Strategic Air Command Was Not Very Strategic with the Super Secret Nuke Code of 00000000

Truthstream Media
Dec 1, 2013
Editor’s Note: Box. Of. Fail.

Kimberly Paxton
The Daily Sheeple

The only numbers that stood between the world and a nuclear apocalypse were a closely guarded secret for many years but now we know that they must have been developed through intensely difficult algorithms.  Obviously, great care had to be taken that this super secret code would not be easily cracked.

Thus, from 1962 until 1977, the code was…are you ready?

00000000

That’s right.  Eight zeros.

This, of course, is sort of like making your password, well, “password“.

I’m thinking that the Strategic Air Command perhaps was not very strategic after all.

The emphasis, you see, was not on security as much as it was on speed.  The Strategic Air Command didn’t want to have any delays in nuking the daylights out of enemies, so they made the code as simple as possible.

Here’s how it happened:

In 1962 JFK signed the National Security Action Memorandum 160, which was supposed to ensure that every nuclear weapon the US had be fitted with aPermissive Action Link (PAL), basically a small device that ensured that the missile could only be launched with the right code and with the right authority.

There was particularly a concern that the nuclear missiles the United States had stationed in other countries, some of which with somewhat unstable leadership, could potentially be seized by those governments and launched. With the PAL system, this became much less of a problem. (source)

The system was designed to be incredibly difficult to bypass, with the hacking of it once described as “about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.“

So, since it was hackproof, the decision was made to provide the incredibly simple launch code.  And, if the button pusher was in a panic because, oh, they were about to NUKE AN ENTIRE COUNTRY (!!!), and they forgot the code, it was written down on a handy checklist kept near the device.

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