Posted on 01/21/2014 4:11:46 PM PST by nickcarraway
For nearly a decade, an awkward debate has raged about the U.S. military's nuclear force: Did top Air Force officials really choose "00000000" as a code that could enable the launch of a nuclear missile? Ten years later, in a document obtained by Foreign Policy, the U.S. military told Congress that it never happened. But is the Pentagon telling the truth?
Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert and former launch officer , says no. Blair, now a scholar and author at Princeton University, first raised the idea in a piece published in 2004. He accused the Air Force of circumventing President John F. Kennedy's 1962 order to install extra security codes to safeguard against accidental or unauthorized launch by putting them in place, but making them painfully simple to the missile launch officers who manned underground bunkers. Doing so, Blair said, effectively eliminated the codes' usefulness.
The U.S. military says that's not the case. A new wave of media coverage sparked by online media outlets last year prompted the House Armed Services Committee to ask about the issue, and the military responded by insisting "00000000" was never used.
"A code consisting of eight zeroes has never been used to enable a MM ICBM, as claimed by Dr. Bruce Blair," the new document, obtained by FP, insists, while laying out the basics on how a nuclear missile can be launched.
(Excerpt) Read more at complex.foreignpolicy.com ...
Way to complicated to remember. With “LAUNCH” as the code all they had to do was punch in the name on the launch button. Remember the Launch Officer was probably stoned.
Where and when? Atlas, Titan, Minuteman? The default enable panel codes were set to zeros. Enable codes were separate split knowledge cards. The default settings were nulls, did nothing.
Thanks for the ping. In this case, I believe the Air Force. I was on an aircrew in SAC during the Cuban missile crisis. Launch messages were never a single string of digits. They were a series of four-letter groups that had to be authenticated and then decoded using a one-time pad. We were tested on this procedure every time we went on alert, and the minimum passing grade was 100 percent.
LEMAYROX, all caps ...
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