Everyone has been left baffled after learning the nuclear launch code America used during the Cuban Missile Crisis and part of the Cold War.
From 1962 to 1977, the passcode intended to keep any trigger-happy members of the Air Force from launching a nuclear strike was perhaps too easy to guess: 00000000.
While officials long denied their pervasive use of this highly insecure and distressingly simple passcode — including a report to Congress — an unclassified manual for the nuclear-equipped Minuteman has confirmed the claim.
The manual, unearthed by Princeton scholar and former Minuteman launch officer Dr Bruce Blair, helped end over a decade of debate between veteran missile launch officers and the Air Force itself across the 21st Century.
‘As the manual says, ‘under normal conditions CODE INSERT thumbnail switches will be set at 00000000,” Dr Blair wrote for Princeton’s Science & Global Security site.
‘[And] as I and thousands of other older launch crew members can attest,’ he added, ‘they remained at 00000000 during the (abnormal) firing process as well.’
To this day, many online are still perplexed by the revelation, calling the ‘absurd oversight’ a ‘fun fact that will keep you up at night.’
‘It is amazing how stupid and lax the controls on nuclear weapons were,’ one user commented on the historic episode.
But the story of how this shockingly simple code came to be implemented is a tale of true Cold War paranoia: a turf war and political disagreement between then-President John F Kennedy and his own Air Force generals.
From 1962 to 1977, the passcode intended to keep trigger-happy members of the Air Force from launching a nuclear strike was too easy to guess: 00000000. Historians say that the shocking passcode was a rogue plan by the Air Force. Above, a Minuteman II missile test in 1965
The telltale technical manual also included a grainy image of the ‘launch enable panel’ (left) in which USAF personnel were instructed to input the eight-digit code. ‘It shows eight ‘code insert thumbwheel switches,’ all set to zeros,’ Dr Blair noted (at right, the corrected later panel)
President Kennedy issued an executive order in June of 1962 demanding installation of the so-called ‘Permissive Action Links [PALs],’ a lockbox intended to prevent rogue deployment of nuclear weapons by any rabidly anti-Communist Air Force personnel.
Creator of the US Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay, in fact, urged JFK to preemptively use America’s nukes to bomb the Soviets ‘back to the Stone Age.’
But while JFK had entrusted his more level-headed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to set up the protective PALs over these missiles, LeMay’s US Strategic Command generals ‘almost immediately’ had the PAL codes all reset to 00000000.
‘This McNamara vignette will be one of a long litany of items pointing to the ignorance of presidents and defense secretaries and other nuclear security officials about the true state of nuclear affairs during their time in the saddle,’ according to Dr Blair.
‘What I then told McNamara about his vitally important locks elicited this response: ‘I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged.” the Air Force veteran noted when he first broke the story in 2004. ”Who the hell authorized that?”
Strategic Air Command, Dr Blair explained, ‘remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.’
As he recalled from his own tour as a Minuteman launch officer between 1970 and 1974, the easy-to-remember combination was even helpfully jotted down for officers.
‘Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check thelocking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits otherthan zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel,’ Dr Blair wrote.
While JFK had entrusted his more level-headed Defense Secretary to set up the protective PALs over these missiles, LeMay’s generals ‘almost immediately’ had the PAL codes reset to 00000000. Above, a USAF archival image of an officer using the nuclear ‘launch enable panel’
To this day, many online are still baffled by the revelation, calling the ‘absurd oversight’ a ‘fun fact that will keep you up at night’ (above)
‘This absurd oversight highlights the tension between security and readiness, even with the most destructive technology on earth,’ one person opined on social media (above)
Unhappy with the attention brought by Dr Blair’s revelations the Air Force issued a report to Congress, obtained by Foreign Policy magazine in 2014, carefully denying the nuclear security expert, academic and Air Force veteran’s claim.
‘A code consisting of eight zeroes has never been used to enable a MM ICBM [Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] as claimed by Dr Bruce Blair,’ they said.
But within a year, Dr Blair was able to access an official Air Force document, ‘Weapon System Operation Instructions, Technical Manual T.O. 21M-LGM30F-1-2, June 21, 1969, Change 34, June 13, 1973’ that confirmed the use of the eight zero code.
The technical manual also included a grainy image of the ‘launch enable panel’ in which USAF personnel were instructed to input the eight-digit code.
‘The launch enable panel, feeds a special code to the program control panel,’ Dr Blair noted. ‘It shows eight ‘code insert thumbwheel switches,’ all set to zeros.’
‘The Air Force misled the Congress,’ the nuclear expert argued. ‘It dodges the truth with regularity, and, hiding behind a thick wall of secrecy, gets away with it.’
