And They Were Probably Running Windows Too

Phil Libin CEO of the digital security company CoreStreet also write a blog: Vastly Important Notes. He writes about security issues and much more. In one recent security related post he detailed the state of the art security attached to America's nuclear arsenal during the height of the cold war.

In his February 11th column, Bruce Blair from the Center for Defense Information gives a rather horrifying first-hand account of the traditionally framed conflict between safety and convenience. In this case, it's the convenience of being able to annihilate our geopolitical enemies on short notice versus the safety of not starting a nuclear war by accident.

In the 1960's each of the thousand-odd Minuteman nuclear missiles were fitted with special locks which would prevent launch unless the "secret unlock code" was received from high-authority - presumably the president or secretary of defense. The purpose of the locks was to prevent unauthorized launch either by accident or through a deliberate subversion of the chain of command. The problem was that this extra step was seen as a cumbersome process which had the potential to delay our nuclear response and thereby dampen the retaliation we could mete out in the case of an actual attack. The solution was the equivalent of writing your windows password on a sticky-note attached to your monitor:

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the "locks" to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the "secret unlock code" during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

All I can say is that I agree entirely with the first lesson he learned from this story.

We are really, really, really lucky that the world didn't get all blown up before the end of the cold war. Sure, the professionalism and relative cool-headedness of many individuals on both sides of the conflict helped a lot, but there was a scary number of close calls. Let's try not to do this again.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 02:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment