How good to see the US military were in control of passwords

[Bob]

Now the 'day job' is in IT - and we're currently having to put in loads of work introducing a whole raft of additional password controls. And this is at a brokerage company.

So imagine how I felt when I read an article that reports during the 'Cold War', the 8-digit password to launch the US Nuclear Missiles was:

00000000

It was made this so it would be easier for the soldiers to remember!

Bad enough, but it gets worse! In some US Airforce bases, the settings were kept on 00000000 all of the time, so it would be 'easier and quicker to get the missiles under way'.

Don't you just love being under the 'protection' of people like that?

Not.

[MikeL]

Bad enough, but it gets worse! In some US Airforce bases, the settings were kept on 00000000 all of the time, so it would be 'easier and quicker to get the missiles under way'.

And we thought that Dr Strangelove was surreal...

[jrandom]

Yes, I read that article too. I can't remember the link to the source site offhand.

However - there were rational reasons for that setting. Of course, it was presented in a 'Thou, Gentle Reader, shall be Shocked, Truly Shocked' manner. Remember that the guys who wrote it have a political agenda, too.

The 8-digit unlock code safeguard was implemented as an additional layer of security to guard against specific threats. Mostly to minimise risk from within the 'trusted' group of missile controller officers. It was bypassed in an environment where the prevailing military attitude was one of time-critical response requirements, which always has a bearing on security system design. No doubt those who quietly decided to ignore that particular security measure felt that they had good reasons for doing so. I got the impression that it was originally introduced as a political initiative, rather than as anything that came out of a holistic security design exercise.

I found it particularly interesting to read in another article by the same author that the 'understood by the brass, but not the politicians' military facts of the Cold War, from the USA's perspective, were that 'retaliatory strike after attack' was impossible.

Even though second-strike retaliatory deterrence was the policy of the administration at the time, the real position was always 'retaliatory strike upon launch warning'. Strike capabilities after absorbing a full-scale nuclear assault from the USSR could not be guaranteed, hence it was imperative that a retaliatory strike was launched while the Russian missiles were still in the air. Hence the military obsession with quick time-to-launch.

This is why there was always so much fervour surrounding the reliability of the early-warning systems, and the possibility of a single rogue launch triggering an all-out exchange. Neither side could afford to 'wait and see'.

[Skyryder]

I saw something the other day on the History Chanel. Can't remember the size of the thing but the Russians exploded a nuclear device that was so big the aircraft that dropped it just managed to get away from the blast. The bomb was dropped from a height of 30,000 feet. The upshot was that shortly after this Reagan and Breznove sighned the SALT agreement. The programm mentioned that that the Americans could deliver their weapons with a fair degree of accuracy where as the Russians never mastered this. They went for sheer size where accuracy did not count.

Skyryder

[angle]

"password to launch the US Nuclear Missiles was:

00000000"

"The programm mentioned that that the Americans could deliver their weapons with a fair degree of accuracy where as the Russians never mastered this. They went for sheer size where accuracy did not count."

Both are urban myths.

[Bob]

There is something else the article left out (which I only remembered just now). Before you could use the 00000000 counter, you had to activate the equipment.

To do this, it was a two-person job. Reason? You had to turn the keys simultaneously - and the two keyholes were something like 10ft apart.

I think someone said they had managed to devise a technique for doing this with string... but can't find anything about it.

There is some more on the subject in the 'Snopes' site

[Warren]

the password was set to 00000000 and the switches were all left in the 0 position because they decided that the other security systems were adequate. So there is no 00000000 password there was just no password at all.