For years, US nuke code was 00000000
Precious little stood between American servicemen and a third world war, report says
In one of the many memorable scenes in Mel Brooks’s 1987 interstellar romp “Spaceballs,” King Roland, played by a quivering Dick Van Patten, is coerced into divulging a secret code that is the only thing keeping his planet’s precious atmosphere from being sucked out to space.
“That’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage,” Lord Helmet (Rick Moranis) exclaims incredulously upon hearing the sequence: 12345.
Well, John F Kennedy was no idiot, but as US president he instituted the PAL encryption on America’s arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles, and for 15 years the secret code — yes, the one that could instantly turn the Cold War into a global inferno — was — wait for it — 00000000.
According to a report in Britain’s Daily Mail, the code was selected by Strategic Air Command, supposedly because it would shave a few precious seconds off of the process of launching those nukes.
In 1962, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 160, requiring each and every one of the US’s nuclear weapons to be outfitted with a PAL encryption device to prevent unauthorized access to some of the most powerful weapons ever built by mankind.
However, nuclear experts cited by the Mail said the US military was afraid that in the event of war, communication lines would be severed, meaning that command centers could potentially be unable to send launch codes to the soldiers with their fingers on the triggers.
Thus, they instituted a fail-safe, easy-to-remember code, so that when the time came, the troops could fire away without having to worry about complicated launch procedures.
The procedures, and the codes, were finally changed in 1977, after a former launch officer wrote an article showing that four people working together could fire off a nuclear missile without authorization from the US government.
Ground Control to Major Kong, anyone?