The password for the US nuclear button was so absurdly simple for years that the strange thing is that no one violated it

For a long time, the public position of the United States government was quite clear: only the president could order a nuclear strike. Up to this point, everything is more or less “normal”. What is not so understood was the “key” to access the button, maximum security in case of sabotage. Nor are the approved plans in case the president dies at the hands of a list of countries, the consequences of which They would have been literally apocalyptic.

Nuclear security in the Cold War. At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the security of American nuclear codes was alarmingly poor, to put it mildly. Despite the critical need to protect these codes to prevent accidental or worse, unauthorized releases through some form of sabotage, security measures, as we will see, were surprisingly lax.

Fisher’s proposal. In the 1980s, Roger Fisher, a Harvard academic and specialist in negotiation and conflict management, proposed an innovative idea to the Pentagonone that, if approved, would have been the subject of a film and several television series: implant the nuclear codes in the chest of a volunteer who would accompany the president. In this way, if the head of the White House decided to launch a nuclear attack, I would have to take the poor man’s life to access the codesdirectly confronting the human consequences of such a decision.

Fisher argued that an act of this caliber would make the president deeply understand the weight of causing millions of innocent deaths. Fisher’s proposal was rejected by the Pentagon. The officers expressed that forcing the president to kill someone could distort your judgment and potentially prevent it from acting in a nuclear crisis. The response underlined a greater concern about the rapid response capacity that for implementing additional moral safeguards.

The revelations. And then a report appeared that left many speechless. Bruce Blair, nuclear expert and former launch officer, revealed that after President John F. Kennedy’s order in 1962 to use codes to protect nuclear weapons, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) modified the system to prioritize launch speed.

What does this translate into? According to Blairthe SAC set the launch codes for the Minuteman nuclear missiles to “00000000”, that is, eight zeros, to facilitate an immediate launch in case of order, thus reducing the barriers for an unauthorized launch. In other words, when year after year the compilation of the most used passwords in the world shows that we fall back to 123456, we should remember that launching nuclear bombs was much easier than that.

Negotiation and controversy. The US Air Force was so exposed by Blair’s claims that they claimed to have no recollection of an eight-zero code being used to activate or launch Minuteman ICBMs. Blair not only maintained his position, he also cited technical manuals which indicated that the code insertion switches They should be set to “00000000” under normal conditions. As if that were not enough, he accused the Air Force of providing misleading information about its nuclear safety procedures.

We add a layer of security. Coincidence or not with Blair’s statements, In 1977 a more robust system was implemented which required launch personnel to contact a higher authority to receive the necessary codes, thus strengthening safety measures and reducing the risk of an accidental or unauthorized launch.

Furtherance orders and the SIOP. We could not talk about the history of American nuclear control without remembering another critical moment. It happened a little earlier, in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb and later a hydrogen bomb in 1955.

The development of long-range bombers and a growing Soviet nuclear arsenal posed a new threat to the United States: a surprise attack that could leave it unable to respond. The scenario led American leaders to reconsider who could make decisions in the president’s absence.

Thus, in the late 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued secret orders called Furtherancegiving military commanders “preclearance” to launch nuclear attacks in two cases: if time was short and did not allow the president to be consulted, or if he died during an attack. These orders included activate the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)designed to respond to any attack, even conventional, with a massive nuclear counterattack that would involve thousands of targets in the Soviet Union, China and other communist bloc countries.

Apocalypse. It is not a trivial term. At that time it was used a lot to stage what it meant to activate the operation. The SIOP, in fact, was apocalyptic in its scope. It anticipated nuclear attacks against more than 4,000 targets in a period of 30 hourswith multiple weapons assigned to the most critical targets.

To give us an idea, it was estimated that more than 200 million people would die immediatelywhile tens of millions more would succumb to the subsequent consequences, all with the goal of ensuring a unilateral victory for the United States.

Policy review. Although Eisenhower and his successors recognized the risks of delegating this authority, they considered that the lack of a response mechanism was an even greater danger. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson revised the orders to adopt a more flexible policy. Instead of a full-scale nuclear attack, The United States would respond with conventional weapons if the initial attack did not involve nuclear weapons. This change marked a move away from the brink of nuclear war, establishing for the first time a policy of proportionality in military responses.

By the hair. In short, the history of “nuclear security” in the United States, a topic that one would think was covered and studied exhaustively, leaves many doubts and possible gaps that, fortunately, never came to pass. All of these situations highlight the tensions between the need for rapid crisis response and the implementation of strict safeguards to prevent misuses of nuclear weapons.

Of course, they also highlight how, during periods of extreme international tension, security measures can be compromised in favor of operational efficiencyraising important questions about the balance between security and military preparedness. The best of all is that we are still alive after a long era in which eight zeros were the key to the red button, or even in which it was proposed that a man carry the key to the red button. blackout inserted in the heart.

Image | PickPik, The Big Red ButtonUS Air Force

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*An earlier version of this article was published in December 2024