Nuclear War: The Big Zero

As an I/T worker in the banking industry, it is impressed upon me again and again that the weakness in security is rarely technological, but almost always human in nature. If you make any security measure too onerous, people rebel against it and do something to foil the best laid plans of mice and men. The most infamous of these measures among tech guys is the common practice of ultra-secret passwords being left around a worker's cubicle because "I can't remember so many passwords!" A new article shows that even cold warriors are afflicted by this problem.

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.

It makes you wonder how many luggage locks with top secret documents inside are still set to 1234. Even makes you wonder how many Congressman log into their Congressional E-mail with their birthdays or children's names - the most common targets of hackers.