This is essentially false. There are several redundant safety and security mechanisms protecting nuclear weapons, one of which is the Permissive Action Link (essentially a combination lock on the warhead). This is the component in question which once had the alleged code of 00000000: https://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.or...

The "nuclear football" is a completely separate authentication mechanism for verifying a presidential order, and as far as we know uses codes that rotate on a daily basis.

The key words there are "as far as we know". Fool me once...

As far as we know, the earth is a globe. What point are you trying to make?

That if the government is caught lying about how secure one part of the lock to the Armageddon button is, you have no reason to believe they aren't lying about the other part too. Particularly, if there's a strong incentive for the system to not be secure - which there is, namely, response time.

True, but can you imagine the look on the president's face after he hacked someone's chest open to find out that was the code?

  > True, but can you imagine the look on the
  > president's face after he hacked someone's
  > chest open to find out that was the code?

That's the combination on my luggage!

It was one of the greatest hacking ever done by a US President. Sad that it had to come to this but thats on the Democrats. I bet Biden would be to weak to do it. But you can't be weak when it comes to defending the nation. America First!

Yep... I can imagine the face...

You seem to be confusing stupidity with strength. Also confusing violence with strength. All these things are unrelated, except I guess the more stupid one is, the more one needs strength to exert violence...

I meant this as a parody but that you take this at face value is just the point I wanted to make.

Or maybe you’ve got so much strength it’s just “easier” - thought can be expensive...

This feels like a Poe’s law moment.

I didn't knew Poe's law. Yes this is a parody and I guess you all know the president I am talking about. This ideas are created with sensible persons in mind. But not all politicians are sensible people

That's the problem with Poe's law, you can never be sure.

That's not a problem, that _is_ Poe's Law. That you can't be sure.

That was an apparently-unsuccessful reference to this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

In any case, descriptive though it is I would argue that there can be a problem associated with Poe's law. Not in the same sense as prescriptions (e.g. Postel's maxim, "be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send"), where you could argue whether or not it's a good principle in general or in specific cases. But from my standpoint as someone using sarcasm to point out the absurdity of something, someone taking me at face value is a problem.

Let's do a thought experiment : if the above is true then it means that no thought at all has been given to launch security for the most powerful weapons in the USA's inventory. This disregard for national security has been maintained by all presidents since Kennedy and all national security officials as well. During this time any state or non state actor who gained access to the control infrastructure could have issued launch instructions, for example the USSR could have caused a launch at PRC by the USA.

No, the situation is that the security is something you are rather than something you have.

To initiate a launch against PRC, Russia would have had to fake being the President and the entourage including various military brass who would have been able to confirm the identity of the elected official.

Thus the nuclear launch codes served the same purpose as red mercury.

This isn't how the launch orders are issued.

Submarines do not have a voice channel to the president, or to the military command. They receive coded signals that instruct them to take particular actions. Creating the appropriate coded signal is a fundamental part of the launch control chain.

Also if the president is killed, and the vice president and the head of the senate... eventually the question is "who has the codes" - if it was "something you are" then the first thing that an adversary would do is kill the are and then follow up as they pleased while the c&c system flailed.

The codes used to signal submarines are demonstrably not the “nuclear launch codes”. The military hierarchy is established and chain of command is already established for contingencies like “who gives orders when the top brass are assassinated.”

No - they are not the launch codes, but the submarines need a launch authority. Apart from the ones that listen out for The Archers on BBC Radio 4 and then open a letter in a safe.

Breathtaking, isn't it? But it doesn't mean that, at all.

All it really means is that we were taken in by a PR scam that had nothing to do with launch security, and everything to do with getting civilians off the backs of serious soldiers who considered themselves better qualified to make decisions than the politicians.

And all it cost to run was to have one of the president's minders carry around a satchel that the press were told had "launch codes" in it. I don't know if the presidents were in on the joke, or even the minders.

So the US nuclear arsenal is commanded by the generals?

We just don't know.

I was under the impression that that was the code to open the missile, not launch it.

If you watch a video of a silo firing procedure, there is no one code to launch it.

It was supposed to be a code needed to arm the nuclear weapons mounted to the missiles. (It would be sort-of-pointless to launch a missile with warheads that would not pop.)

But it was a scam, an attempt to reassure people that the generals couldn't start a war all by themselves, from a time when politicians were thought not to be even more insane than any general.

Nowadays we rely on the generals to be less batshit insane than a president.

In the UK, there's a similar thing with the royalty.

The military swear loyalty to the crown, not to the government. If, perish the thought, the public elected an incompetent malingering buffoon into the office of Prime Minister [cough], who then ordered the military to do something batshit crazy, the officers could ask the Queen (or whoever is monarch if she ever gives up) for confirmation. If she declined to confirm the orders, then the military had grounds to disregard the orders of the government.

Of course, this assumes that the monarch is sane. The Queen, obviously, no problem. Charles - not so sure. His traumised children (well, the one that is still a member of the family) probably, maybe, but who knows what horrors lurk?

So there is the reverse scenario, where Mad King William orders the military to kill all journalists, and the government has to find a way to stop the military from doing that without breaking their oath to the crown.

Indications are that that particular PM is not the buffoon he plays, but an extremely cynical man who has always got tremendous mileage from pretending to be it.

That is not to indicate he is not, in fact, a different kind of buffoon. But if he is, we don't know what kind.

Seems like a good time to drop a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Definitely highly sane

Edit: sentence structure

From the Wikipedia page, for ironic appreciation: "For the footballer, see Stanislav Petrov (footballer)."

(The satchel supposedly containing the "launch codes" was called by the press, and maybe the president's minders, the "nuclear football".)

But if there were ever a Hero for the ages, Petrov was it. Achilles can take a hike.