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If you had to choose the launch codes for nuclear missiles, what would it be? Certainly not a bunch of zeroes. Right? Think again.

Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia, uncovered a startling fact - the launch code for all U.S. Minuteman nuclear missiles for 20 years used the same code: 00000000. He discovered this after finding a 2004 paper by Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos.

Known as Permission Action Links (PALs), they were meant to give only the president of the United States the power to launch them. For two decades, multiple presidents have carried around a briefcase with the allegedly constantly changing codes. Symbolic at best.

The code itself wasn’t very secret, either. According to Karl Smallwood on Today I Found Out, Dr. Blair explained:
“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.”
Let's hope the codes have changed.