You are indeed correct, I'll leave my comment to stand as a testament to my wrongness.

The bunker doors were "fixed" with metal plates after it was shown they could be easily shimmied with a credit card.

It's understandable, there are some things the mind simply doesn't want to believe, and an all-zeroes password on a nuclear bomb easily qualifies.

Do you happen to have a link that discusses the bunker doors? I don't think I'd heard of that one.

This is all discussed in "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser. I'm not sure if that specific story is available for free online somewhere, but it's hardly an isolated incident of terrible security within the nuclear arms community. The book bounces between two narratives, the first being an in depth look at a specific accident where a rocket exploded in it's silo, the second being a broader overview of the command and control structure around nuclear tech spanning from the plutonium spheres used by scientists in the manhattan project, all the way up to 80's era MAD policy and ICBMs on 24/7 alert.

Another one of my favorites from that book was the EOD tech that put a ready-to-rumble teller-ulam thermonuclear device into the bed of his pick-up truck, drove it off the base, dismantled it in order to show off to a girl, then reassembled and returned it. Although, I can't personally verify the source of that story.

Ever since reading Snowcrash, i've wanted my own personal nuclear umbrella. Not enough to actually do anything about it, of course. It just seems like the ultimate in "an armed society is a polite society."

Thanks. I keep seeing that book mentioned and I'll have to check it out. The story of the guy trying to impress a girl sounds worth it all by itself.