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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

My own thoughts separately: If this is all correctly remembered and truthful, it could mean that someone managed to sneak those codes into the command chain and the person passing them on wasn't even aware they were the launch codes. In that case i would suspect any consequences, if they happened, to be kept quiet on as well.

Or it's super mundane and just a coincidence/typo.

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I'm curious what the actual protocol was for defining the codes. Could it have been an accidental collision? depending on the codes, what is the probability all three matched?

You have to wonder if there was some sort of covert op in play, and cooler minds prevailed (Capt bassets' rigorous adherence to protocol maybe was not planned for by the attacker. Refusal to launch at defcon2, which could have been overlooked by a less attentive sr official).

What sort of covert op? Who would want to start WWIII?

In the decade or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis there were some US military leaders who thought that a "preventative" attack on the Soviets was a good idea - by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis the public estimates of Soviet capabilities were so high (overestimated by a factor of 100 in some cases) that people probably thought it was too late for such an attack.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2005/03/13/to-be-sorted/the...

it's probably crack-pot conspiracy theory, but you could definitely sense there were elements of our government who thought a pre-emptive strike to level russia/china in one swift move would be agreeable. Perhaps they thought they would not be capable of retaliating, or the retaliatory strikes would not be nearly as impactful?

I'm not suggesting that is a rational approach, but I've heard crazier things uttered in terms of foreign policy even in modern day (e.g.: nuke entire regions, turn them into glass).

It terrifies me to no end that people could ascend into power with such ideas, but we'd be fools to think it doesn't happen. Look at any big org (company/government, whatever).. the best and brightest are not always the ones being promoted up, -- it's often the sociopaths.

I believe the thinking among many at the time was that war with the Soviets would result in "acceptable" losses to the US i.e. 20 million Americans dead, give or take. This was probably not too far off given extremely limited Soviet capabilities at the time. (Europe would have fared far worse, but I don't know that they cared too much.) There's a scene in Dr. Strangelove where this is advocated, and I think it's reasonably true-to-life.

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