Why did the military require human beings to turn the keys if they expected people (and weeded out people unwilling) to turn the key blindly? A wire would have been much more efficient...
A weak ago, there was a discussion about the “Letters of last resort” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7165048 (56 points, 6 days ago, 50 comments). They are secret instructions for nuclear submarine commanders in case of something killed the whole UK government.
From Wikipedia:
> According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.
This kind of safeguards is easier to implement in humans than in automatic systems. How do you distinguish from the submarine the lack of communication caused by a nuclear attack from a problem caused by a massive electricity outage and a big fire in the BBC building? Maybe you can listen to some Canada and Australia signals to hear if there is a problem.
It's evident that the original purpose of placing "moral processors" in the loop was lost after the fact.