In 1962, President Kennedy was fearful that individual military commanders had too much leeway to launch a nuclear attack on their own initiative, and instituted a new policy that an eight-digit password would be necessary to launch missiles. Air Force officers, more fearful of a delayed nuclear response than a rogue commander, followed the letter if not the spirit of the rule and used 00000000 in every missile silo. Then, just like half the people in your office do with their passwords, they wrote the eight-digit sequence on a piece of paper to make sure nobody forgot. The Air Force disputes this story, but it comes from Bruce Blair, who was an Air Force launch officer in the 1970s.
