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This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people, coming to you

from the city where the west begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

PAL codes are codes for permissive action links or complex multi-digit combinations that

vary for each nuclear weapon system which prevent the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons,

but this wasn't always so.

Here to tell the story of Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel.

Let's take a listen.

During the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on rapid response

to an attack on American soil that to minimize any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear

missile for nearly two decades, they intentionally set the launch codes at every silo in the

United States to a string of eight zeros.

We guess the first thing that we need to address is how this came to the silo in the United States to a string of eight zeros.

We guess the first thing that we need to address is how this came to be in the first

place.

Well, in 1962, JFK signed the National Action Security Memorandum 160, which was supposed

to ensure that every nuclear weapon in the US was fitted with a permissive action link, PAL, basically

a small device that ensured that the missile could be launched with only the right code

and with the right authority.

There was particularly a concern that the nuclear missiles the United States had stationed

in other countries, some of which had somewhat unstable leaderships,

...