Jamie Oliver is usually a funny guy, but here he is a fear mongering idiot. That's not to say the Minot-Barksdale incident wasn't a big deal, because it really was a big fucking deal. But the blast door and test cheating is blown way the fuck out of proportion. Let me give you a little perspective on this shit:
That launch control center is in the middle of nowhere in Montana and it's protected above-ground by a squad of security forces troops equipped with crazy shit like armored vehicles, rifles, light machine guns and grenade launchers. The people delivering the food made by an Air Force chef are usually those security forces. Nobody fucking orders Chinese food to a nuclear launch control facility and lets a goddamn delivery guy just knock on a blast door and deliver it. The maintenance personnel generally have either a Top Secret or Secret security clearance and are cleared by the security forces and the missile launch crew before they're permitted to go down the elevator shaft and into the capsule. While the blast door policy calls for having it closed if one of the two launch officers is asleep, there is hardly any chance for terrorists to take over a launch control center. The officers broke a security rule and received non-judicial punishment and a discharge for it.
As far as "cheating" on tests is concerned, these "proficiency" tests were a complete joke and a monthly formality. The only reason they were administered was because they were required by a regulation written by headquarters. The effort put into actually writing these tests was laughable from a professional educator's perspective. The real practical evaluation and skills training occurred in a computerized life-size launch control center simulator in which crew members actually performed routine and emergency war order tasks they were required to be proficient in.
The multiple choice tests were difficult to fail without any assistance, even to a 90% passing standard, but there was pressure from commanders to only promote those who had score averages in the 99% + range, which is why there was pressure to "cheat". It's not that people were inept; it's just that there was enormous pressure to get perfect scores on poorly written tests every single time. If you didn't get a 100% on a test, you would get shit on by leadership because their leadership would shit on them and so on.
Lt Col squadron commanders, who took their tests separately from other crew members but also had a monthly alert quota, usually just ordered Lt and Capt instructors to give them the instructor copy with the highlighted answers every month. Either that or they had a subordinate take the test for them altogether. The "cheating" was a cultural feature of this career field. Everybody participated in it. The Major General who fired about 90 officers also admitted to doing it when he was on missile alert duty.
I understand that there is an importance of attention to detail with nuclear weapons, and therefore the pressure of high test scores must be a part of the job. However, after this whole affair, higher headquarters acknowledged the poor test validity as an assessment of actual job knowledge and revised testing criteria. Tests are also now pass/fail to avoid these ridiculous pressures.
The reason why it became a big deal in the first place was because two officers who were accused of trafficking drugs (a separate serious issue) had their phones searched and Air Force Office of Special Investigations, who works directly for the Secretary of the Air Force and not Air Force Global Strike Command, 20th Air Force or base leadership. They found test answers in their text messages. From this, they went down a rabbit hole that eventually found incriminating evidence on pretty much every single missile launch officer at the base. Higher headquarters eventually crunched some numbers and figured out that they could fire about 90 officers before the base was no longer able to fulfill its nuclear deterrence mission. So, they arbitrarily picked about 90 people to give non-judicial punishment to and let the others ones go. Most of the people who survived this “purge” will willingly tell you that they got lucky because they did the same exact thing everyone else did but didn't get fired.
So there you go. Yeah it sucks and it shouldn't have happened. But all the fear mongering and implications that nuclear weapons were under the control of idiots who couldn't pass a proficiency test is absolutely asinine. There was never a single time any of those weapons were under any risk of being inadvertently launched, stolen, pilfered, unsecured or whatever.
instead of solving memory game word problems on paper. These crew members were extremely good at what they did