He said he came in to find the system running, and the only time that happened was when Washington was waiting for info.
And even if you don't buy that, if pushing the button's not a big deal it doesn't need all the safeguards everyone's yelling for. (Had such safeguards been in place he might equally well have seen them, thought "oh, nobody's in, this will do what I want anyway" and approved it).
That button needs a safeguard even if it's not an international incident. Even if only one person would lose a few hours' work from an all-nighter, work for something that's not so important, it's still someone's work.
And given that it's right next to a 'single terminal reset' key, it should be immediately obvious to anyone who's ever used a keyboard - mistakes can and do happen, even when you're fluent.
And yet, to this day, Firefox has both Ctrl-Q (close all Firefox windows without prompting) and its neighbor Ctrl-W (close current tab) and refuses to change that or provide remappable keyboard shortcuts. One of the biggest UI failures I'm aware of in 2014.
Ctrl-Q exits on Thunderbird too. Since in MS Outlook that combination marks a mail as read, for keyboard-heavy users switching between the two, it is no fun.
