The application to spheres and the possibly apocryphal story of the orange is bordering on the absurd, and is amusing, for sure. But the prospect of having the

The application to spheres and the possibly apocryphal story of the orange is bordering on the absurd, and is amusing, for sure. But the prospect of having the Soviets pull ahead in the nuclear race kind of put a damper on people's sense of humour in those days. But that said, these policies are about eliminating the grey zones enabled by imperfect and inconsistent application of human judgement, and are alive and well today in practically every organisation that even vaguely deals with sensitive material: The clean desk policy. Because sensitive material would be written on paper, any paper is considered sensitive by default. It's obviously entirely impractical for security staff to go through all the paper on your desk and validate that they only contain "safe" content, and frankly, it's a fairly high cognitive load to constantly evaluate that for yourself for every sheet of paper. So the policy is that everything is removed at the end of the day, and it's easy for everybody to understand. The same again for physical security. Everybody wears their badge visibly all the time. Yes, it's obvious that you work here, and the guard knows you and you've said good morning to each other every day for four years, but by making the policy apply to everybody all the time, you remove the grey zones where a bad actor exploits a security guard's lapse in judgement: did you really leave your badge in the pocket of your other coat, or were you just fired in the other building? 99.99% of the time you really did forget it, but it's the other 0.01% we have security for in the first place.