[the_third_wave]

Those codes were intentionally zeroed to get around what was (most likely rightly so) considered to be a failure of the launch doctrine to take into account the possibility of the leadership being knocked out which would make a retaliatory launch impossible due to the lack of valid launch codes.

I don't think Intel has such problems and I assume they are keen on keeping their microcode update process from being abused - it is not as if they don't have enough problems as it is.