Just hot off the press - the British Royal Navy is now operating their nuclear weaponry control system with Windows - immediately bringing to mind pictures like the one below:

For a full resolution image, go to the Photos section and download file from there.

Jokes apart... The British Royal Navy is ustilising Windows XP and 2000 in the submarine systems. The project is codenamed SMCS-NG (Submarine Command System Next Generation), and takes control over sensor and weapon control applications. The major reason for this move was that software was available off-the-shelf and at a very affordable price, not to mention that the implementation of the system proved to be very quick. Another advantage is that hardware required to run these operating systems is also cheap and widely available, although we can rest assured that they used extremely rugged and resistant hardware for the job.

For those of you who have security in mind - the UK parliament has stated that the use of Windows is low risk and the systems run in an isolated mode - thus there is practically no chance of an outside cyber-attack starting the end of the world .