I can't answer for what was going on when you were a kid. I was doing this stuff roughly 10 years ago dealing with WMD and they were fucking tight. No excuses, no bullshit, no errors, no nothing.
I'm glad to hear that those responsibilities were taken seriously. When SAC was disbanded I wondered about the loss of institutional culture related to security. (Though SAC had its issues, too.)
I was in DOD police once at a munitions depot. We patrolled a large area of bunkers, checked the lock on every bunker every shift and otherwise drove our trucks around the back roads of the nature preserve surrounding the bunkers. A nice gig while it lasted. I'd rate security to be about medium.
But we had no access and little knowledge of the smaller area that contained The Weapons That Shall Not Be Named. Marines guarded those.