One former missileer who left Malmstrom in 2010 said he believed that every officer there knew about the cheating and that 85 percent to 90 percent of them — himself included — cheated on the tests. “The penalty is so severe that everyone is freaked out,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions. “It makes your life so much worse when you miss a question, and there are no real consequences to not knowing the answers, so people help each other out.”

Current and former missileers described a surreal circular dance in which crew members routinely cheated on the tests, got promoted to higher rank and then officially announced their zero tolerance of cheating, all while looking the other way.

“The colonels, they all did the exact same thing we did,” said one captain, who left Malmstrom in 2011 after four years there, and who said he routinely cheated. He also asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisal from the Air Force. “Then they put on a facade that they had to do the right thing now. But everyone knew.”

Last week, the Air Force said that the 34 suspended launch officers, all at Malmstrom, either knew about or took part in the texting of answers to the tests. Air Force officials ordered all missile launch officers to retake the test, and said that by Friday nearly 500 had done so, with an overall pass rate of 95.6 percent.

Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein, commander of the Twentieth Air Force, Air Force Global Strike Command, said the breadth of the cheating at Malmstrom — the 34 officers represent 17 percent of the Malmstrom launch crew — “shocked” him. A former missileer himself, he said he had never cheated or witnessed cheating.

“I’m not saying that people did not complete a test and then tell others, be careful of this question or that question,” General Weinstein said. “But to the extent of full answer sheets being passed around, I’ve never seen that before.”

Many military officials believe that demoralization may have led to a spate of recent mishaps among Air Force nuclear missile officers. In the past year, a general who oversaw nuclear weapons was dismissed for drunken antics during an official trip to Moscow, 17 officers assigned to stand watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles were removed for violating safety codes and having bad attitudes, and missileers with nuclear launch authority were caught napping with the blast door open — a violation of security regulations meant to prevent terrorists or other intruders from entering the underground command post and compromising secret launch codes.