Slashdot Mirror
Computer Scientist Looks At ICBM Security
An anonymous reader writes "Computer security guru Matt Blaze takes a tour of a decommissioned ICBM complex in Arizona. Cool photos, insightful perspective on two man control, perimeter security, human factors and why we didn't blow ourselves up. From the article: 'The most prominent security mechanism at the Titan site, aside from the multiple layers of thick blast-proof entry doors and the fact that the entire complex is buried underground, was procedural: almost all activities required two person control. Everywhere outside of the kitchen, sleeping quarters and toilet were "no lone zones" where a second person had to be present at all times, even for on-duty members of the launch crews.'"
It may take two people to launch an ICBM, but it only takes one troll to launch a first post!
I joke but human redundancy is probably your best bet and pretty reassuring considering I've seen Dr. Strangelove twenty times or so. Also I enjoyed this picture. Is it a good idea to store the keys right above the safe to the Emergency War Orders? No matter, if you know the combination to the lock and have a twenty pound sledge, those hastily welded rings holding on the safety padlocks will take a few seconds to remove.
My work here is dung.
. Jets at the bottom of the silo spray water at the exhaust flames during a launch to create steam, which dampens the massive sound and vibration created by the engines, preventing damage to the missile surface as it leaves the silo
So, all we'd have to do is turn off the valve from the pond that says "DON'T TURN OFF!" and the missile will ruin itself on launch.
Da?
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
With all the paranoia about tuhrrarists, is it even safe to be reading this? BRB, someone at the d
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The thing that speaks to me while reading stories like this is how far we have actually managed to get, in a relatively short period of time. At one point both were stockpiling nuke upon nuke and then it all went away to what it is today.
An article this excellent is rare enough that it deserves special recognition. Thanks to the author for taking this trip to the middle of nowhere, and relating the experience so lucidly, that I feel almost like I was there myself.
ICBM Security Looks At Computer Scientist
"fueled and ready to be launched toward the Soviet Union on a few minutes notice."
So what if the Limeys decided to get some revenge for 1776? Or those goddam sneaky cheese-eating rat-bastard French?
My cousin was one of those guys with the keys and a gun and a buddy for many years. He's retired now and shares the stories at family reunions. He was a colonel so I'm sure he knows exactly what he can and cannot talk about. What's even better are his stories about winter life in rural North Dakota.
This stuff has been out in the open for years.
Great article. As someone who grew up in Cheyenne, WY near F.E. Warren AFB (an AFB without planes or a landing strip - you can guess the mission) the details of these monsters have always fascinated me. I'd hear stories from my friends whose dads worked either as the missile capsule crews themselves or were maintenance personnel.
If Slashdot readers are flying in and out of Denver International Airport (or any area around CO, NE, WY) you can look out the window and see the launch facilities from the air. Amid the farm lands and country roads, you can look down and see an outcrop of buildings and maybe a quonset hut or two, and then a separate concrete reinforced pad maybe a hundred yards away; the whole area carefully fenced. You can tell they don't quite fit in with everything else. The number of them is startling. Yeah, in fact a little scary. But the author is correct when he states that in the (then) USSR they had the exact same thing pointing at us. Gives me the willies still.
Those who are interested to read more about the global nuclear complex are encouraged to read a recent book A Nuclear Family Vacation . It is written by a husband-wife duo, both of which are professional writers/journalists, both with a professional focus in defense. They spent a number of family vacations visiting landmarks of nuclear significance: the Trinity Test Site, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge, Kwajalein atoll, Cheney's "undisclosed location" bunker, Cheyenne Mountain, a Soviet test site in Kazakhstan, a Soviet secret city (like Los Alamos), and even eventually visited Iran's enrichment facility near Isfahan. Along the way, aside from the basic travelogue reporting of what's there, they reflect a bit on the enormity of the whole system, how it worked, and the miracle that we're still alive. They also discuss the current state and future of the US nuclear arsenal, the reliable replacement warhead program, and point out that there are still plenty of nukes out there, and Armageddon is still only about 30 minutes away.
I'm pretty sure that it's not secret information that while turning two keys is one way to launch a missile under certain circumstances, there are other conditions that will lead to missiles being launched without keys, or launch commands being ignored despite turning two keys.
Presumably, the instructions are coded into a tape memory bank of a gigantic complex of computers.
What is missing from the story is when they went coed and the subsequent shenanigans that resulted. It was more luck and fear than the 2-man rule that saved us from nuclear annihilation. Also, the security really wasn't that great. They were in the middle of NO-WHERE, on the corner of desert and empty. Even so, people sent to "exercise" the protection mechanisms got pretty far.
Did anyone actually ever test the "one man inside goes bad" scenario? I expect not, or if so, they buried the results, because the probable outcome to that would have scared too many people. I.e. he shoots his buddy, opens the doors, and lets in his accomplice(s).
I'd like to point you all to the Titan I Epitaph website: http://www.chromehooves.net/Titan_Epitaph_main.htm . It's 2 parts urban exploring, 2 parts history, and a surprising amount of original technical documentation (including a "guidebook for the planning, construction, phasing, systems integration, installation and checkout, turnover and activation of the operational Titan I complexes and their support facilities"). If you've got an afternoon to waste, you won't be disappointed.
Just an FYI but Star Trek First Contact was filmed here.
I am so glad to hear that the toilet is *OUTSIDE* the "no lone zone".
"Is the Colonel's underwear a matter of national security?" - Lt. Kaffee, "A Few Good Men"
All the policies that SAC (Strategic Air Command) enacted are still present in every day life of a Missileer (Those of us who still man underground silos). Mainly concepts like TPC (Two person concept) along with TPC (Two person control). Both of these allow us to operate in a very safe environment. The best time the public hears about nukes is when they don't hear about them.
We have all seen a movie where they take out a card with multiple lines of 20 digit numbers and two people have to read theirs before a strike is authorized.
Turns out they were so paranoid that ALL the launch number were zeros. Everyone in power was so afraid of not being able to launch that they decided to short circuit the security. This came out a few years after the US and Russia stood down their nukes.
I love reading things like this, but the article desperately needed more photos in my opinion. This is a nice page regarding the older Atlas launch silos, which are now decommissioned and (in this case) have private owners. This page is a nice view of a Minuteman III launch facility, which are expected to be in operation until 2025.
...in South Dakota. The cool thing is that the tours are small (6-8 people), and are led by folks who were actually in the bunkers when they were active. Fascinating stuff...like how the escape hatch actually led to a spot under the parking lot asphalt.
I find it sort of hard to believe that no drills were ever conducted. The launch facilities are closed environments; the military could tell the workers there anything, and could lead them to believe that they needed to launch. This could be done with either the missile deactivated, or as part of a planned missile test with a dummy warhead.
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney?
Yours In Ashgabat,
Kilgore Trout
The authors discusses PALs and wonders about their absence. ICBM warheads were (and are) not equipped with PALs, because they are only required on weapons that may be exposed to capture or loss.
The authors mentions the security seems to "have a hard shell and a soft interior". That's because he discusses the veru visible security measures (meant to protect against external threats) but only briefly discusses the surety procedures (meant to protect against internal threats and unauthorized launches) and doesn't realize the full import of the latter. (The full details of the surety procedures are classified and are much more extensive than detailed in the article or in any public source.) I don't think he even realizes there is a difference between the two. I suspect, like the computer geeks I've seen here on Slashdot, that he's a little fuzzy on the difference between electronic (computer and network) security and security in the physical world.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a former ICBM crewman - though I wore Navy blue rather than chair force blue.
I live within 4 miles of one of the Titan II sites in SE Arizona. They are up and down the1-10 and 1-19 freeway from Tucson. When they were decommissioned, the silos were filled with debris and cement and permanently disabled, the control rooms and Blast rooms were not. Many of the sites were sold to people who later covered them up. Some didn't do such a good job and I was able to find one that afforded access, although you had to shimmy down a small shaft about 30 feet to get to the Control center and the crew quarters. I wasn't the first to do this and there were some pics on flicker that were taken by other "explorers".
One of the things that struck me was the extreme solitude you got inside one of these. All of the instrumentation and most of the furnishings have long ago been stripped out. There were lots of electronic cabinets and a few desirable computer racks (including a nice DEC PDP rack I could have used for my PDP-11)
The Titan II ICBM's were large a liquid fueled and were extremely dangerous. The Titan II was used to launch the Gemini capsules in the 60's. There was a greater danger due to a hydrazine explosion (like the one one in Arkansas) than by a nuclear explosion. Still, I shudder to thing of a 9 megaton nuclear warhead parked 4 miles from my house...for 20 years!! The Titan II ICBM had the distinction of carrying the largest nuclear warhead by a missile...ever! Later the one big warhead were replaced by several smaller mirv warheads.
I remember after crawling through the access shaft and walking through the terrible dark control center and then using a ladder to get to the crew quarters, I could have imagined what it was to be working in one of these. Someone else had that feeling also and inscribed by one of the places where the bunks may have been, I saw this graffiti written on the cement wall of the bunker:
"You've just launched a motherfukin nuclear missile and started World War III and doomed mankind...It's Miller Time!"
Banks frequently have at least two people present when counting cash. For obvious reasons.
In a number of places where I have worked we usually had two people present when moving databases or critical software to production. It didn't matter i the person watching was a junior member of the team or not. Their role was to double check things, e.g. make sure current backups are available, the person doing the rollout was pointed at the correct server, the correct release version was being used.They could call out "stop" at any time if something didn't look OK.
I highly recommend it. It also doubles as a training session for the junior team members.
Often times your best tools are common sense and decent procedures.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems like very few people have noticed that this is the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson, Arizona, which is entirely open to the public. I toured the same place and took pictures very much like what is in the article. It's definitely high up there in the list of cool places for a geek to visit while on vacation:
http://www.titanmissilemuseum.org/
I would also recommend the nearby Pima Air and Space Museum, also in Tucson. There is also supposedly the Biosphere II one could visit, although I didn't get to see that. As a Coloradoan, my road trip through New Mexico, Arizona and Utah was the best I've ever taken. Maybe not up there in a typical tourist's list of places to visit, but if you're a geek, there are plenty of aerospace and nuclear related things which are totally awesome. Hope to go down there again someday.
I visited one in Lithuania a few years ago that's open for tours. It's not in the same shiny condition as the US ones in Arizona - the Lithuanian name for their country means "rainy", and rust never sleeps. The lighting's bad, and you don't really trust the electricity not to zap you as you're walking around, and there's this big dark rust-lined hole that's where the missile was. Much of the facility looks like the kind of abandoned factory where you'd set the ending of a B-grade movie, but in worse condition.
And yeah, the folks there were just hanging out waiting to be told to launch a missile to kill a few million people, and knowing that they'd have to launch quickly because a US missile was targeted on them. And they probably didn't have the level of operational protections that the US missiles had.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This was the real terrorism, politicians and generals trying to look tougher than the other side and threatening to blow up the entire world, poisoning us all and maybe causing a nuclear winter to kill off anybody that's left, and it went on for forty fucking years. Back when I was a kid, I had neighbors digging holes in their back yards for bomb shelters, and we'd get drills in elementary school about how to hide in the hallways during nuclear attacks.
Al Qaeda's just some bunch of second-rate lamers they're using as an excuse since there isn't a real Enemy any more. (Yeah, they're evil bastards, but the direct damage they've done is a lot less than the IRA did over a few decades, in spite of the US starting a couple of wars over them.)
While I'm disappointed with Obama in general, one thing he did that was really good was back down on the Bush Administration's radar systems in eastern Europe, which were there to provoke the Russians.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This guy can afford to go there but can't afford a real camera? Or is he just some artsy asshole who wants to make a "statement". Idiot.