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Power Failure Shuts Down 50 US Nuclear Missiles
Pickens writes "The Atlantic reports that a power failure at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming took 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), one-ninth of the US missile stockpile, temporarily offline on Saturday. The 90th Missile Wing, headquartered there, controls 150 Minuteman IIIs. According to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what's known as 'LF Down' status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves. LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline. The cause of the failure remains unknown, although it is suspected to be a breach of underground cables deep beneath the base, according to a senior military official."
are offline!
Our stockpiles are ruined! how can we protect ourselves with only 5463 warheads?
WOPR tried to hack in and must over loaded something likely taking a fuse with it.
I understand the wish of some to reduce or eliminate the US nuclear arsenal, but while we have it, whoever is in command really needs to take care of it better. We had the loss of launch codes in 2000, completely removing the ability to launch for several months. We had the notorious "let's load live warheads on to low-security cruise missiles slated for destruction" incident a few years back. And now this. At this rate, is the nuclear arsenal even serving as an effective deterrent?
"for a few hours, we lost the ability to end the world"
what a shame.
Five 9's is a myth
...when you fail to check your power systems regularly, the terrorists win.
Please, take care of your electrical-systems-powering-ICBM-missiles. Please.
In other news, the Underminer was heard telling other evildoers at a sleazy subterranean bar that "The test run has been a total success" and "Soon, I shall be more notorious than Kim Jong Il."
His claim was immediately disputed by five carnivorous giant rats. At press time, it was not quite clear who had survived the ensuing bar fight (our photographer, sadly, had not).
Switch the targeting systems for empty boxes while Colossus can't look!
Oh, wait...
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
It is now being called an engineering failure not a power failure.
"According to the official, engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles, began to "ping" out of sequence, resulting in a surge of "noise" through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they're not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.
Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark. The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted. The suspect LCC remains off-line. "
The missiles were offline for about an hour.
"Would you like to play a game?" Sorry, the network cable's broken...
50 * 9 = 450 nukes
anyone think it's funny that we don't allow other countries to have nukes?
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
YAY!!!...
What, why is everyone looking at me like that? Is it wrong for me to get excited when my home state makes it onto the news? This is a once-in-a-lifetime event!
A small comparison of interest:
Windows: Public School. Mac: Private School. Linux: Homeschool. Assembly: Unschool.
... and assumed the launch control center has been blown away, then proceed to start the launch sequence on their own?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
"I ain't gonna let some silicon diode tell me what to do!" -- General Beringer
False alarm, good Amerika peoples. Only Peoples Republic of China installing network taps. Please to go about your daily businesses.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Move along, nothing to see here -.-
This kind of situation is the reason they don't put such 'intelligence' into the missiles.
"If Ikon goes off-line it will assume that there has been a catastrophe and will initiate launch on its own." -General Vostov
For about an hour on Saturday, it was somewhat harder to launch about 50 nuclear missiles, making the world temporarily a teeny bit safer.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Look, I RTFAd.
To summarize: one of the ICBM routers went out of control, sending out pings to the missiles before it should. The missiles sent back error codes as they weren't expecting to be pinged yet, and the increase in traffic eventually flooded that segment of the network, and they had to take it down. The local guys lost control of some added security features. They sent in armed soldiers to each silo to make sure they were intact.
The president still had full control of the missiles via NCA and Kneecap. Neither were operational at the time due to our relatively peaceful defcon status, but every single one of the missiles would have still launched during the "power failure".
Really, the only reason this is a big story is what the hardware was controlling. As any slashdot reader can tell you, routers can die all the time without warning. They were back up and running within an hour (bypassing the faulty router).
So Broken Arrow means missing nuke.
Apparently Dull Sword is the term for a non-functioning nuclear warhead.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room."
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
That has to give a whole new meaning to being afraid in the dark. I bet there were a few hundred people messing their pants on Saturday, and a lot of people who haven't stopped working non-stop since the incident.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I'd recommend over Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.
Win Win!
PROFIT!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
50 ICBMs do not come close to pretending to be 1/9th of the US nuclear missile stockpile, much less the US warhead stock.
You'll be grateful for Bush's foresight when the aliens attack and we lack the ability to transmit a virus to their mothership from our trusty powerbooks.
What bombs are those? I'm honestly curious, I've never heard of anything like that before.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSWAT00960720080606
The Air Force has been long criticized over its handling of the nuclear stock pile. Missleers used to be a sought after job, but over the last few decades, its been a career dead end in the Air Force.
Dick Cheney came to elected office from Wyoming, and claimed he was from Wyoming to avoid the law that prohibits both president and VP candidate coming from the same state (Texas, with Bush). Cheney is the devil, and dwells in the bowels of the Earth. Cheney loves nothing more than WMD like "loose nukes". He's got plenty of time on his hands, and saw on TV that Republicans are taking over again next week.
I believe we have located the Cheney Bunker. And he's grabbing nukes!
--
make install -not war
The end of the world could possibly take an extra 5 minutes.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
It's not like we were using them anyway. Heck, we probably saved on some tritium, assuming it didn't leak out when the power went off.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
When Clinton took office they had 5 bombs that individually each one could destroy the planet. He had 3 of them dismantled and had the other 2 on orders to be dismantled. Bush came into office and stopped that silliness instead ordering 9 more to be built. Thus we can assume right now that the US has at least 11 bombs that if they work according to theory would completely destroy this planet. YAY
This isn't a troll, mods ... ought to get a +5 Funny. You must go through a lot of Reynolds Wrap.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Agreed. The biggest we've had to my knowledge is a 25 mt bomb - the B41. That's not small, but even a 15mt left people alive at 75 miles. http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/PAGEPUB/CH2.html I don't think a 25 would take out the world...
In 2008, Gates fired the Secretary of the Air Force and its chief of staff after a series of incidents suggested to Gates that the service wasn't taking its nuclear duties seriously enough. At one point, a B-52 bomber flew across the continental U.S. without realizing that its nuclear weapons were "hot."
Ya know, if you boys can't learn to take care of your toys, maybe you should have them taken away!
Who's going to do it?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Do the nukes each have an ip address? what happens if I do a port scan? (besides having several 3 letter agencies show up and get a room at Gitmo?
A room at Gitmo isn't enough? What, you want to actually launch something? Greedy bastard.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What bombs are those? I'm honestly curious, I've never heard of anything like that before.
Your geek card is in danger. You could think of black hole bombs, for example (The Gap trilogy), or of fun with planet-smashers (Doc Smith's evolved and ethical and genocidal Lensmen), and many more.
Technically, the Electoral College rules prevent an elector for voting for a president/VP from the same state. So they could have both run as Texas residents, but it would have been poor strategy (Bush/Lieberman or the screwy procedures for a Congressional vote breaking an indecisive EC vote)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I know a fellow who cut the phone lines to Cheyenne Mountain back in the early '70s. He was running the drilling machine to make pilings for a new highway overpass when two truckloads of angry MPs hunting communist infiltrators came roaring down the road. Turns out the guy who left the little flags showing where there was an underground cable didn't notice a loop that was put in when the cables were installed and the two ends didn't match up. By complete coincidence the bridge piling was going in right over the looped cable. Hah, took my friend and his crew several hours to convince the MPs they weren't a Soviet sleeper cell disrupting communications as prelude to nuclear attack.
That's why it's called a fail safe. If it fails, it goes into a safe mode.
You wouldn't want it to automatically fire the missiles. They are strategically pre-programed with destinations so they can be launched in a hurry. Suppose China or Japan does a sneak attack and they are still aimed at Russia who for some unknown reason is coming to our aid and assisting us in repelling the land invasion. Now suppose the invading army took out the command center and the missiles blew up Russia.
It doesn't make sense to automatically shoot at unknown enemies. We spent craploads of money putting satellites and sensors all over the globe in order to detect launches and deduce point of origins from travel arc just so we could respond to the threat and not potential allies or neutral countries.
This sounds like a typical SPECTRE operation.
Have gnu, will travel.
"The cause of the failure remains unknown, although it is suspected to be a breach of underground cables deep beneath the base, according to a senior military official."
Mole People working for Al Qaeda! How else can this act of sabotage be explained?
Fu*cking gophers again, chewing on the wires in the ground because they're warm (all that current) and the ancient paper/plastic coating tastes so good to them.
Actually the real problem in the 21st century is that 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doesn't work as a deterrent to people who are willing to commit mass murder and mass suicide for some god that they believe in. Say what you want about the commies, they weren't religious fanatics who would be willing to blow up the world in order to get 72 virgins.
We need to consider putting 'omnicide' (a word that I made up meaning a deliberate act resulting in the destruction of all human life on earth) technology into partial control of a group of rational, civilized people who can make sure that the governments that have omnicide technology don't bumble or get tricked into using it. And that nobody who doesn't have it gets access to it.
Omnicide technology is not having a few nuclear bombs. That would just make big explosions and create a lot of fall-out. Stupid and envoironmentally destructive, but not in the omnicide category. Having 5000-10000 hydrogen-to-helium converters put you in the OT category, though. So does having the technology to create super-diseases that spread rapidly and have no cure. Or earthquake control technology (which may or may not exist). Or asteroid-directional control technology, which definitely doesn't exist as yet. Or any other omnicide technology that I can't think of at the moment. (Can you think of something that I missed?)
I'd be surprised if such a group doesn't already exist, possibly with extra-human intelligence oversight.
Ask Muldar, he knows.
explode when overheated?
Exploding gadgets -- it's not just laptops
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
What if they programmed the missiles to roll a D100 simulated maintenance check every month and if they roll a hard one they detonate right there, ON SITE?!?!?!
I mean, while we're dreaming up ridiculous programming scenarios we might as well make it interesting.
And they get mad at me when one of our customer's website goes down for 5 minutes and they can't sell their shit. sheesh.
This is a terrible thing to be on the news as far as security is concerned. Did they just say f***k wikileaks, we'll leak it ourselves?
What!?!? No Dark Star references?
[Doolittle convinces the bomb not to explode]
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.
Pinback wants the bomb to disarm]
Pinback: All right, bomb. Prepare to receive new orders.
Bomb#20: You are false data.
Pinback: Hmmm?
Bomb #20: Therefore I shall ignore you.
Pinback: Hello... bomb?
Bomb #20: False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore, I shall refuse to perceive.
Pinback: Hey, bomb?
Bomb #20: The only thing that exists is myself.
Pinback: Snap out of it, bomb.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There was a 4.4 earthquake in WY two days ago, with two aftershocks since then. Could this have affected underground cables or the computer?
If they ever had it, maybe they were smart enough to turn that feature off, disable it, when the missile wasn't already armed targetted and preparing for launch, or remove it from the programming, when the cold war ended?
Another possibility is multiple redundant communications networks, and a "fail to disable" if other links are still responsive
Just hope there is no bug. ICBM launch controls, nuke arming, and targetting are three things that cannot be allowed to have bugs.
Are they related to Musketeers? Or Mousketeers? Or Tears for Fears?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
So we could only blow up Saturn instead of Jupiter? Dang, we better be nice to the Jovians for a while. Stop making fun of their Great Red Zit and funny clown-stripes.
Table-ized A.I.
Operators should be comfortable with the dynamics of SIM City before moving on to Supreme Commander
So, when the lights came back up again, did they recount the warheads, to make sure that they are not missing one to Ocean's 11?
The problem is, Hydrogen bombs contain pressurized Tritium gas, a hydrogen isotope. It has a half-life of 7 years, so those weapons need to be regularly cycled through a depot for refurbishment. They don't have a very long shelf life, unlike conventional explosives. And this refurb process ain't cheap.
All nuclear devices require constant maintenance. It's the price you pay for being in the game. That's not an issue, if you need them and can afford them. Unfortunately, a lot of people have fooled themselves into thinking we don't need them (given our conventional force reductions, we most certainly do) so the real question is can we continue to afford them. The answer there is: not unless we get off our asses and rebuild our industrial base.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Now when China's decided it's time to wipe us off the earth, all they have to do is dig a few really deep holes.
Of all the secrets that the government keeps, why is THIS one public? Why is ANYTHING having to do with the status of nuclear weapons public? WTF? There are a few things that SHOULD be secret.
I believe that congress was sold on the interstate highways act because we needed a system to move and stage nuclear weapon during the early days of the Cold War. Can incident like this finally convince congress to pay some money for the infrastructure for the 21st century?
Who am I kidding?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Perhaps Iran is the only one infected who made it public knowledge.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I'll have it fixed in a minute man.
That was in 1962 when the US and USSR played a game of nuclear chicken.. You really should have stayed awake in your history classes.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm just glad they failed safe, to be honest.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
...a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles...they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark.
5 computers responsible for 5 missiles each doesn't total 50 missiles.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
akin to the Crazy Ivan submarine manuever, our enemies have no idea what nutty thing we'll do next!
that for a few hours we could only kill the entire population of the world 9 times over rather than 10? Goddammit people! That's the sort of thing that the evil ones who hate our freedoms will take advantage of! 9/11, war on terror.
I guess we were just fortunate we didn't need to have a nuclear war today.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
i think the parent was asking for existing devices
except for numerous fictional devices, i also have never heard of a device capable of destroying the planet in a single blast. Wikipedia states that there is no theoretical upper limit to Fusion device yield, so one could make a thermonuclear device with giga-tons of yield, burried somewhere (it would be HUGE, not transportable in any way), but i wonder what kind of yield would be needed to actually destroy the planet
People, what a bunch of bastards
AT&T had their longlines go down in, IIRC, 93, from a self induced DDos like this.
Best Slashdot Co
Our base is under attack. Low Power. Silos Needed.
The Tzar Bomba was also a down-rated version of the original design, which was specified at 100 MT
Still not enough to destroy the planet (or all life on it) though
People, what a bunch of bastards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7me4boq5Wyk
You ever seen a Russkie drinking water, Mandrake?
According to the article, it seems that one of the five redundant control computers started polling out of sequence, and the missiles didn't like it so they sent error codes, which the control computers didn't like, and lots of errors were happening in a hurry. So the operators [talked to the bombs about phenomenology] shut the control computers all down and restarted them one at a time, which let them find the bad one, and they haven't yet told the public if they've figured out what was wrong.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You're probably too young to remember Andrei Amalrik's book, but the Soviets had severe internal conflicts and economic problems purely aside from the Cold War. Reagan's military escalation probably hastened their collapse a bit, but they had more problems with the Pope telling Eastern Europeans that they shouldn't be subject to the Soviet Empire. Amalrik was mainly focused on ethnic tensions, and even after the Soviet Union collapsed and divested itself of many of its ethnic groups, Russia still had their civil war against the Chechens and other Muslim minorities.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am so conspiracy all the time, but this is a little too much, all of a sudden so many bunkers went down, alarms and all.....a bit too convenient. So not enough man power to add personnel for security watch at each station, i imagine they had people waiting at each silo, too see which would have extra security, and the ones that didn't got hit...that or someone over in china was playing the next gen wargames, and brought down all the silos at once using a fake systems diagnostics test, and now knows for next time what works to bring down those missile silos.....OR, (and this is the last one ...promise) someone wanted to flex for the americans and show them just how insecure they really were, either russia, china, or ex militants knowing the systems, and decided a show of hands by shutting down for a few seconds all the systems at once....
Whatever it was, we definitely will see the movie coming out for it....my bet is it will be another die hard....
Ah, my nationalistic friend, it can be seen as exactly the reverse. After all, we were racing against them, too. The truth is that they were superior in many areas (airframes and engines, spacecraft--Sputnik caused us to shit our pants), and we in others. It was a two-way race.
And no, the military build-up did not cause the USSR to collapse. It was their highly-flawed economic system. No matter how little they spent on their military, it would have still failed them.
Oh, and China does not "a history of... copying technology", they have a history of inventing it. In recent history, they suffered horrible colonial wars, but they're back. Don't let your patriotism confuse you.
Lies about crimes
A lot of UFO activity lately, and this last month -> http://www.colinandrews.net/UFOs-NuclearOver-ride.html