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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?
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.
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.
Move along, nothing to see here -.-
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).
The end of the world could possibly take an extra 5 minutes.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
If you have to resort to using ICMB's against terrorists, then the terrorists probably have already won
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.
Understand one thing: fairness doesn't matter. Never having them used in war, that's what matters.
Um. But the USA is the only country ever to use them in war. So perhaps you wish to modify your statement to: "Never having them used against us in war, that's what matters."
"Yet other countries have them."
I didn't say "deterrence" trumps everything else. Sometimes one has to USE force to obtain the desired outcome or something like it.
That all wars since WWII have been rather minor affairs argues that mutual nuclear deterrence between RATIONAL ACTORS works.
An irrational actor may not be deterred, which means the option to defeat or destroy (there is a difference) may be selected.
For example, Israel deters enemies by the "Samson option". If you are going to lose your country irrevocably to an enemy, there is
no logical reason not to destroy as many of them as possible. It becomes perfectly reasonable to empty your arsenal into their military, infrastructure, and since in cultural war every enemy human is an enemy, their population centers. Your willingness to do that must exist to be a deterrent, and if that fails, you serve your co-culturalists elsewhere by your sacrifice.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."