Slashdot Mirror
Launch Command Preserved In Power Failure, But Nuclear Designs Still Risky
With a follow-up to Tuesday's story, Martin Hellman writes "Slashdot reported that a system failure at Warren AFB in Wyoming affected 50 ICBMs and that 'various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline.' Assuaging fears that America's nuclear deterrent might have been compromised during this failure, the source article notes that the missiles still could be launched from airborne command centers. Other reports cite an administration official offering assurances that 'at no time did the president's ability [to launch] decrease.' Given the difficulty of debugging software and hardware that is probably not a good thing. The history of nuclear command and control systems has too many examples of risky designs that favor the ability to launch over the danger of an accidental one."
It was the space brothers. Our galactic family is reminding us that we are all one brotherhood on planet earth and need to peacefully and lovingly help each other. Violence and nuclear weapons are not the answer to our problems. Going forward we need to think globally, not as a small tribe of individual nation states. They repeatedly down nuclear facilities in the USA, Russia, and China sending a message that we will not be allowed to nuke ourselves out of existence.
Or at least, I hope they run good protection software.
Like ... Search and Destroy. Or Avast! Nothing like pirates for protecting nuclear warheads.
[note: this was an attempt at comedy.]
So why aren't we sitting in a post-apocalyptic wasteland right now?
Have you been to Detroit recently?
At the point where it's necessary to launch a nuke,
And that time is now! We must preserve the purity and essence of our natural fluids. How can anyone not understand this?
Ah, the evolution of language. In 1,278,698 I.D. use of the shift key diminished, but the point made was not lost on even the lowly four and five diggers.
It's true: the M.A.D. doctrine (by which I mean M.A.D in newspeak) inverts the risk profile of the launch-fail condition. Deterrence is like that. In oldspeak, as we used to say, "when the cat's away the mice will play". No, those strange symbols are not mouse-whisker emoticons. We used to call them delimiters, back when both ends of a sentence had one, even though not of the same kind. Yeah, it was kinda weird, now that I think about it. But it grows on you after 40,000 hours of reading 600 wpm. You get used to it, ya know?
Too bad we only have negative evidence that M.A.D. actually worked in the first place.
Yo momma so fat, they use her belly button as a missile silo.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."