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."

Comments

Canard.

[blair1q]

"risky designs that favor the ability to launch"

There are multiple safeguards built into the system that have to be released in order to launch even one missile. None of the safeguards are coupled, meaning that there is no cascading effect. Each one has different inputs and a different means to activate it.

One of the simplest is that it takes the near-simultaneous activation of two mechanical, key-locked switches to send the fire command to the missile, and these are separated by enough distance that one person can't do it alone. And it only gets to that point after a number of other manual steps have been taken to prep the launch.

Even the President's order is not sufficient to start everything rolling. The people in charge of monitoring the threat systems go to him to ask for authorization. He doesn't go to them - they'd never believe him if he did, since there's no way he'd know there was a threat. And they don't make their decision lightly.

At the point where it's necessary to launch a nuke, it will be blindingly clear to everyone that we should have made the process simpler, not that it is too simple.

Re:Why have them

[Pharmboy]

then definitely any tight grouping of 100.000+ soldiers+armor should fear a nuclear warhead, and such groupings would be inevitable.

Wrong answer. No military is going to group 100k soldiers in an area that can taken out by a single warhead, and never would have. Ever. Even in WWII we were only able to kill 100k people by striking civilians. This is the whole reason you have multiple military bases, to distribute you capabilities and make it impossible for an enemy to take out a significant portion with a single strike. With the exception of training bases, military posts generally have less than 10k people, and often less than 5k people stationed there, for this exact reason. The remainder of the work force on a base are civilians.

And you won't see tactical nuclear weapons being used in the field likely ever, as that is the invisible line in the sand that would justify the enemy using nukes, perhaps on civilian targets. And there is no justification for using them against an enemy without nuclear capability. If an enemy used tactical nukes on us, we would still use them as a strategic weapon in retaliation, against fixed targets, not mobile troops. Even though we have them, tactical nuclear weapons make no sense, as they are solely a deterrent, a strategic weapon. Perhaps this is why they were all under SAC (Strategic Air Command) and not TAC (Tactical Air Command) during the Cold War, including all ICBMs (obviously excepting navel based warheads under the Nuclear Triad philosophy: Bombers, ICBMs, Submarines)

So, such groupings are not only NOT inevitable, they are highly unlikely as there is no tactical or strategic advantage to such a grouping, and tremendous risks.