The hidden base that could have ended the world | Hacker News Reader

The hidden base that could have ended the world

bbc.com

197 pointsyitchelle94 comments

> It would have been impossible to start World War Three by accident.

"Since 1950, there have been 32 nuclear weapon accidents, known as 'Broken Arrows.' A Broken Arrow is defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of the weapon. To date, six nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered."

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows_static.sht...

That page seems a bit inconsistent, the K-219 was lost with 34 nuclear weapons and they don't seem to have been recovered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-219

From the wiki:

> K-219's full complement of nuclear weapons was lost along with the vessel.

> In 1988, the Soviet hydrographic research ship Keldysh positioned itself over the wreck of K-219, and found the submarine sitting upright on the sandy bottom. It had broken in two, aft of the conning tower. Several missile silo hatches had been forced open, and the missiles, along with the nuclear warheads they contained, were gone.[13 [a book reference]]

The official story, then, is that they were recovered. What are you suggesting?

I suppose the 1988 Soviet media had a few reasons to lie. But still, there are only a few places the warheads could be: In Russian control - they recovered them quickly and didn't want to advertise the capability, and simply didn't tell the Keldysh or the public. Or perhaps the Keldysh's story is true, and they know that because they were the ones who pried open the silos. They could be in American control - we somehow stole them from the sub between the sinking and the survey, and kept it a secret. It sounds like that's the story we are meant to believe. They could be on the sea floor, fired or dropped onto the bottom to make recovery more difficult, or the Keldysh's report was a lie and they're sitting in their tubes on the sub. They could be in the control of some rogue weapons dealer who recovered them, but that seems much less likely than any of the above options. Or perhaps Dirk Pitt used a secret NUMA submersible to recover the missiles from the dangerous Soviet menace, and the warheads are decommissioned and sitting in Admiral Sandecker's basement.

There are only a few places they could be, sure. The trouble is they're now deniable; whichever state is holding them would be hard to hold to account if they were ever used.

It's highly unlikely anyone but a major superpower recovered the missiles from more than 3 miles deep off the US coast.

Considering the US tried with Project Azorian and almost succeeded to salvage an entire submarine from depth, it's unlikely that some warlord had the capability to salvage anything from depth off the US coast without the US knowing about it.

I think this depends on the phrase "forced open". If there are pry marks on them, then yes someone was down there. But the other possibility is that the torque of the wreck popped the hatches open and the missiles were ejected to land somewhere on the seabed. Or they fell out, much like how the turrets of the Bismarck were lost when it turned upside-down during it's sinking.

Right, but none of the incidents on that list involved a nuclear missile silo. I read the author's sentence as "It would have been impossible (for Morris or other silo crew members) to start World War Three by accident."

> "It went to a national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was awakened on 9 November 1979, to be told that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the combined U.S.–Canada military command–was reporting a Soviet missile attack. Just before Brzezinski was about to call President Carter, the NORAD warning turned out to be a false alarm. It was one of those moments in Cold War history when top officials believed they were facing the ultimate threat. The apparent cause? The routine testing of an overworked computer system." [1]

Compounded with the thirty-four nuclear missile officers "texting answers to each other on a monthly proficiency exam" in 2014 [2] or the silo whose blast doors were left open while one crew member slept and the other awaited food deliver in 2013 [3], I'm don't see how that claim can continue being held.

[1] http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb371/

[2] http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/15/22317264-34-nucle...

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/23/us/air-force-nuclear-silo-door... "derelict in his duties in that he left the blast door open in order to receive a food delivery from the onsite chef"

Two incidents 35 years apart?

> Two incidents 35 years apart?

That we are aware of. What's your acceptable threshold for accidentally vaporising a city?

>Just before Brzezinski was about to call President Carter, the NORAD warning turned out to be a false alarm.

These stories are usually ignorant of what the actual procedures were and how very far any launch scenario was. There would be secondary detection confirmation and everyone was well aware of what a false positive was.

No one was just launching on one set of data, if they did, we wouldn't be here to discuss it.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u...

"Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years"

Had it been in a James Bond movie, I'd have laughed "a good gag."

And this just one category of risk.

I visited a Soviet silo near Pervomaisk in Ukraine a few years ago. The guide, who had been a subcommander in the final crew, enthusiastically demonstrated how the Soviet standard (flagpole) that stood between the two luxuriously shock-absorbed command chairs could be used to turn both keys from one station - the slotted design in the top of it allows you to simply hook on and push. It was intended as an unofficial but official but unofficial failsafe, so a sole survivor could launch.

Their design was generally very different to US missile complexes - they usually had the command complex in a silo rather than a separate bunker, as they essentially put upended submarines on shock absorbers in them then concreted over the silo cap. Clever leveraging of existing R&D, and means you're just digging silos, and no complex structure.

Also, the Satan missile is a scary, and surprisingly huge, thing.

>> Also, the Satan missile is a scary, and surprisingly huge, thing.

There were some current articles on the SATAN 2 missile which is just as scary:

The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), thought to weigh at least 100 tons, is considered to be the largest atomic weapon-carrying rocket ever produced and is capable of carrying as many as a dozen warheads inside its shell.

With an estimated range of 10,000 kilometers (6,213 miles), the Sarmat missile is “capable of wiping out parts of the earth the size of Texas or France,” Zvezda said.

The report also said that the missile has been designed with stealth technology, which enables it to be fired at a target without being detected by radar systems.

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2016/05/11/465010/Russia-nucle...

> The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), thought to weigh at least 100 tons,

I don't know why presstv would write it that way, the specs of the missile have been publicly known for decades, and it weighs 209 tons. I guess that's "at least 100".

There really is no such thing as missile stealth. Just penetration aids:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_aid

Both sides worked endlessly on producing and overcoming these and in hindsight a lot were snake-oil. I seriously doubt any ICBM could come down undetected at any time during the cold war. The US had listening/detection posts very close to Soviet territory via NATO nations. The Soviets also had listening/detection posts in Siberia, Cuba, and South America.

Not stealth, but the Soviets did have FOBS which allowed an attack from an unexpected direction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...

It's scary in that any ICBM is scary--there's nothing the Sarma can do that 2-3 Minuteman IIIs or DF-31s can't do, except maybe better missile defense evasion, and it's not like there's any missile defense available that can handle a full blown ICBM strike.

>Also, the Satan missile is a scary, and surprisingly huge, thing.

Oddly I saw a Polaris missile at RAF Duxford recently and was surprised by how small it was, in particular the warhead cowl. Or maybe the one at Duxford is a scale model or something? I know that Polaris's only had a 1500 mile range, maybe the true ICBM's need massive upscale?

The Polaris is an SLBM, and thus not exactly comparable to something like a Titan or a Satan; in particular its size is dictated largely by the physical necessity of being able to fit a worthwhile payload aboard a nuclear missile submarine. Same goes for its propellant; you don't want to be dealing with RFNA and similar nasty stuff aboard a submarine, where things are dangerous enough without adding something that's toxic, corrosive, pyrophoric, and in general just enthusiastically terrifying.

Early Soviet SLBMs actually did use nasty liquid fuels and oxidizers (hyrazine, nitrogen tetroxide) - I find the idea of being on a submarines pretty terrifying even without scary liquids and leaky reactors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-27_Zyb

There is a fantastic book by rocket-chemist-turned-science-fiction-author John D Clark called Ignition that documents the research and discovery of liquid propellants. It's a great read - out of print, but available online as a pdf: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

I toured the museum in Tuscon in the article when I was in high school - it's still one of my favorite museum experiences of all time. I remember seeing a roll of punch tape still sitting on the targeting computer and wondering who it encoded for nuclear annihilation.

FYI: that particular pdf copy is illegible, at least the first couple dozen pages.

Disappointing - that used to be the best source for a copy. It's been out of print for a long time, but I checked on Library Genesis and found this copy: http://93.174.95.27/get.php?md5=4ACE426B937741B4ACFFFC81F658...

Apparently it was just Chrome's PDF reader acting up. Opens fine in other readers.

I'm not having any trouble with it in Firefox or iBooks; perhaps try another reader?

On Chrome, it shows up like: https://puu.sh/qn7yn/8e295774e5.png

Opening in Preview seemed to fix it.

Not nice to read, but it does offer some hope for being able to convert to something like EPUB for more comfortable reading on a small device - from looking at the rendered content, I suspected it just contained page images, but if that were true, Chrome wouldn't misrender it the way your screenshot displays. Thanks!

Can you actually see one of the RVs? They might have been the infamous Chevaline 'destroy Moscow at any cost' devices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevaline_Re-entry_Body

No RV on display at Duxford, AFAIK, however here's a photo of a Chevaline REV.

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y235/Section1/swiki/c1/Chev...

Apparently it was made of balsa wood! What I find interesting is that the REV was not the point/be all and end all of the system, the point of the system was that all the missiles and decoys that a submarine could fire would arrive over Moscow at once and co-ordinate their behavior to overwhelm the defense systems. Pretty amazing!

Polaris is tiny. There's another example at the Science Museum at Wroughton, which isn't usually open to the public.

You could easily fit the packaged warhead - 200kT - in the trunk/boot of a car.

If I remember correctly, Eric Schlosser's Command and Control recounts an incident where an American nuclear missile crew were erroneously given the order to fire a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union. The person at the other end of the phone had simply read them the incorrect code, intending to give a routine instruction related to maintenance. Launch codes were validated, and by the procedure the missile should have been launched.

Thinking that this was likely an error due to the officer's tone of voice and the present geopolitical situation, the missile crew asked him to repeat the order, and he cheerfully repeated the code for firing the missile. Only after being prompted for a third time did he realize his mistake and relayed the correct encrypted order. The near-accident was not reported at the time.

The anthropic principle is a terrifying thing when you think about it. How many Earths burned for us to live?

The article mentioned that the crews started their 24 hour shift with top-secret security briefing on the world situation.

Considering cases like this, it was probably quite good idea to share the information with the crew so that they could make more educated decisions instead of just blindly obeying orders.

You'd think codes for routine messages and for starting WW3 would not be easily confused.

Just a UX tip for anyone designing these things.

rm temp*

versus

rm temp *

(I know I'm not at a command prompt, but it felt so wrong to type that.)

theft???

Eric Schlosser's excellent book Command and Control covers the details of what happened when things went horribly wrong at a Titan missile silo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

an airman [...] dropped a socket from a socket wrench, which fell about 80 feet (24 m) before hitting and piercing the skin on the rocket's first-stage fuel tank, causing it to leak

This made me think of the wonderful book 'Ignition!' that has a similar prophetic passage in it:

Say that somebody dropped (accidentally or otherwise) a greasy wrench into 10,000 gallons of 90 percent peroxide in the hold of the ship. What would happen — and would the ship survive?

Out of interest, did you manage to track down a physical copy or read digital? I've been trying to get one for my father but devilishly hard to find at a reasonable price.

No physical copy, unfortunately. They seem to be extremely rare and hugely expensive when they are sold.

The PDF is available at http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf but I've no idea how legal that is...

Out of interest, what do you consider a reasonable price?

I have a physical copy.

Yes, I came onto this thread to post about that book - it's an absolutely gripping read from start to finish, and tells two stories in one - a specific one and the more general one of nuclear weapons development and safety. I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants a "thriller" which is realistic (or, indeed real!)

This is an interesting article, but I mean... these bases still exist. They're no secret. Both Russia and the United States have underground missile control facilities that control small clusters of nuclear silos ready to launch at any moment. (Additionally, the U.S. has a large submarine nuclear force that does the same and Russia has a small submarine force ready to do the same, both have a small contingent of bombers, and Russia has quite a few mobile ground based launch platforms).

Living in Nebraska, I drive by the Minuteman silos pretty often when I chase storms. They look like this (I took this a couple years ago): https://www.flickr.com/photos/digicana/14505073893/

There are lots of them. This is a map of just one of the three fields, based out of Warren: http://www.nukewatchinfo.org/nuclearweapons/nebraska,%20colo...

I drive through Wyoming to western Nebraska a few times a year and have seen those. I had no idea! I thought they were oil/gas pipeline access.

I've visited the mentioned Titan Missile Museum outside Tucson -- well recommended. It was recently used to film the reenactment sections of "Command and Control", a documentary based on the book of the same name about the Damascus (Arkansas) incident in 1980 where a Titan missile under maintenance exploded (fortunately not breaching the warhead).

“The three minutes to get to the silo is a built in security protocol,” Morris explains. “If we didn’t make it in three minutes, the crew underground assumes there is some sort of security situation topside.”

Reminds me of the two Russians who "saved the world" by being the one person to prevent an erroneous nuclear launch:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

I find Arkhipov particularly hair-raising. One bad cup of coffee that morning and he might not have been in the mood to argue with the other guys.

Petrov, on the other hand, wouldn't have directly caused a launch had he reported a launch. There was still a good chance that his superiors would have ordered retaliation, it's just not quite as certain.

The excellent and rather terrifying Cuban Missile War alternate-history timeline is based on Arkhipov deciding the other way: http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-miss...

Oh man, because of you I just spent 1 hour reading this!

Very impressive work by this guy.

Atomic tourists may also be interested in visiting the Minuteman Missile National Historic Park. The park features a Missile Alert Facility (including bunker where the operators would turn their keys) and a missile silo at some miles distance.

https://www.nps.gov/mimi/index.htm

I always thought the Safeguard ABM missile complex looked seriously weird and interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program

... and now I know where that amazing location in Fallout 4 was inspired by.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Sentinel_site?file=Fo4sentinte...

Nice article. Would love to visit one of these silos one day. NB: I would hope that ALL disused launch silos around the world would have had the warheads decommissioned properly and all accounted for...

You can own one:

http://www.missilebases.com/

> The missile was launched by two separate keys (also kept in the safe), turned simultaneously and held for five seconds by the commander and deputy. Located on separate consoles, there is no way they could be operated by one person. It would have been impossible to start World War Three by accident.

Seems to me the separate-console defense could have been easily defeated with a simple mechanical contrivance. How hard could it be to make a gadget that lets you turn a key from a distance?

But that wouldn't have been accidental. They weren't necessarily trying to prevent attackers from being able to launch - more that someone couldn't put the wrong key in the wrong hole accidentally.

Read the quoted passage again. "Located on separate consoles, there is no way they could be operated by one person." This was supposed to keep one rogue individual from initiating a launch.

There's been a constant tension between the desire to control nuclear weapons and the desire to ensure nuclear weapons can be used in a war. These two goals are fundamentally in conflict to an extent. For a long time, the military was more worried about being unable to use a nuclear weapon due to a breakdown in the control system than they were worried about rogue officers using a weapon without permission.

Permissive Action Links (devices in bombs which require an authentication code for the bomb to work) were resisted by the military, fearing that the codes might not be available when needed in wartime. That finally got forced on the Air Force and Army, but the Navy to this day doesn't have PALs on their weapons, because they see the risk of communications problems as being too high.

For another example, the codes for the Minuteman ICBMs were set to 00000000. They remained like this until 1977.

It's quite possible that this hardware was designed under a requirement that it would need two people to launch, but that it was deliberately engineered to make that requirement easy to bypass in case a single person needed to launch in wartime.

No, the concern was that a deranged officer might launch on their own, without correct authorization and checks from another person. This resulted in the two-man rule.

When I did maintenance on our comm systems in certain areas of the base, there was always someone else with me. Entering alone meant that you would get shot (signs were up saying lethal force was authorized, and they meant it). What's more, our workcenter was divided into teams and members of each team would not be allowed to maintain equipment from the other, to prevent a single person from making unauthorized modifications to both.

Two-man was taken quite seriously.

That depends on distance, relative orientation, obstructions between the keys, force required, etc, but chances are it would be easier to take the consoles apart and connect them by wire to a switch that makes two contacts. It probably would also be easier to smuggle such an electromechanical contraption in than smuggling in a five meter pole would be.

Regardless of the method used, I think that would satisfy the goal of making it impossible to start World War Three by accident. It also would be very hard to do it intentionally, but by a single person, as the guards outside the main room wouldn't let a single person stay in the main room, and wouldn't let anybody carry in weird stuff.

>A code to unlock the missile had to be dialed into six thumbwheels of 16 numbers each

Could it be they were using a hexadecimal based system?

Thought the same thing, it would have to be no?

You're right, apparently not hexadecimal. I found a photo of the code thumbwheels: http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/55b7d71a371d2279018...

Those were probably so-called "BCD" switches. You had four data lines because that's what it takes to represent all digits from 0-9, but not all 16 combinations could be dialed up, just 10. The result of putting N switches together in a control panel is a BCD number where N decimal digits are represented with N*4 binary lines.

There are a lot of surplus BCD and other types of thumbwheel switches on eBay, but I'm not sure if they're still being made these days.

Was this the code that was actually set to 0000000 ?

I can't find the reference, but I'm sure I read somewhere that the launch codes were not properly set up for a long time...

That was Minuteman missiles and it was 00000000 - so over 10 (or 16) times as secure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Develop...

It wasn't a "not properly set up" thing, it was the military deliberately pushing back against safeguards they saw as making the US deterrent less credible.

That would work if they made the password full of zeroes public. But did they? I think it's more likely they wanted to increase probability of correct execution. So they prepared for the possibility the correct passwords to launch would not be available when needed, in the simplest way - have a password that is easily remembered.

“It’s a pin number you have to be able to remember under extreme stress,” says Morris. “How many times have you been in line at the grocery store and can’t remember your pin? We have to be able to remember this code in a war situation.”

Heh.

Not feeling on edge today? Read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Ever since visiting I find it weird when movies or TV shows have double-key "terrible thing" control systems where both keyholes are within reach of one person.

Wasn't it true that most bases never got provisioned with a missile? That building them was enough of a deterrent?

No idea, but I suspect they were all real. The risk of anyone assuming some were fake - and thus thinking the US was bluffing - would have been too high.

Its not a bluff is any of them had missiles.

Oh yes it is. It's a dangerous bluff, too; what happens when a high-level leaker tells his handler most of the holes are empty?

Who would believe her?

No one would change national policy based on a single report of such gravity - but the report would initiate a frenzied search for confirmation, which would all but certainly be forthcoming. At that point, the United States loses the Cold War.

Really? It would be acceptable to be hit with just some missiles, and only all the missiles would be a deterrent? This has gotten silly.

Really. Do you not know how MAD worked? Rough parity of force was the whole point - specifically, that neither side could expect to launch a country-devastating strike without receiving one in return. If one missile force turns out mostly not to exist, it becomes possible for the other side to contemplate starting a nuclear war that leaves it, but not its enemy, a functioning country, and the whole Cold War strategic calculus goes right out the window.

That's the same unstable outcome that made things like FOBS and ABM systems such a matter of concern, and drove the Cuban missile crisis - whose proximate cause was the Soviet Union seeking to achieve parity with short-ranged, forward-deployed US missiles which might enable a decapitation strike, which in turn might allow a full countervalue strike with little fear of response from a shattered government lacking anyone with the authority to launch a counterstrike. (The same fear motivated the creation of the Soviet "Dead Hand" or "Perimeter" system, whose purpose was to ensure a response even after a decapitation strike.)

I agree this has gotten silly, but we don't agree on when that happened. The idea that the US nuclear deterrent mostly never existed is entirely novel to me, and I've been unable to find even one source for it, credible or otherwise. Where on Earth are you getting this crazy stuff?

The amount of money and resources spent on this absurd and dangerous game rather than on making the world a better place is a sad commentary on humanity.

All the time I observe adult disdain and condescension toward children for their "childish" fights and arguments and all the "stupid" things they do.

The exact same titan missile design that is the subject of this article was used to send probes to other planets.

Also, this world was designed with competition in mind, tempered with cooperation. So military competition is to be expected. Lacking competition people tend to stagnate. Too much and they suffer as well - a balance is what is needed. But that balance is not zero military.

I haven't seen any world wars lately, have you?

Nuclear weapons are arguably a big part of the reason why.

Those bases weren't hidden enough ... it's my understanding that we have the same capability today but with "mobile missles", the enemy can't easily defeat a counter-strike.

The US nuclear detergent still includes land based missiles as one of its components.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Minuteman-I...

> The US nuclear detergent

"We clean international geopolitics so you don't have to!" /joking

That's what pre-coffee cell typing with a glitchy digitizer gets me, I guess. Leaving unedited to stand by my words (and shame).

Thank you for leaving it unedited, that was a good laugh.

The BGM-109G "Gryphon" ground-launched cruise missiles were all destroyed (except a few for museums) as part of the INF treaty. The warheads were put into storage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/04/12/c...

The system used large off-road capable trucks and would drive to one of several pre-surveyed locations in preparation for launch.

Source: The 38th Tactical Missile Wing was at Wueschheim Air Station, just down the road from where I was stationed at Hahn. Also, a friend was a surveyor for the Army, who scouted locations for the Pershing II IRBM in the pre-GPS world.

If by "we" you mean Russia, then yes, you have mobile missiles. America's mobile missiles glide quietly under the ocean in Trident nuclear submarines. All of America's land based launch capabilities are in fixed nuclear silos. They are not and have never been hidden; Russia even gets to come inspect them from time to time (and visa versa) as part of the treaties both nations have signed. Both nations maintain enough weaponry to launch a massive retaliatory strike even if hit with a first strike, it's part of what makes both nations feel secure that neither would be dumb enough to try a sneak attack. For America, some of the silos are placed far north in Montana to make an offensive first strike more effective, some of them are placed further south (Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska) to give a few more minutes to get missiles off during a surprise attack. The silos are spaced out enough that each would require a ground burst to destroy them, but close enough so that the nuclear debris cloud (mushroom cloud) would potentially damage or destroy incoming warheads (coming in at ludicrous speed) before they made it to the ground. The radioactive cloud that would be farted into the upper atmosphere by the debris clouds from the attacks on these missile fields would probably be responsible for well over half the national fatalities in a counterforce nuclear attack. We're talking hundreds of near-megaton ground bursts.

All of those ground bursts are conveniently located upwind from where most of our food comes from, too.

How do you mean, conveniently? That the explosions near the silos will spoil the sources of the food? Sorry I have to ask, I'm not a native English speaker.

Yes, fallout would be blown downwind and contaminate large areas of agricultural land.

"Conveniently" is being used sarcastically here, since that is of course very much not convenient.

Thanks for the explanation.

"Give peace a chance."

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