Comment by BonoboIO | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BonoboIO | Hacker News Reader

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The moment you see icbms leave the silos it’s over. They are not scalpels for a tactical strike on a small area to prevent xyz, for that you would a submarine much closer or bombers or even a cruise missile.

They are the hammer and lots of them. If they fly, you can be sure it’s the big game. You are right, in about 30 minutes (probably less, when you take into account that the USA would only react with icbms) or closer to 10-15 minutes it’s Armageddon.

The first bombs would explode in the higher atmosphere and blind the electromagnetic spectrum aka radar detection fails and your only option is to fight back and hit hard in retaliation.

I don’t know if it’s (still) in service, but the USA had a rocket that would fly over the rocket fields and send the launch codes and fire the icbms. The fear was, that the soldiers were incapacitated and could not fire them itself. The backup.

Absolutely insane how in minutes everything would go to hell.

The communication rocket(s) seem to have been shut down in 1991.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/DRC-8_Emergency_Rocket_Co...

> I don’t know if it’s (still) in service, but the USA had a rocket that would fly over the rocket fields and send the launch codes and fire the icbms. The fear was, that the soldiers were incapacitated and could not fire them itself. The backup.

Truly terrifying as a citizen of a non-nuclear country that this is (or was) in place, and that a handful of countries (presuming they all have this capability) is willing to obliterate everyone else because they took it too far.

> Truly terrifying as a citizen of a non-nuclear country

I flicked back a page of your comments and saw " .. here in Sydney."

I'm in Australia like, I presume, yourself.

The same country that has (along with multiple other installations) the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt

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

which has always been a prime target in any first strike scenario .. given its primary function is communications with roving nuclear ballistic missile launch submarines.

Like it or not Australia's been part of the game since an Australian scientist first explained to the Americans how to build an atomic weapon and further convinced them that it was both feasible and essential.

TIL about Sir Mark Oliphant!

" . . . rocket that would fly over the rocket fields . . . "

A series of airplanes, called Looking Glass, was the first backup.

> I don’t know if it’s (still) in service, but the USA had a rocket that would fly over the rocket fields and send the launch codes and fire the icbms. The fear was, that the soldiers were incapacitated and could not fire them itself. The backup.

They can't actually be sat there just waiting for a radio signal, can they? Just waiting for some kid with a Flipper Zero to end the world?

Could involve a dead man's switch (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch ) such that the signal can only work if everyone in the control centre is already incapacitated, that combined with requiring the signal to be highly encrypted sounds fairly safe I think?

The explanation previous seems misleading, the rockets sent up to give codes for launch, humans still launched them. Presumably before satellites, redundant fiber networks, and robust national communications they wanted a fallback in case communications get disrupted.

So not a dead man's switch, just backup one way comms system.

Ah, thanks for clarifying!

It's probably worth considering a return to a fallback comms system. In the 1990s, telcos were the pinacle of reliability. Sure, AT&T had local issues from time to time, and that cascading failure incident [1] in 1990, but things were on a path towards even more reliability. Now, I expect a several hour, multistate outage of 911 about every other year. Nationwide single carrier cell phone outages aren't uncommon either.

I'm just going to assume a hostile first strike makes satellite comms difficult.

[1] http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/att_collaps...

" That's exactly right, bluescrn, kids simply had to hang about and record the launch codes used in one armageddon in order to reuse them to start the next. "

Unforgiveable snark aside I suspect they would have used some level of authorisation ... although there was that strong rumour to the effect that the default silo launch codes were 000 for many many years.

Which was, of course, just silly .. military intelligence would demand at least eight zero's.

https://sgs.princeton.edu/00000000

the dead mean switch

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