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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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" 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

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...

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