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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?

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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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