Minuteman missile communications
computer.rip
computer.rip
[1] Run by U.S. National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/mimi/
Please share them!
-To practice for the moment of a real launch command, he would receive encoded messages every day that had to be manually decoded as quickly as possible — this decoding would be done independently by him and the second person on duty, and they would then compare to make sure they matched. In the case of a real launch, not only would the two people in the underground facility need to agree that the command was issued, but a second team in another facility would need to do the same.
-He was not allowed to know the targets of the missiles he would be launching, though these targets were fixed for each missile.
-It was almost assumed that if they were launching, they would have already been hit on the surface by a nuclear weapon (locations of the launch facilities were not secret, because they wouldn’t be a deterrent if they were secret). The two people underground are positioned in what looks like a shipping container suspended inside a submarine hull, all encased and locked behind one giant thick steel (?) door. If the elevator shaft had collapsed during an impact, they would be stuck inside to die. So they did include an escape hatch in the roof, but buried deep underground — this would involve the two men opening the escape hatch, letting a bunch of sand fall through, and then digging upward through 100-ish feet of ground over many days to get to a surface that was a wasteland. He was never really convinced that this would work, but the men had to believe that if they did their jobs, there would be some way to survive it.
I was actually a bit surprised there was nothing about lightning and EMP suppression. I’m no expert on EMP effects, but multiple-mile-long cable loops underground seem like the kind of thing that would develop large induced currents in the presence of a varying magnetic field.
Nonconductive fiber optic cables are entirely immune to these effects. And they’re less expensive than copper!
I started off on a more detailed explanation of the timing issue, why we may not be able to launch before inbound weapons arrive, but it's kind of a complex topic that changed quite a bit over time. I might write something more in-depth about it later.
I'm looking forward to your insights, this is a great comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
Now I think about it, how is the international law banning nukes in space actually enforced? E.g. if Russia just put one on a satellite and didn't tell anyone, does anyone have any way to notice?
Yes. Satellites are not transparent so they occlude the sky behind them for anyone who is watching, which allows discovery of new satellites. Imaging them and determining trajectory via doppler etc comes after you know it's there.
See: https://www.space.com/amateur-satellite-trackers-on-global-l...
Launch vehicles are pretty hard to miss.
My wild guess would be, a bomb radiates and a satellite usually does not, so it might be possible to easily check new launched ones or all of the satelites of a certain size?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4922079-one-second-after
Either nobody has tried to find out yet, or it is not.
I am way out of my depth to say anything about this but I am just asking questions. I think we have to define a few words here
> space
what does space mean? I mean where will the detonation take place? Is it low earth orbit? geostationary orbit? is it past the orbit of Jupiter? outside the solar system (like voyager 1)?
> nukes
How big is this nuke?
If it is small enough and far enough, do we care?
Likewise "space" (for a HAEMP) means "up to about 500 km" — diagram from the previous link, based on h = 400 km: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EMP_mechanism.png
For the purposes of "where can nukes not be stationed according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967": (1) orbit, (2) any celestial body, (3) anywhere else in outer space:
> Article IV
> States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
For people like me that didn’t understand why the cables are pressurized.
Story time: The airbase I was stationed at in Germany had been built by the French, prior to their partial departure from NATO[1]. There was a buried cable on base that went bad while I was there. It was pressurized but apparently the hole in the casing/jacket was large and admitted more water than could be kept out by the nitrogen. So the airmen of the outside plant had to use their TDR[2] to find the fault and dig it up to repair it. To their surprise it turned out to have paper insulation[3], as it was made before plastic began to be widely used in wiring. It also had swastikas printed on it - because the French had used captured Nazi war-surplus cable when they built the base in the late 1940's.
[0] It would be hard to maneuver large & heavy steel cylinders down the entrance, through the blast doors, and satisfy the security concerns of the LCC crew that they were legit. And then remove the empties afterwards back through all that. The cylinders can not be stored on the surface, for security reasons and because the buildings would no longer be present after an attack.
[1] https://shape.nato.int/page214871012
[2] Time-domain reflectometer. It's like radar for wiring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer
[3] The water soaked much of the paper for quite a distance in either direction of the hole. So they ended up replacing a rather long piece of cable instead of just putting in a splice junction. Lots of digging & cursing needed.
> This is the basic premise of cable pressurization: Keep the pressure within the cable in excess of the pressure that could be applied by standing water.
One time, I had to speak up, that something might actually be ITAR, before an imminent potential violation.
I probably didn't make any new friends on that occasion, but the situation was taken seriously, and violation was averted.
I found out the interesting way when leaving the States that ic it goes into space, it comes with lots of ITAR red tape of which I and my university had been blissfully unaware.
Being escorted onto my flight (which had been held for an hour!) by a couple of State Department officials who simply told me to sit in the first available seat when we got aboard was kind of cool, though. Instant upgrade to business class, and the pax in the vicinity probably spent the flight wondering who the heck I was and what I had been up to...
This is why a lot of European space hardware sellers have ITAR-free as their selling point
The funny thing is that I did pretty much the same thing, I had our flight computer prototype in my hoodie pocket to fidget with (since I'm leading all the electronics for the project) but luckily we weren't travelling far and didn't get any invitations from the government folks.
Our first sat, NCUBE, never made it out of the launch canister once in space; the 2nd one was on a failed launch which probably made some Kazakh farmer's day very interesting - judging from the photos I saw, it seems it came down in a wheat field - but the third one deployed successfully, but at that time, alas, I had graduated.
The rest of the film is pretty good, too!
Turn your key, sir!
I can imagine shaping buildings like a house to fool satellites but the furnished living room looked a bit too much. I assume these bases were military territory with fences around them.
If you know the right people in town, you can get some fascinating information. At one time, supposedly most of the nuclear weapons in the US passed through Loring. There was a large field area that had bunkers dug into it that held nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. There were many more bunkers than weapons needing storage, so that you could rotate the munitions constantly so that the Ruskies would have to guess which bunker to nuke.
On top of this field full of bunkers was a bunch of buildings that looked very boring, and were supposedly made to look like "boring" military buildings.
One building was a large concrete cube. About 40 ft on all sides. It was supposed to represent something like a small schoolhouse. It was designed to contain the detonators for the bombs. It supposedly had 4ft thick reinforced concrete walls. It was supposed to be able to survive a near direct strike.
This all made a lot more sense back in the 60s when bombs were less accurate, smaller, and satellite intel was significantly more limited.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rauEmMeHagTpVgGQA this is the location I describe above. If you look to the south-west of the runways, you can see a similar road layout where some base-housing used to be. The bunker area was meant to be hard to distinguish from those from a spyplane or early satellite.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/K5MMuAdLtZ63hL8Y8?g_st=com.google.ma...
Might well be totally mundane, but it sure seems odd to me with my complete lack of knowledge about civil engineering.
Not that it would have helped me without the rest of your comment — although I've seen a vertical cylinder in a farm in Aberystwyth I'd assumed that instance was fuel, and similar elsewhere were labeled as liquified air tanks.
But chicken farms make a lot of sense.
anyone know anything else about this stuff? i’ve often considered trying to recreate his career path. (he died about 5 years ago.)
It will open directly in Google Earth and put you right on the scene in Armageddon, Wyoming, which appears to be roughly eighty miles south of Bumfark, Nowhere.