Armored Car Used to Potentially Block Minuteman-Missile Launch (1987) | Hacker News Reader

Armored Car Used to Potentially Block Minuteman-Missile Launch (1987)

articles.latimes.com

36 pointsmolecule21 comments

> The theory, according to the spokesman, is that the cover is blown aside so rapidly that a vehicle parked atop it with brakes off will be left hanging in thin air--like yanking a tablecloth out from under dishes--and then drop straight down, in hopes of keeping the launching missile from going anywhere.

Feels like something Adam Savage might enjoy testing out.

As long as they don't attempt the usual "Well, that was fun and educational, now let's see if we can really make it explode..."

I like that an article from 1987 is freely available on the web. I wish most of the news organizations that have historic content locked up in libraries and microfilm would do this.

The National Library of Australia is progressively digitising it's collection of historical newspapers (some coverage from 1803 to 2007). http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper?q=

Love this: The procedure has never been tested, he added.

> The spokesman said an Air Force investigation established the troubles began with the failure of the navigation guidance unit inside the missile. That is not unusual, he said, because the guidance units have a finite life and must be replaced periodically.

There must be more to it than that... "Fire!" "Err, Sir, the guidance unit has just indicated it needs to be replaced"

Interesting military hacking. Is it wise to unveil this missile exploit?

If you can maliciously drive an armored car onto a missile silo in a military base, you have already owned the military base.

...with all sorts of drones / driverless cars around nowadays, you can imagine some of them could be remotely hacked and made to land or park themselves more or less inconspicuously atop a silo at the right time. You don't need to "hack a silo" (which, I hope, is really not possible!) anymore to incapacitate the adversary from delivering a nuclear strike, just hack any random device that can be moved around at the right time. Hopefully you can't use the same tricks to trigger a missile launch, so overall the new situation might have increased humanity's chances of long term survival :)

Now it would be obvious, but in a future with god knows how many small little e-critters swarming around everywhere doing god knows what... yeah, bad I idea to share, but someone in a foreign military paid to have such an idea would've already had it anyway :)

> more or less inconspicuously

I'm going to have to go with "far, far less" on that.

I'm guessing the physical security around a missile launch silo is likely to prevent that.

Missile silos aren't "in" military bases as we normally tend to think of them. The silos themselves are usually sited in remote locations, the surfaces are often unguarded and protected only by chain-link fence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Active_LGM-30_Minuteman_S...

http://countrychickengirl.blogspot.com/2011/03/sunday-drive....

Thomas Schelling theorized [1] that you cannot credibly claim you will intentionally trigger nuclear armageddon, but what you can do is tolerate an uncomfortably high risk of accidentally triggering nuclear armageddon.

Seen in this light, you'd publicize every nuclear mishap.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_...

Wow. The quote in that section is stunning. Definitely worth a click-through. Thanks for posting this.

Parking trucks or other objects on top of silos was actually part of the START verification protocols, so highly public, too. The other technique was leaving silo doors open during certain hours, when overhead collection assets (satellites, maybe flights) were... overhead, to verify presence or absence of missiles in certain silos.

So how old are our nuclear missiles now?

And what happened with the massive cheating going on inside the unit that is supposed to maintain and run them?

The 'youngest' nuke is now over 21 years old. Due to the terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaties, we no longer conduct any actual testing, so it's all computer-simulation based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship

I wonder what sort of armored car it was. An APC, some kind of secure transport...?

It could never get past that super-secure launch code.

Weren't the codes 00000000 for 20 years? :)

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/nearly-two-d...

That code was only used past numerous safeguards that required multiple access codes/keys. The actual activation code was trivial compared to the layers of security necessary to use it.

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