The button that isn’t
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
Visited a soviet silo just outside of Pervomais'k, Ukraine (thoroughly recommend a visit if you find yourself in that neck of the woods, you can sit atop a Satan missile and wave your cowboy hat until a burly Ukrainian tells you to get off before he shoots you) - it's a two-key system, with two buttons, on opposite sides of, well, a really tiny room. While one could reach both buttons and keys simultaneously, the idea was that the keys would be carried by separate people - however in practice, they both hung from a peg on the back of the chair, meaning that someone could have theoretically initiated a launch singlehandedly. Theoretically, because the other fun fact revealed was that most of the time they were nothing like launch ready, and perennially struggled with equipment failure.
Oh, and don't forget that the super-secret launch code for minuteman missiles across the US was... uh, 00000000, for several decades.
I believe this was the combination to the locks on the launch bunker access doors, not the actual launch codes.
Either way-- laughable security for the military's crown jewels.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org...
The bunker doors were "fixed" with metal plates after it was shown they could be easily shimmied with a credit card.
Do you happen to have a link that discusses the bunker doors? I don't think I'd heard of that one.
Another one of my favorites from that book was the EOD tech that put a ready-to-rumble teller-ulam thermonuclear device into the bed of his pick-up truck, drove it off the base, dismantled it in order to show off to a girl, then reassembled and returned it. Although, I can't personally verify the source of that story.
The military would disagree. The all-zeros combination code was chosen on purpose because it was felt that having a code at all was a reduction in security since the code revelation procedure became a single point of failure. These aspects of the nuclear security system were designed by politicians, and weren't exactly the best of ideas, so the military did what they needed to comply with the law but keep the nuclear arsenal secure and available.
More civilized individuals might call that insane as opposed to laughable.
This is false. I suggest reading Command and Control; it is illuminating and terrifying.
The setup you described evolved from a tug of war between competing bureaucratic interests combined with ineffective oversight. The various military organizations fought to keep control and funding of prestigious nuclear weapons; the political arm dealt with the paradox inherent in having a system that was ready to be deployed at a moment's notice, but impossible to detonate accidentally.
The compromise that emerged were these broken systems.
To quote from Command and Control:
>After the accident at Thule, the Pentagon had ordered SAC [Strategic Air Command] to impose some form of use control. Instead of relying on PALs, during the early 1970s the Air Force put a coded switch in the cockpit of every bomber that carried nuclear weapons. The switch permitted an arming signal to be sent to the bomb bay when the right code was entered. The lock had been placed on the bomber, not inside the bombs—and a stolen weapon could still be detonated with a simple DC signal. SAC was far more worried about its weapons being rendered inoperable during wartime than about someone stealing them or using them without proper authorization. During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
It's weird how you say that like it was wise instead of horrifically insane, though.
The scary thing about the Cold War was that the participants generally had the best of intentions (aside from a few people like Curtis LeMay, and they never really got presented with the opportunity to express their evil side) but disaster could have easily happened anyway, purely by accident.
And I really shouldn't put this in the past tense. All of this stuff is still there. We all seem to have just decided to collectively pretend that MAD went away when the USSR dissolved, even though there are still thousands of missiles and nuclear warheads ready to wreck civilization at a moment's notice.
This was one school of thought within the command and control structure, but was, from my understanding both a minority opinion and one held more by political oversight members than by the actual generals holding the keys.
Leslie Groves specifically felt that a nuclear exchange was inevitable, and that the US was in a position to win.
In that case, they shouldn't have been fussed about an extremely small chance of failure. The Soviets would never dare bank on such a chance, therefore it wouldn't change the effectiveness of the deterrent.
The only reason to act as they did is that they were worried about not being able to get revenge if the Soviets launched first.
I vaguely recall a short story in which the Soviets launch their missiles, for whatever reason, and the U.S. President refuses to give the launch order. MAD has failed and America is doomed anyway; there is no value in adding hundreds of millions to the death toll simply to follow through on a threat.
Fully agreed. There seems to be this weird mode of thinking for most people 'I choose to ignore the bad stuff so that I am happier'. But the end result here might be exactly the opposite, the worst case.
For example, it is scary how lightheartedly people talk about 'war with Russia' in context of the current Ukraine crisis. Regardless on what political side one is, avoiding direct confrontation of nuclear powers should be the main concern.
Rather than all the talk and fuss and whatnot about more-or-less meaningful social justice causes, I would rather like to see a movement to put nuclear weapons into 'cold storage' and a verified international protocol to continuously check that they are there.
Seeing that it is unrealistic to have full disarmament, this would at least greatly reduce the risk.
If fired, they would have missed their destination by thousands of miles.
Note: a maths user error, not a "Perl sucks" rant.
When the bug was presented in a meeting, there was one guy who insisted that we install a big red button to shutdown the system. There was even discussion on whether it should have a little lid or not. When that guy left the meeting early, they briefly considered to install a fake button.
In the end, what happened is that they built a "heartbeat" system that just zeros out the modules every second or so. The information in the modules is lost, but since there are millions of collisions each second, this had virtually no impact on data taking. But it prevented damage when the readout system crashed again.
They also made a little GUI in the control room showing a beating heart probably just to calm people down :-).
The only exception was the Large Binocular Telescope, which is one of the largest telescopes around (even the largest, depending on how you define it). But there a lot more thought was put into the design so you wouldn't be able to run the telescope into the ground even if you tried. (It also helps that they have a dedicated night assistant whose job it is to point the telescope and make sure that the observers don't do anything stupid.)
And then there is the heretical "G.I. Joe: Retaliation", where all the world leaders are in one room with their breifcases containing big red buttons.
"Excuse me, we're looking for Sierra 7." "Yeah, it's down this road for a mile, then left on 127."
And the Soviets wouldn't have been fooled either. So they look like military installations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/us/roswell-new-mexico-miss...
More morbidly, in a first strike scenario you want the enemy to waste nukes on actual farmhouses it couldn't tell for certain were launch facilities or not. Then even if no facilities are missed (something you would be hoping for), that's still fewer nukes to be dropped on cities and conventional military installations.
They just copied some footage helpfully provided by the air force. (7:50) There must have been a "director's cut" of the same because we see it in "The Day After" where they're turning the keys.
The president's emergency satchel (nuclear football) or cold codes (plastic card called the biscuit) contain codes to identify the president and __authorize__ nuclear attack. They are codes for authorization. They don't contain codes that are needed to execute the attack. There is also two-man rule in place. Secretary of Defense must confirm the authorization.
It contains some seriously in-depth analysis of both current and historic nuclear weapons development, with a strong bend toward the diplomatic and political side of things.
We could at least make an attempt to get into how making a strike would require planning exactly what targets to attack, what weapons to attack them with, and exactly when to launch which weapons, all depending on the political situation and what we're actually trying to accomplish. The idea of a big button on the President's desk to launch a strike is then pretty absurd.
Since 1962, the plans had built in variations, so that e.g. it would be possible to call for an all-out strike with a hold on China, and all the participants knew what to do for that case.
But still, all the planning was done in advance. US nuclear war planning assumed that we'd be retaliating for a strike on us, and thus time was of the essence. Strategic Air Command had a goal of getting all of their strike bombers airborne within 15 minutes of a warning, and they could do it. There was, of course, no actual big red button, but conceptually it was pretty close. Ordering an attack would have been a matter of authenticating the order-giver, and saying, launch the pre-planned attack.
Edit: I should probably link to Wikipedia's treatment of said plan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_P...
It's also a little surprising, though believable, that there was only one dedicated emergency attack plan up to 1962.
1. Soviet nuclear missile sites, bomber airfields, and submarine tenders.
2. Other military sites away from cities, such as air defenses.
3. Military sites near cities.
4. Command-and-control centers.
5. Full-scale "spasm" attack.
So, sounds more or less as you describe. The first one apparently didn't have anything like that.
tl;dr - an excuse to talk about the history of "button as a metaphor"
edit - point being that, at least in this case, in 1983, it contradicts the claim in the article that these "systems aren't centralized", and "requires a lot more activity, spread out across a vast geographical area". I'm sure it's better in current times.
*edit - oh, I thought he had the power to launch himself - I guess it changes slightly if his job was only "to report" up the chain of command.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm...
Some years after the incident, Petrov told he believed that the system at his station was showing a false alarm and wanted to wait for a confirmation from other stations. He is cited with not wanting to sting a bee-hive.
After being introduced the information present at the other stations (most if not all were seeing the same false-alarm) he told the interviewer that if he would have had this "information" at the time of the incident he'd probably decided otherwise.
There must be a mountain of research into false positives of launches and more false positives than we know. After the fall of the USSR we found that that this happened practically regularly. I believe the Soviets saw the Able Archer exercises in 1983 as a potential attack and even detected missile launches. We also found out that Castro was ready to start nuclear war until his Soviet masters explained to him what that really means.
This is also why nuclear launch approval tends to be from the head of state only, instead of an automated process or via lower level delegates.
XO Vasily Arkhipov, who had also been XO on the infamous K-19, was the only officer to oppose launching the sub's nuclear payload, and since launch required positive agreement from the Captain, XO and political officer, Arkhipov literally stopped World War Three by himself.
There's a quote from The Last Sentry[1] regarding this:
"On major combatant vessels, the political officer was third in command, following the captain and his starpom (short for stariy pomoshnik, or senior assistant), who was the equivalent of an executive officer in the U.S. Navy. The zampolit was required to qualify as an underway watch officer like any other officer on the ship and so had to have some operational competence."
I'm pretty sure that training and working with the regular crew would weaken the dedication to "The Party" over time.
[1]: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pThlAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT15&o...
Well, a lot of us believed that there were only two possibilities for nuclear war: either no missiles got fired, or they all did -- either in an escalating pattern of strike and counterstrike, or in one big "let's knock them out before they get us" attack.
So I guess a "big red button" is as good a metaphor as any for the sort of on/off, all-or-nothing situation we were afraid of.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+cheating+scandal
Nice warm comforting thought.
Even better is how they solved cheating - they stopped giving them grades:
http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/334501037/to-stop-cheating-nuc...
Yes, those are the people in charge of nuclear weapons, how safe do you feel now?
The job required to fire a missile is somewhat prestigious but relatively simple - the command comes in, execute a pre-planned sequence of events that have been drilled into you by that point.
At that point it's no different from following the assembly steps for a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.. though with much greater consequences than a stomachache afterwards :)
Or are they just going to belittle the "enemy" in their minds like they are taught and then an hour later twice the number of nuclear warheads come crashing down on us from overseas in return.
Not their problem because they were "just obeying orders" and they are under a hardened site.
Kind of like how armed drone operators don't think about what they are are doing until months later when they get PTSD when they find out they killed innocent people
This has two pernicious effects. First, it leads the people in the silos to think to themselves: if none of this really matters, why not cheat? It's all theater anyway, right? Why put your career prospects at risk over something that's pure theater?
And second, it means that the best and the brightest Air Force servicemembers, the ones who want to wear stars on their shoulders someday, don't want to serve in the silos to begin with. Promotions in the military flow from service in real wars, not imaginary ones. So the people who end up in the silos are the ones who can't get stationed somewhere (anywhere!) else -- and that's exactly the type of person who's going to be tempted to cheat to get ahead in the first place.
The military is not interested in your morals, they are interested in your following the orders that you are given. Teamwork breaks down when people question orders, and timing matters during operations.
Yes, there are a small handful of cases throughout history where a lone solider disobeyed / questioned orders and came out ahead. I can't know for certain, but I'm willing to bet that many, many more soldiers who've done this either got their squadmates killed, lost their ass afterwards, or both.