At least it wasn’t Russian hackers.
The Air Force swears there was no panic. But for three-quarters of an hour Saturday morning, launch control officers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming couldn’t reliably communicate or monitor the status of 50 Minuteman III nuclear missiles. Gulp.
Backup security and communications systems, located elsewhere on the base, allowed the intercontinental ballistic missiles to be continually monitored. But the outage is considered serious enough that the very highest rungs on the chain of command — including the President — are being briefed on the incident today.
A single hardware failure appears to have been the root cause of the disruption, which snarled communications on the network that links the five launch control centers and 50 silos of the 319th Missile Squadron. Multiple error codes were reported, including “launch facility down.”
It was a “significant disruption of service,” an Air Force official familiar with the incident tells Danger Room. But not unprecedented: “Something similar happened before at other missile fields.”
Not unprecedented. Huh. That’s comforting.
We haven’t used them in 50 years so a 45-minute glitch is no big deal, IMO.
Probably a bad vacuum tube.
That’s why the US maintains the nuclear triad of silos, bombers and subs.
It’s Obama’s fault.
I’m a little ho hum about this. I think the subs are the major nuclear force these days. It’s not like we’re on the precipice of a nuke exchange with France! Failure in such complicated (and aging) systems is to be expected. I just hope they learn from it. Besides, has Obama found the codes, yet?
@Animby,
How do you know that President Obama doesn’t secretly have it in for the French?!?
i bet it runs windows..
Wow, a single point of failure. Dallas, it could have been a missing Windows service pack. You can just imagine the briefing to Obama this morning, “well Mr. President, they turned off the auto update feature because it interrupted the Solitaire games.” “Then the anti-virus started up and everything just slowed to a stop.” “Not to mention the hard drive was full due to all of the pr0n downloads.”
#6 ethanol – because he’s too busy hating the Brits. And, as the old saying goes: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Fortunately we didn’t need to wipe out another civilisation just before they wiped us out during those 45 minutes.
#8 Positive it was a timer setting off to fail a circuit the day after the warranty expired. Service call to reset the timer is $11.7M bucks.
Republican picked defense contractors have those timers in pretty much everything. Those Repug senators aren’t cheap.
So this did this comm failure prevent the missiles from being launched if needed? Or is the concern that a comm failure might accidentally launch?
If it the later, then that is a huge concern. If the prior, then not so much.
Communications failure; nothing happens.
This photo looking like it was farmed from the movie “Wargames”. Which gave the erroneous info the missile could be launched by a single crew capsule. It actually takes two crewed capsules. So either one can be drilled, as if it were the “real deal”, not knowing it wasn’t, and not really launch any missiles. So nobody ever gets cold feet about “turning the key”.
But that’s not why two crews are used, or why humans are “in the loop”. It’s all about using the best possible security method to prevent accidental or unauthorized missile launches. So even a loss of communication, posses no serious problem of safety or security. The missile range was simply unreachable for a short time. They probably played cards or read a book. Or check for faults at their end. I’m sure they take a break, during their shifts. This was just an unplanned 45 minute break. The repair techs were likely humping it, to restore the link.
I’m always reminded of the Tv series “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and their use of the plot device they called “Fail Safe”, which controlled the launch of the sub’s nuclear missiles. But they often contradict the definition of what Fail Safe meant. It’s not that the system can never fail. It designed to fail, safely. That is, if and when it fails, it doesn’t result in any missiles launching. This might make them useless at a crucial time. But it’s reasoned that’s better than than having them triggered off anytime accidentally. Which would be a “Fail Unsafe” system. And we can only assume that the other side employs something similar. So relax.