Trump subthread: Awful Command and Control of ICBMs

[Strelnikov]

This has been a problem with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from the start, the fear of false positives that the US was under Soviet "first strike" missile attack, either from technical malfunction or human error. I have made this thread a subthread of the Trump thread because the possibility of accidental nuclear war has increased under his "leadership."

"World War Three, by Mistake", Eric Schlosser, The New Yorker

Eric Schlosser wrote Command and Control, a book and later documentary on the history of US nuclear weapons and the endless accidents that happened during the Cold War. In the above article he discusses the problems of the US Air Force's Minuteman III fleet.

"...My book “Command and Control” explores how the systems devised to govern the use of nuclear weapons, like all complex technological systems, are inherently flawed. They are designed, built, installed, maintained, and operated by human beings. But the failure of a nuclear command-and-control system can have consequences far more serious than the crash of an online dating site from too much traffic or flight delays caused by a software glitch. Millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, could be annihilated inadvertently. “Command and Control” focusses on near-catastrophic errors and accidents in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that ended in 1991. The danger never went away. Today, the odds of a nuclear war being started by mistake are low—and yet the risk is growing, as the United States and Russia drift toward a new cold war.....

...Today, the United States has four hundred and forty Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, sitting in underground silos scattered across the plains of Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. The missiles are kept on alert, at all times, ready to take off within two minutes, as a means of escaping a surprise attack. Each missile carries a nuclear warhead that may be as much as thirty times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The Minuteman III was first deployed in 1970 and scheduled for retirement in the early nineteen-eighties. The age of the weapon system is beginning to show. Most of the launch complexes were built during the Kennedy Administration, to house an earlier version of the Minuteman, and some of the complexes are prone to flooding. The command centers feel like a time capsule of late-twentieth-century technology. During a recent visit to a decommissioned Minuteman site, I was curious to see the big computer still used to receive Emergency Action Messages—launch orders from the President—via landline. The computer is an I.B.M. Series/1, a state-of-the-art machine in 1976, when it was introduced. “Replacement parts for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete,” a report by the Government Accountability Office said last May, with some understatement, about a computer that relies on eight-inch floppy disks. You can buy a smartphone with about a thousand times the memory.....

....The Minuteman III is a relic of the Cold War not only in design but also in its strategic purpose. The locations of the silos, chosen more than half a century ago, make the missile useful only for striking targets inside Russia. The silos aren’t hardened enough to survive a nuclear detonation, and their coördinates are well known, so the Minuteman III is extremely vulnerable to attack. The President would be under great pressure, at the outset of a war with Russia, to “use them or lose them.” The missiles now have two principal roles in America’s nuclear-war plans: they can be launched as part of a first strike, or they can be launched when early-warning satellites have determined that Russian warheads are heading toward the United States. After being launched, a Minuteman III cannot be remotely disabled, disarmed, or called back. From the very beginning of the Minuteman program, the Air Force has successfully fought against adding a command-destruct mechanism, fearing that an adversary might somehow gain control of it and destroy all the missiles mid-flight. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone,” an Air Force officer told “60 Minutes” a few years ago.....

.....The dangers of “launch-on-warning” have been recognized since the idea was first proposed, during the Eisenhower Administration. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara advised Kennedy that the United States should never use its nuclear weapons until a nuclear detonation had occurred on American soil, and could be attributed to an enemy attack. The first Minuteman missiles had already become a great source of stress for McNamara. The control system of the original model had a design flaw: small fluctuations in the electricity entering the command center could mimic the series of pulses required by the launch switch. An entire squadron of fifty missiles might be launched accidentally without anyone turning a key. “I was scared shitless,” an engineer who worked on the system later confessed. “The technology was not to be trusted.” McNamara insisted that the control system be redesigned, at great expense. The destruction of fifty Soviet cities because of a mechanical glitch, a classified history of the Minuteman program later noted, would be “an accident for which a later apology might be inadequate.” "

***

Rolling Stone printed an article in 2015 on what it's like to work in the missile silos years after the Cold War ended, "Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?" They spoke to ex-Captain Blake Sellers, who had spent two and a half years in a command capsule with another USAF officer waiting for a "go code" that never came.

"....Sellers, a burly, dark-haired and affable video-game nut, is third-generation military, on both sides of his family. One grandfather can be seen in an iconic photograph of Eisenhower in Europe during the Second World War. His mother's father was a chaplain in Korea. His father served in Vietnam. Sellers grew up in Florida, near the Navy Seal Museum, watching Cape Canaveral rocket launches in real time from his backyard and binge-watching Top Gun. Like most missileers, he did not feel called to the job of pulling crew duty in an underground capsule, babysitting 50 ICBMs for 24 hours at a time. The Air Force chose that duty for him, just months before he graduated from the Academy, because a shellfish allergy disqualified him from a career as a pilot. He sucked it up. "The Air Force perspective is you should be so jazzed about serving your country you should not care where we put you," he says. "If I complained, they would have thought I was a spoiled baby."

The Missile Alert Facilities aboveground look like any other prefab family home, with the exception of the barbed wire and radio towers outside. But inside, they are not exactly homey. They have kitchens and lounges, but they also have shelves of grenades and assault rifles, and each one houses an elevator shaft leading to the capsule. Over the course of a four-year tour, officers pull about 225 alerts down below— night and day, winter and summer, and always at the edge of the End of the World.

After two years at F.E. Warren [Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming], Sellers could complete a launch exercise in less than a minute, between scenes of Mad Men or bites of a burger. Once missileers learn their checklists by rote, many of them have hours of idle time on their hands. Some binge-watch TV, or read; a few study for advanced degrees. Inside the capsules, little has changed since the Cold War, from the constant vibration and foot odor to the eight-inch floppy disks in the consoles. "It's absolutely all the same whether it's Christmas Day or the Fourth of July," Sellers says. "You are in a constant state of jet lag. You are up at 1 a.m. under fluorescent lights. After a year and a half I was never fully awake or fully asleep. You reach this zombie state."

Sleep deprivation is known to induce hallucinations and impair judgment. The CO2 levels in the silos don't always meet OSHA standards either. The combined effect may make missileers groggy and even impulsive and aggressive. The Air Force has revealed that two missileers once stayed in a malfunctioning capsule breathing noxious fumes for hours, rather than ask their leadership for help, and were hospitalized. Crew partners are paired for at least eight months at a stretch. Privacy is obviously limited in a 170-square-foot capsule behind four-foot-thick walls, so teams get to know one another extremely well. And what happens in the capsule stays in the capsule. "The trust between members of a good crew is near-unbreakable," one missileer says. "Eating, sleeping and working in such intimate quarters for months together builds an incredibly strong relationship."

....Sellers quickly saw that morale at Warren had bottomed out. Eventually, the adrenaline rush is long gone, and the prospect of another three years of sleepless nights following checklists out on the American tundra feels like a prison term. That might explain why a disproportionate number of nuclear commanders and missileers have recently been charged with criminal acts.

The end of the Cold War and the advent of the hot War on Terror has meant less attention and less prestige on the job at ICBM bases. The fallout has been unusually high rates of criminality, domestic violence and security lapses. Currently, four court-martials — for drug use, rape, assault, sexual assault on an unconscious person and larceny — are underway at Minot. At Malmstrom, two missileers are being court-martialed for using and selling bath salts — a synthetic substance that can render users psychotic. And at Warren, three airmen have recently been or are due to be court-martialed for drunk driving, using and selling pot and "indecent filming of the private area of another person without consent." "

***

That article also mentions Schlosser's book and lists some of the accidents that have happened:

"....A hydrogen bomb fell out of a plane in 1958 and leveled a South Carolina home without detonating. Another bomb accidentally parachuted towards Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961, but failed to activate. A warhead shot into the air in Arkansas in 1980, after its silo exploded; it traveled 100 feet but didn't detonate. As recently as 2007, workers at Minot AFB in North Dakota accidentally loaded six nuclear-tipped missiles on a plane that crossed the continent to a base in Louisiana — the error was discovered only after the plane landed. On October 23rd, 2010, 50 missiles in the fields around Warren went "offline" for nearly an hour. The Air Force blamed the incident on a circuit glitch."

[ericbarbour]

Eric Schlosser wrote Command and Control, a book and later documentary on the history of US nuclear weapons and the endless accidents that happened during the Cold War.

I recently read this--highly recommended. The USAF did something incredibly stupid, they fielded the Titan II as an "interdiction launch-on-warning ICBM" which required quick launch turnaround. It was an early liquid-fuel missile using "hypergolic" fuel and oxidizer which are toxic and evil as hell. Most of the book goes into an accident in a Titan silo in 1980 where a minor error (dropping a wrench socket) turned into a fatal explosion. People had to die before the Air Force learned its "lesson" (ha ha) and replaced them with more reliable and "safer" (ha ha ha ha) solid-fuel Minuteman missiles. We are still living with the institutional paranoias of the 1950s.

The computer is an I.B.M. Series/1, a state-of-the-art machine in 1976, when it was introduced.

And don't start me about IBM mainframes. They still make 'em, although the new ones are physically tiny compared to the System/360 and 370 machines they are based on. (IBM deliberately puts them in oversized cabinets with big weights in the bottom, to make them seem more "substantial".) And the new ones STILL RUN THE ARCHAIC SOFTWARE that ran on the 360/370s. This is because their corporate and government customers keep demanding it. The Series/1 was just an ordinary minicomputer of the time, meaning notorious for developing hard-to-find faults in its TTL circuitry.

Uncle Sam is an idiot --- he keeps letting out massive IT contracts that require hardware that runs their old software. This, plus the major banks, are reasons why COBOL is still being used.

Another thing not mentioned here: the Minuteman missiles use inertial-guidance systems only. No GPS or other external location monitors. "The Commies might be able to fool them." So they are not as "accurate" as the USAF claimed at first. And being 40+ years old has probably not improved the accuracy. Not that it much matters....

[Strelnikov]

Eric Schlosser wrote Command and Control, a book and later documentary on the history of US nuclear weapons and the endless accidents that happened during the Cold War.

I recently read this--highly recommended. The USAF did something incredibly stupid, they fielded the Titan II as an "interdiction launch-on-warning ICBM" which required quick launch turnaround. It was an early liquid-fuel missile using "hypergolic" fuel and oxidizer which are toxic and evil as hell. Most of the book goes into an accident in a Titan silo in 1980 where a minor error (dropping a wrench socket) turned into a fatal explosion. People had to die before the Air Force learned its "lesson" (ha ha) and replaced them with more reliable and "safer" (ha ha ha ha) solid-fuel Minuteman missiles. We are still living with the institutional paranoias of the 1950s.

The computer is an I.B.M. Series/1, a state-of-the-art machine in 1976, when it was introduced.

<snip>

Uncle Sam is an idiot --- he keeps letting out massive IT contracts that require hardware that runs their old software. This, plus the major banks, are reasons why COBOL is still being used.

<snip>

Another thing not mentioned here: the Minuteman missiles use inertial-guidance systems only. No GPS or other external location monitors. "The Commies might be able to fool them." So they are not as "accurate" as the USAF claimed at first. And being 40+ years old has probably not improved the accuracy. Not that it much matters....

Which means they cannot be re-aimed at China, or North Korea, or wherever; the launch areas were chosen for their parabolas at hitting Moscow, Leningrad (St. Pete's), the tank factory in Gorki (Nizh'ni Novgorod), the Murmansk sub base, and so on. And I would not be surprised if targets would be missed by miles on a good day, but God help you if the weights shift the wrong way shortly after launch and the missile falls short into the ocean, or nukes Canada, or wipes out central France. We would be better off giving up on the land-based ICBM; cruise missiles and SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) are enough "strategic" nukes for anybody, because it should never be forgotten that we still have thousands of tactical nuclear bombs.

....And don't start me about IBM mainframes. They still make 'em, although the new ones are physically tiny compared to the System/360 and 370 machines they are based on. (IBM deliberately puts them in oversized cabinets with big weights in the bottom, to make them seem more "substantial".) And the new ones STILL RUN THE ARCHAIC SOFTWARE that ran on the 360/370s. This is because their corporate and government customers keep demanding it. The Series/1 was just an ordinary minicomputer of the time, meaning notorious for developing hard-to-find faults in its TTL circuitry.

It's idiotic, but they might want it this way to keep the information that want processed hard to get to through the internet, assuming these machines are hooked up to anything greater than a complicated LAN. Consistency counts for some people above improving the software rationally, and there's a market for those types in industry.

[ericbarbour]

Resurrecting the thread because of this article, which is funny as hell to me:

https://increment.com/programming-langu ... -way-down/

Companies involved in keeping COBOL-based systems working say that 95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems. “Our COBOL business is bigger than it has ever been,” said Chris Livesey, senior vice president and general manager at Micro Focus, a company that offers modern COBOL coding and development frameworks.

Show this to a computer-science professor, and watch his or her head explode.....