Nuclear Bombs: Is it just me?

[rdfox]

But it's when I think about the things other than the bomb itself, things like how close they came to being used, that makes me nervous. Things like the fact that there were moments the leaders of the Cold War had the red button in front of them, codes in hand, a finger movement away from launch. Things like the US launch code, a number that can wipe out humanity, being 00000000 and common knowledge to the silo crews for decades. That's when nuclear weapons frighten me.

Not... technically correct. First off, in both the US and Soviet Union (and in Russia now), while only the head of state could authorize the release of nuclear weapons, even for him, the "two-man rule" remained in effect. For those who don't know, the "two-man rule" is one of the most basic safety precautions regarding nuclear weapons, and it's a very simple one: at no point will ANY one person be alone with a nuclear weapon, or in a position to be able to launch, release, or initiate one unilaterally. The most famous example of this is, of course, the ICBM crews that had two men in a launch bunker who had to separately give a launch command within something like a quarter-second of each other for their missiles to launch (and, if they made more than a certain number of attempts within a given span of time WITHOUT synchronizing, the control consoles would short themselves out to prevent an unauthorized launch), but this also extends to loading nuclear bombs onto aircraft, guarding nuclear weapons storage facilities, technicians working on the weapons... and the head of state being able to order their use. In the US, for example, only the President could authorize the release of nuclear weapons to military leaders (in MOST cases, this would result in an immediate launch order, but, for example, in a tense crisis, POTUS might authorize the release of a limited number of tactical weapons to a four-star theatre commander, so that he could use them for a quick response to an overwhelming surprise attack)... but then the Secretary of Defense would have to confirm the President's order before it could go into effect. (If SecDef was unavailable, the most senior available government official confirmed by the Senate could do so. However, this doesn't mean that POTUS could go down the line of succession until he found someone willing to go along--if even one of them refused to confirm the order, it's dead.) Since the whole point of the two-man rule is that it prevents a "Dr. Strangelove" situation where a single individual goes mad and unilaterally initiates use of nuclear weapons, it makes sense that it would have to apply all the way up to the President. (Possibly even MORE sense than with the military people who had custodianship of the weapons, since, unlike them, elected/appointed officials don't go through the psychological screening and reviews that the military requires of those who work with nukes...) The "two-man rule" even extends to such things as the physical design of the launch bunkers (the two men in the bunker must turn two separate keys, thirty feet apart, within a quarter-second of each other, to send a valid launch order, in an effort to make solo launches impossible--and in the 60s, the bunkers were redesigned after a bored missile crewman came up with a way to use shoestrings to turn both keys by himself and reported it to his superiors), and even to the bunkers themselves. In the days of Atlas and Titan, each silo had its own launch bunker, meaning that even if both men in a missile crew (or one man who got creative with the limited resources on hand) went mad and initiated an independent launch, there would be, at most, a single missile launched, which is a situation that could probably be salvaged Fail-Safe-style over the Hot Line, though likely only through the sacrifice of a similar American target. However, Minuteman saw such an expansion of the missile arsenal that it rendered single-silo launch control centers prohibitively expensive, in manpower if nothing else, so a new pattern was devised where each LCC had control over several dozen missiles. This raised the specter of a potential large-scale attack being initiated from a single insane missile crew, so instead of having a single LCC for each missile field, there would be three of them; any two of them could start a launch by BOTH issuing launch commands within a certain (short--the exact number isn't public, but it's believed to be less than five minutes) period of time, thereby extending the two-man rule to the LCCs themselves. Additionally, if a launch command is received from the "Looking Glass" airborne command post or a little-known system called the "Emergency Rocket Communications System," basically a Minuteman missile with powerful radios instead of warheads, which would transmit a launch command if ever fired, that command can count as a "vote" to launch, making it so that a single LCC could then fire the missiles, but the launch keys for Looking Glass are held by the four-star general (either the head of Strategic Command or his deputy) on duty on board the airplane and the second-highest ranking officer on board, while the ERCS (if it even still exists--I'm not sure it wasn't decommissioned after the end of the Cold War) can only be activated by launch keys held by a four-star general on duty at STRATCOM Headquarters at Offutt AFB, Nebraska, and his deputy, so even then, it requires the same two-man rule to activate them (and they have to send correct PAL codes, too--see below).

As for the "launch code" being 00000000, that's not right, either. See, not only is there no actual Red Button, but there's no single code that authorizes a launch. The way it works is this: IMMEDIATELY after taking the Oath of Office (usually between his Inaugural Address and his leaving Capitol Hill for the viewing stand for the Inaugural Parade), a general takes the new president into a secure room, where he hands him a card, one the size, shape, and material of a standard credit card, which has a large (20+) number of code groups on it; each code group is a pair of ten-digit codes, generated randomly. The new president is asked to select a code group from that card, memorize which one it is (there's various ways to help him remember included on the card) WITHOUT marking the card in any way to indicate which one it is, and then read the actual code group off to the general, who will transcribe it. Only the President has the card the code groups are on; the actual code group he selects becomes his code for verifying his identity when giving a nuclear release order. (The point of this is so that if the card is lost, it's unlikely that someone would guess which code is correct.) That's actually as close as we have to a "launch code" in the classical sense, in that it proves you're authorized to release nuclear weapons to military commanders.

The next thing that might be considered a "launch code" is the contents of an Emergency Action Message sent out to the nuclear forces to order a launch (that's what you hear being read over the loudspeakers in "The Day After" and at the start of "WarGames"), but that's simply an encrypted message that, when decoded, tells the forces which, if any, weapons are to be released, what their targets are, and what the Permissive Action Link code is. EAMs go out all the time; most of them are either practice alerts, practice (simulated) launch exercises, or even just routine status updates saying that it's now time to stop using January code book "J" and start using January code book "K", but they're all encrypted as practice for the crews.

The one that was actually set to "00000000" up until 1977 was the Permissive Action Link code. The PAL is a device integral to each nuclear weapon's firing circuits that has a single purpose--without the correct, current code inserted into it (usually via a control device next to the release switch), any attempt to initiate the weapon will, instead, result in the weapon destroying itself without any nuclear yield. (Early ones would set off the high-explosive implosion apparatus in "one-point-safe" mode, preventing the physics package from getting into a potentially supercritical configuration and instead basically pulverizing it; more recent ones have taken a bit less violent approach, and will instead simply pass so much current through the firing control circuitry that it instantly fries, thus rendering the weapon unable to fire until it has been returned to the factory for repairs.) As a side note, it was only weapons in the custodianship of the US Air Force that had their PALs set to all zeroes; Navy nukes always had fully active PALs on them. The Air Force believed it was likely that, in wartime, the PAL codes wouldn't be successfully received by the crews (either they would be garbled and unintelligible, they would be cut off in mid-transmission, or they'd simply never be sent), thus rendering the Air Force's nukes useless. Therefore, either Curtis LeMay or his successor, Thomas S. Power (a man even LeMay considered unstable), ordered that the PAL codes be permanently set to all zeroes and that ensuring that the control devices were so set was included in the launch checklists. When Jimmy Carter (who, despite his reputation for having dismantled the military, was actually highly concerned with our military readiness--he largely retired obsolete platforms that were of only marginal value any more and cancelled programs that were either going to fail or were no longer relevant following changes since their inception) found out about this during his highly detailed review of nuclear weapons protocols, he was FURIOUS, and issued an order as Commander-in-Chief of the US military requiring that the USAF's PALs be activated and put in compliance with their original purposes. Since POTUS outranks any general, despite resistance from SAC and the Air Force Chief of Staff, the order went into effect and the PALs have been active ever since. (Carter, despite being seen as a "failed" president due to his frankly being too nice and good a person to be effective in the office, did trigger a LOT of reforms regarding our nuclear deterrent force *and* the whole Continuity Of Government plan. Example: After the inaugural parade, he was being briefed on the military plans to be able to whisk him away from the White House at any time if we detected a Soviet missile launch, and when they said that they could have him on Air Force One or the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and taking off from Andrews AFB in under eight minutes at any time, he simply cut off the general and told him, "Good. Do it. Right now. Prove you can do it." The general tried, I'll give him that, but it took them almost fifteen minutes just to get the helicopter to the White House helipad, at which point Carter cancelled his order, pointing out that if it had been a real nuclear attack, Washington would have gotten hit about the time the helicopter got there to pick him up. His point made, he then ordered a revamp of the plans and a lot more practice at actually accomplishing the task...)

[Nuke]

tldr maybe with line breaks just no.

[lajoswinkler]

Wasn't there a recent scandal in USA with people working around nuclear missiles? Something about them cheating on tests... 34 of them IIRC.

The discovery was a side-effect of another investigation about drug usage among highly ranked army officials.

Just when you thought of them as being perfect, they do something like that. :rolleyes:

[peadar1987]

tldr maybe with line breaks just no.

Pity, it's actually well worth the read

[Nuke]

formatting is everything.

[Godot]

Pity, it's actually well worth the read

I agree ...

the wall of text initially kept me from reading it ...

but when I started, it was so interesting that I kept reading,

despite the scarcity of line breaks

[rdfox]

Sorry. I tend to write in paragraphs, not soundbites. I guess I'm of the generation that, y'know, had an attention span.

(It's not a simple topic, so you can't expect short, simple comments...)

[lajoswinkler]

Sorry. I tend to write in paragraphs, not soundbites. I guess I'm of the generation that, y'know, had an attention span.

(It's not a simple topic, so you can't expect short, simple comments...)

I belong to the same generation, but honestly, a line break here and there is simply much more pleasant. You don't have to chop everything down to small paragraphs. Line breaks are enough.

Anyway, it's an interesting piece of text.

[Nuke]

24 contiguous lines of text at 1080p is just impossible for me to read.

besides it looked like the transcript to some documentary ive seen 7 times.

[Woopert]

I don't like nuclear weapons at all, just the potential for what they can do is enough to say "no thanks."

I also feel bad for those doing the tests and the people with the cameras...they're awfully close by...

[Coldfinger008]

May i say that i want to die with a nuke strapped to my back?

[rpayne88]

I get a rush of adrenaline when i see one blow up. Don't worry about being nuked because it won't happen, and if it did, you wouldn't be able to do anything anyway.

IIRC from 10 grade AP World History, my teacher told me that tests were done in the 50's. Evidently, IIRC, if you were in a trench or behind a sharp decline in elevation, you would be fine. Evidently, one of the tests done had a bunch of soldiers positioned in trenches not too far from a nuclear detonation. Obviously, they were outside of the "fireball" created by the explosion. However, they were within the radius affected by the shock wave. Apparently, it rolled right over them, and other than mild exposure to radiation, they were fine.

We never saw any visuals when he talked about this, though, so I may be misinterpreting what he meant.

[rpayne88]

In the days of Atlas and Titan, each silo had its own launch bunker, meaning that even if both men in a missile crew (or one man who got creative with the limited resources on hand) went mad and initiated an independent launch, there would be, at most, a single missile launched, which is a situation that could probably be salvaged Fail-Safe-style over the Hot Line, though likely only through the sacrifice of a similar American target.

Or do it Call of Duty style and hit the big red button labeled "Abort," "Self Destruct," or "Explode."

[rdfox]

IIRC from 10 grade AP World History, my teacher told me that tests were done in the 50's. Evidently, IIRC, if you were in a trench or behind a sharp decline in elevation, you would be fine. Evidently, one of the tests done had a bunch of soldiers positioned in trenches not too far from a nuclear detonation. Obviously, they were outside of the "fireball" created by the explosion. However, they were within the radius affected by the shock wave. Apparently, it rolled right over them, and other than mild exposure to radiation, they were fine.

We never saw any visuals when he talked about this, though, so I may be misinterpreting what he meant.

Look up "Declassified Nuclear Test Film #55" on YouTube for one of the several such tests done.

Or do it Call of Duty style and hit the big red button labeled "Abort," "Self Destruct," or "Explode."

Operational ballistic missiles very deliberately do NOT have any form of abort/self-destruct/range safety package on board, simply because having one would make it possible for the enemy to work out a way to trigger it. Once launched, it's going to fly until it either suffers its own failure, is shot down, or reaches its target...

[dr_jt]

I live within 2 miles of a primary strike target so being afraid is not worth the emotional energy. I have better things to be afraid of. Like mimes. Yeah mimes are pretty frightening with their stupid striped shirts and silly little hats. Don't even get me going about the white face. The other thing that scares the crap out of me are "pretty ponies". When I was just a little guy my sister caused significant injury to my face with one because I said they were stupid and anyone that likes them is stupid. I still have nightmares about demon eyed ponies chewing my face off.