Minuteman missile communications

https://computer.rip/2024-07-20-minuteman-missile-communications.html

by sklargh • 2 years ago

387 68 2 years ago

nirav72• 2 years ago

Interesting article. I have always been curious about how weapons systems like missiles communicate with command and control systems. Especially how the datalinks worked on cold war era systems. Not a lot of info out there. So this article was a good read.

tonetegeatinst• 2 years ago

Believe it or not, ITAR regulation.

https://isititar.com/

kejaed• 2 years ago

As someone who has this week been going through, in detail (is there any other way?), the American CCL and Canadian ECL, this is absolute gold. Thankfully the items in question are no longer on the USML…

RCitronsBroker• 2 years ago

this is the best thing I’ve seen today so far LOL

sandworm101• 2 years ago

Lol. It is because many of those old "cold war" systems are still in use today.

randall• 2 years ago

my dad was a pm for this stuff. i have no idea what he did as he retired by the time i was 8 (92) but this was his world.

anyone know anything else about this stuff? i’ve often considered trying to recreate his career path. (he died about 5 years ago.)

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Seek out roles at defense contractors related to work on the weapons systems in question.

M3L0NM4N• 2 years ago

I just started a software engineering job at Lockheed Martin a couple weeks ago working on communication systems. Not sure if I can say what though to be honest, and I’m going to err on the side of safety here. I’ll be working on F-22 communications in a few months when/if my program clearance comes through. Super cool so far though.

kelp• 2 years ago

I can't really help with what you're specifically looking for, but I'm pretty sure my grandfather worked on these as an engineer. He retired from Boeing in 1985. Died almost 20 years ago.

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

It's honestly not too hard to go down a similar path. Defense contractors are literally always hiring and most job apps will give you a decent idea of what you are working with so you can more or less pick your poison before you even join. Of course long term you'll get moved around but you can generally pick your site (which decides what you work on).

tamimio2• 2 years ago

Very good read, thanks for sharing it. Side note: All the pictures have the geolocation data embedded into them.

notarealllama• 2 years ago

A fellow exif fan I see

tamimio2• 2 years ago

It’s always nice to have a look at them!

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

There's actually a KML link buried in the text: https://computer.rip/f/minuteman/90th-mw.kmz

It will open directly in Google Earth and put you right on the scene in Armageddon, Wyoming, which appears to be roughly eighty miles south of Bumfark, Nowhere.

lazide2• 2 years ago

If ever there was a good place for Armageddon, it would be there.

GrantS2• 2 years ago

Coincidentally, I just toured the South Dakota minuteman launch control facility this week [1] and it was fascinating. The park ranger giving the tour was a veteran who manned the facility decades ago — amazing stories. You need to book tickets a few months in advance but well worth it if you’re in the area to visit Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, etc.

[1] Run by U.S. National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/mimi/

chromozonex• 2 years ago

Yep, I’d highly recommend this as well. We did this a year or two ago as well and it was wild how the underground facilities worked, how small they were, and how remote and nondescript they were. Highly recommend visiting these sites if you’re into history!

darknavi• 2 years ago

There is a Titan II missile silo you can tour an hour out of Tucson, AZ. Also well worth it.

https://www.nps.gov/places/titanmissilemuseum.htm

underbooter• 2 years ago

A few months in advance? I've gone to another SD site multiple times and you don't even need a ticket.

Onawa• 2 years ago

Literally one click away from link provided by OP: Delta-01 Tour Fee and Reservations Alert, Severity, information, Delta-01 Tour Fee and Reservations All Delta-01 Launch Control Facility Tours require advanced reservations. Reservations can be made up to 90 days in advance on-line or by phone at 605-717-7629. No SAME-DAY tours available during the summer season.

cbsks• 2 years ago

You can visit anytime without reservations. For the ranger guided tour, reservations are required.

firesteelrain• 2 years ago

Why do people seek to argue like this on this site? The guy isnt lying.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

amazing stories

Please share them!

GrantS2• 2 years ago

A few small things as I think of them:

-To practice for the moment of a real launch command, he would receive encoded messages every day that had to be manually decoded as quickly as possible — this decoding would be done independently by him and the second person on duty, and they would then compare to make sure they matched. In the case of a real launch, not only would the two people in the underground facility need to agree that the command was issued, but a second team in another facility would need to do the same.

-He was not allowed to know the targets of the missiles he would be launching, though these targets were fixed for each missile.

-It was almost assumed that if they were launching, they would have already been hit on the surface by a nuclear weapon (locations of the launch facilities were not secret, because they wouldn’t be a deterrent if they were secret). The two people underground are positioned in what looks like a shipping container suspended inside a submarine hull, all encased and locked behind one giant thick steel (?) door. If the elevator shaft had collapsed during an impact, they would be stuck inside to die. So they did include an escape hatch in the roof, but buried deep underground — this would involve the two men opening the escape hatch, letting a bunch of sand fall through, and then digging upward through 100-ish feet of ground over many days to get to a surface that was a wasteland. He was never really convinced that this would work, but the men had to believe that if they did their jobs, there would be some way to survive it.

amluto• 2 years ago

Various options including DSL over HICS cables and radio were considered, but the current plan is to trench new fiber-optic cables across the launch fields. They're less interesting, but fiber optic cables have both capacity and reliability advantages over telephone cables, and could easily remain in service for the life of the Sentinel program.

I was actually a bit surprised there was nothing about lightning and EMP suppression. I’m no expert on EMP effects, but multiple-mile-long cable loops underground seem like the kind of thing that would develop large induced currents in the presence of a varying magnetic field.

Nonconductive fiber optic cables are entirely immune to these effects. And they’re less expensive than copper!

jcrawfordor2• 2 years ago

Lightning protection in these types of cables is well understood, since the telephone system contended with the same problem. Fortunately EMP effects are mostly accounted for by lightning protection, when it comes to the outside plant. There are definitely lightning arrestors where cables enter facilities, but I would wager the facilities were built with halo grounds. There is integral EMP shielding in the design of the bunkers, as well, with a steel liner surrounding the concrete.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Lightning isn't the only phenomena of interest to ICBM silo ops which generates EMP.

skhr06802• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t they have already launched before suffering any ill effects from EMP?

ben_w5• 2 years ago

It only takes one nuke to make an EMP that can mess up most of the continental USA, that's something which could plausibly be done as a first strike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

Now I think about it, how is the international law banning nukes in space actually enforced? E.g. if Russia just put one on a satellite and didn't tell anyone, does anyone have any way to notice?

jcrawfordor2• 2 years ago

The main reason NEMP (nuclear EMP) became a big concern during the Cold War is its potential for use as a defensive weapon. For example, a large part of military EMP research was done with the specific aim of hardening strategic bombers, after it was realized that the USSR could use a single well-placed high-altitude NEMP to disable most of the SAC fleet as it passed over the north pole. Similarly, in most attack scenarios the USSR would almost certainly have made a high-altitude detonation over the ICBM fields one of their first moves.

I started off on a more detailed explanation of the timing issue, why we may not be able to launch before inbound weapons arrive, but it's kind of a complex topic that changed quite a bit over time. I might write something more in-depth about it later.

kens• 2 years ago

I'm researching the Minuteman II's computer, the Autonetics D-37B/C so I figured I'd put a note here in case there is anyone else looking at it.

twoodfin• 2 years ago

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the highly hn-relevant film WarGames kicks off with a launch order scene between a MCCC and a DMCCC that doesn’t depart wildly from the description here.

The rest of the film is pretty good, too!

Turn your key, sir!

wkat4242• 2 years ago

What about the fake house? Was that realistic? I've always wondered.

I can imagine shaping buildings like a house to fool satellites but the furnished living room looked a bit too much. I assume these bases were military territory with fences around them.

ben_w5• 2 years ago

Thinking of (possibly) fake building, was noodling around Google Maps looking for some interesting walks in my area, and found these surprisingly widely spaced groups of buildings:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/K5MMuAdLtZ63hL8Y8?g_st=com.google.ma...

Might well be totally mundane, but it sure seems odd to me with my complete lack of knowledge about civil engineering.

neilv2• 2 years ago

"Andromeda Strain" has a related filmmakers' conception of a secret/discreet government facility:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgDmJzaSd40&t=13s

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

I'm from northern Maine, where we use to have Loring Air Force Base. Back during the SAC days, it was one of the primary nuclear bases in the US. It even gets nuked in Wargames!

If you know the right people in town, you can get some fascinating information. At one time, supposedly most of the nuclear weapons in the US passed through Loring. There was a large field area that had bunkers dug into it that held nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. There were many more bunkers than weapons needing storage, so that you could rotate the munitions constantly so that the Ruskies would have to guess which bunker to nuke.

On top of this field full of bunkers was a bunch of buildings that looked very boring, and were supposedly made to look like "boring" military buildings.

One building was a large concrete cube. About 40 ft on all sides. It was supposed to represent something like a small schoolhouse. It was designed to contain the detonators for the bombs. It supposedly had 4ft thick reinforced concrete walls. It was supposed to be able to survive a near direct strike.

This all made a lot more sense back in the 60s when bombs were less accurate, smaller, and satellite intel was significantly more limited.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/rauEmMeHagTpVgGQA this is the location I describe above. If you look to the south-west of the runways, you can see a similar road layout where some base-housing used to be. The bunker area was meant to be hard to distinguish from those from a spyplane or early satellite.

justinator2• 2 years ago

Crazy that the communication system doesn't seem to be that much more advanced than tin cans and a string when compared to modern day. Guess the same can be said for the weapons themselves.

ocdtrekkie• 2 years ago

It is just a different set of requirements. They don't need to stream Netflix but they need to survive nuclear war. Simpler, lower bandwidth systems are much more "advanced" in this context, and much more repairable on-site.

justinator2• 2 years ago

Good points.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

http://www.airtalk.com/z_ref-4_1.html

For people like me that didn’t understand why the cables are pressurized.

stoperaticless• 2 years ago

Relevant quote:

This is the basic premise of cable pressurization: Keep the pressure within the cable in excess of the pressure that could be applied by standing water.

chiph2• 2 years ago

To keep groundwater out. it's common to use nitrogen, but the LCC would be hard to resupply with tanks[0], so (based on the photos) they used air that had been dried.

Story time: The airbase I was stationed at in Germany had been built by the French, prior to their partial departure from NATO[1]. There was a buried cable on base that went bad while I was there. It was pressurized but apparently the hole in the casing/jacket was large and admitted more water than could be kept out by the nitrogen. So the airmen of the outside plant had to use their TDR[2] to find the fault and dig it up to repair it. To their surprise it turned out to have paper insulation[3], as it was made before plastic began to be widely used in wiring. It also had swastikas printed on it - because the French had used captured Nazi war-surplus cable when they built the base in the late 1940's.

[0] It would be hard to maneuver large & heavy steel cylinders down the entrance, through the blast doors, and satisfy the security concerns of the LCC crew that they were legit. And then remove the empties afterwards back through all that. The cylinders can not be stored on the surface, for security reasons and because the buildings would no longer be present after an attack.

[1] https://shape.nato.int/page214871012

[2] Time-domain reflectometer. It's like radar for wiring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer

[3] The water soaked much of the paper for quite a distance in either direction of the hole. So they ended up replacing a rather long piece of cable instead of just putting in a splice junction. Lots of digging & cursing needed.

topspin• 2 years ago

Perhaps also to detect tampering? Sudden pressure drop will attract attention.

tshtf• 2 years ago

This video depicts a relatively modern Minuteman launch sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWZXinRwCaE

_joel• 2 years ago

Handy place if you get caught short, at least if there was a roll - https://computer.rip/f/minuteman/teleprinter.jpg

themadturk• 2 years ago

The link in the article to the Minuteman missile website [0] kept me busy for a couple of hours Saturday afternoon. Good stuff!

[0]https://minutemanmissile.com

Minuteman missile communications

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