The button that isn’t

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/12/15/button-isnt/

by danso • 12 years ago

120 62 12 years ago

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

binarymax• 12 years ago

I am reminded of the opening scene in War Games, when the two officers both need to perform a specific series of actions together to launch the missile. It gave an excellent perspective on not only what was probably the actual process, but the ethical dilemma of one of the officers.

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.

CapitalistCartr5• 12 years ago

Funny you mention Wargames. That scene was probably the only realistic scene in the movie. They got that suspiciously good. The one before it, where he arrives at the LCF and it's a disguised farmhouse was idiotic.

throwaway_xl5• 12 years ago

In England we have defense facilities disguised as farmhouses. We don't have land-based missiles but this [0] is/was a government bunker from which launch orders could be given. I wondered if you meant idiotic in the sense of unrealistic for America, or as a bad idea tactically?

[0]http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/

maaku3• 12 years ago

Why is the farmhouse disguise idiotic? I'm pretty sure that sort of thing actually happened -- to disguise the location from satellite surveillance, of course.

mynameishere• 12 years ago

suspiciously good

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPEBROvR9w

colechristensen• 12 years ago

Did anyone ever actually believe that there was a fire-all-ze-missiles button? Even without specific knowledge, a reasonable person must realize that such things have to consist of complicated logistics and multiple levels of redundant failsafes both human and machine.

edmccard• 12 years ago

Did anyone ever actually believe that there was a fire-all-ze-missiles button?

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.

smacktoward2• 12 years ago

A strategy that nuclear strategist Herman Kahn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn) memorably described as a "wargasm."

platz• 12 years ago

I thought there was some russian commander who avoided a direct command to launch missles, and it turned out the command to launch was a mistake made by some other russian entity relying on faulty data. Seems as close to a "button" scenario as one could've had.

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.

pacey2• 12 years ago

IIRC in the past, there were multiple occassions in which a "button" being pressed in error might have started nuclear war. But I think the guy you are talking about is Stanislav Petrov[1] who is known for preventing nuclear war in 1983[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm...

gizmo686• 12 years ago

Its not entirely clear that Petrov prevented a nuclear war. His job (which he choose not to do) was to report detected missiles up the chain of command. In theory, the Soviet Union policy was to require multiple-source warnings before retaliating, in which case they still would not have launched anything. In practice, they very well might neglected to follow this procedure and proceed to retaliate.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

That's the Petrov story, which has legs, but doesn't seem very important to me. Essentially, he was using some new equipment and saw 5 incoming missiles. He decided against acting upon that information as he saw it, rightfully, as a bug. He may have gotten into some trouble with his superiors, but I imagine that has a lot more to do with the face-saving bureaucracy of the USSR than a readiness to launch with such limited information.

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.

HillRat2• 12 years ago

There was also the B-59 incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis[1], when a Soviet sub -- its officers exhausted, out of contact with Moscow, and uncertain if war had broken out -- almost launched a nuclear torpedo against US forces.

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.

[1](http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/)

Terr_• 12 years ago

I wonder, are there any stories where the "Political Officer" is actually the hero rather than the villain?

mkrdouble• 12 years ago

If you're into this kind of thing, then I cannot recommend the group blog, "Arms Control Wonk" enough!

http://armscontrolwonk.com/

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.

captainmuon• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a large particle physics experiment I worked on. One of the detectors had a critical flaw, IIRC the output voltage of the detector modules was proportional to the number of particles passing through it. At every readout, it was reset to 0. Now, if you didn't read out the modules often enough (every few seconds), they would fry themselves. The problem wasn't noticed until the readout system crashed and a couple of modules were destroyed.

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 :-).

antognini• 12 years ago

Interesting. I've observed at a number of telescopes and they all have a big red STOP button that will shut down the telescope immediately. I've only had to use it once. The telescope was poorly designed and it was possible to run it into its hard limit (you could basically run it into the ground). If you do that you have to stop it because the tracking motors will continue to try to drive the telescope into the ground.

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.)

madaxe_again• 12 years ago

The soviet setup for launch control is similar to the US - decentralised, manual actions all over the place to make it happen.

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.

Phlarp5• 12 years ago

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.

mikeash6• 12 years ago

According to this article, the all-zeroes code was on the Permissive Action Links, which are the locks on the bombs themselves:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org...

maaku3• 12 years ago

Either way-- laughable security for the military's crown jewels.

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.

fubarred2• 12 years ago

Another interesting bit: "Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don't Mix"

   If fired, they would have missed their destination by thousands of miles.

http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol2_1/tpj0201-0004.html

Note: a maths user error, not a "Perl sucks" rant.

ufmace2• 12 years ago

The linked blog usually has great in-depth content, but I think this one could be TLDR'ed as "No, for obvious reasons, there isn't actually a big red button that launches a mass nuclear strike. There's a massive infrastructure devoted to making sure they can be launched when they're needed, but won't ever be launched accidentally."

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.

mikeash6• 12 years ago

Note that until 1962, there was a single nuclear attack plan that was to be followed in the event of all-out war, with no variations available. That meant that, for example, China would get a full nuclear strike no matter what the political situation was at the time, and if China had declared neutrality, the only options were to bomb the crap out of them regardless, or come up with a completely new plan on the fly, which was just about impossible.

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...

ufmace2• 12 years ago

Thanks, that's actually some interesting info. I was under the impression that the SIOP was a list of pre-planned strike patterns/plans, and whoever had the authority to order a strike would select one based on the political circumstances. Is that not the case?

It's also a little surprising, though believable, that there was only one dedicated emergency attack plan up to 1962.

sophacles• 12 years ago

That tl;dr is sort of wrong though - it's better tl;dr-ed as:

tl;dr - an excuse to talk about the history of "button as a metaphor"

ck22• 12 years ago

There is also rampant cheating by the people being trained to be in charge of nuclear weapons, both air force and navy:

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?

Karunamon• 12 years ago

Unchanged.

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 :)

ck22• 12 years ago

If they don't have the morals not to cheat in the MILITARY, what makes you think they are trustworthy to consider the consequences of pushing the button on a nuclear missile?

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

shawabawa3• 12 years ago

Why did the title get changed? It used to be the article title "The button that isn’t"

nabla9• 12 years ago

Another misconception is that it's impossible to launch nukes without nuclear launch codes U.S president carries with him.

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.

felipesabino• 12 years ago

Am I the only one that immediately remembered radiolab's Buttons Not Buttons episode [1] ? They had a nice bit about the "cut the heart out" part and how it contrasts with how easy it is today to start a nuclear attack

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/buttons-not-buttons/

coldpie• 12 years ago

It's mentioned in like the third paragraph of the article...

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Nukes or nurse?

http://500daysasunder.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/screen-sho...

grimman• 12 years ago

Where's this from?

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Land of confusion by Genesis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pkVLqSaahk

fubarred2• 12 years ago

Meta: automate things that are frequent, not things that are risky; hence: no WOMPR, Wing Attack Plan R or "Big Red Button."

The button that isn’t

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