So, this is very much a situation where people who can explain the threats addressed by GBSD are unable to discuss.
It’s 450 missiles total.
:rolleyes:
The US did so with Pershing II TELs in Germany for many years and last I checked they avoided killing the population in the localities they were based in, despite massive anti nuke protests.
I’d like to see the assumptions they made in order to come up with that statement. AIUI, SLBMs and ICBMs travel at roughly the same speed when they reach terminal velocity. They take roughly the same amount of time to reach that velocity. Further, SLBMs would be launched closer to their targets than ICBMs, enough so that time of flight should be anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes less.
So, for SLBMs and ICBMs to arrive on target at essentially the same time, the SLBM process for issuing, authenticating, and acting upon a valid launch order, is about 10-20 minutes slower than for the land based force?
Or is 10-20 minutes or less, not ‘operationally meaningfully different?’
Communication links are slower. You have to use very low data rates to reach a submarine. Measured in characters per minute for extreme low frequency. This means a launch order transmission would take on the order of 10 minutes to an hour.
Probably the war plan is to signal the submarine to ascend to just below the surface, where it would use a faster link like VLF or a 2 way satellite connection.
Still this adds minutes at a minimum.
Presumably, to contact your subs, you need VLF/ULF communications - could an enemy successfully knock all those out in a first strike so you cannot use subs as retaliation? (Assuming you didn’t give your subs any ‘Letters of Last Resort’ beforehand)
Eventually, the subs are going to find out what has happened, and get word from whoever is left in the US to nuke the bastards (or just decide to do it themselves). There are something like 7 SSBNs on deterrent patrol at any given time, scattered around the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Even if a country could knock out all VLF comms with submarines, there isn’t a navy in the world (aside from maybe our own) I’d give a snowball’s chance in hell of sinking all those subs before they figure out what’s happened and rain nuclear fire down on the perpetrators.
I thought with US subs a secret code is needed that is not physically on the submarine. This is needed for the warheads to arm.
The PAL code.
Don’t know about the PALs, but I read a nonfiction book (Trident, a 1990s volume about Ohio-class subs) that stated that virtually every safeguard on a submarine can be circumvented if a submarine crew is truly determined to go rogue. They can do a manual hack-around of just about everything they need in order to launch nukes on their own. But in order to do so, a great many submariners have to all cooperate and work together to make it physically work/happen, and many would dissent (and there is an encouraged ballistic-missile submariner culture of independent thought and questioning the orders, such that a rogue commander or officer couldn’t easily get his crew to mutiny together against the higher-ups in Washington this way.)
Perhaps **iiandyiiii **or **robby **or our other Doper submariners can comment on this.
What I read is the PAL system is in the payload themselves. It’s done with embedded microcontrollers that are supposed to brick themselves if tampering is detected. And the warhead is designed to require an exact timing sequence of steps to detonate with full yield. So if the microcontroller doesn’t cooperate - and won’t without the correct code - and the submarine crew are not nuclear weapons designers - it can’t be made to go off. (At least not with design yield. )
Allegedly for years, the PAL code was all zeroes for exactly the fear you are talking about. There must be a finite number of copies of the codes.
My source is the book Damascus Incident.
A missile launch without armed warheads, well. Might still start ww3. Easily.
As for PAL codes - we can speculate about how many copies exist. Probably the “football” held near the President has an actual complete copy. (Meaning if the president were directly in contact with a submarine or missile crew, with everyone else out of contact, all the information needed to arm the nukes is in there)
Probably there is one somewhere in the Pentagon. Cheyenne mountain. Other lesser known government bunkers. Aboard the airborne command aircraft - think there are several of those.
Anyways if the Russians could line up a set of simultaneous surprise nuclear attacks on all copies of the codes - and while we might not know where they are, probably at least a hundred people in government do - they would in theory win ww3 since no deployed US nukes would go off. Since the codes get changed periodically there must be written documents that explain how to do it and listing all these details. And people that know. People who Anna Chapman’s hot younger cousin could potentially get access to and pump for information…
This thread is drifting towards PAL, Command and Control, etc. Just a quick pitch for the Eric Schlosser book Command and Control. It is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read, period. He interleaves a very in-depth account of the Damascus incident in Arkansas with the history of nuclear weapons with a focus on the Command and Control systems, and the virtual war between the government (wanting better command and control systems) and the military (wanting the ability to use nukes as quickly as possible).
The Dead Hand is an excellent book that takes a broader look at weapons of mass destruction (bio, chemical as well as nuclear). Well researched, well written.
I also follow Alex Wellerstein who is a professor of military / nuclear secrets. His blog is good but he seems to spend most of his writing time answering questions and writing on reddit (/u/restricteddata).
It’s a fascinating and truly frightening topic.
Yes. The biggest problem that is revealed in Command and Control is that with no actual accountability, the military can claim one thing while the reality is very different. As long as something can be hidden under a security classification (and, yes, obviously the nuclear secrets are justified in being classified) it’s possible for outright lies to be propagated.
Are all U.S. nuclear warheads actually one-point safe? Are all of them installed with properly configured and verified secure PAL systems? Are they stored in bunkers and other secure storage with access controls where ordinance crews can’t accidentally load live nukes instead of training munitions? (we know that isn’t true) Is the command and control network actually properly air gaped from open networks in a way that minimizes the risk of hacking?
We know from the Thule Patrol mentioned in C&C that the actual way it was done was shockingly crude, for decades. It was just analog voice radio, where B52s would fly around the Thule airbase and see that it was not yet nuked. That was it.
Thule gets nuked = it’s on, bomb the Soviet union and kill everybody.
That was the plan. Someone tells you over the radio they saw Thule get nuked? It’s on. (and hopefully you ask them for the correct codes)
Most of the world’s civilization is/was truly being held hostage, where the only thing keeping us alive is a combination of fear and luck.
Wellerstein is the guy who came up with NUKEMAP, IIRC. His blog is a great read, as you note.
As good as the text of Schlosser’s book is, the bibliography is at least as impressive. Worth getting just for that, IMO.
George Washington University has a large depository of national security and nuclear weapons related documents available online. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/
Finally, I recommend following the various contributors to the Arms Control Wonk pages. Very informative—especially in the comments sections—on the nuts and bolts of WMD deployment, strategy, and nonproliferation issues. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/ They are more active on their respective twitter feeds than at their blog, FWIW.
EDIT: For a discussion on PAL development and history, this New Yorker article by Schlosser goes into some detail. Primary Sources: Permissive Action Links and the Threat of Nuclear War | The New Yorker Probably duplicative with his book, but much shorter to read.
If you want the latest guidance from the US Government’s own mouth on the subject of nuclear surety, here’s a link to a paper on the subject: https://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nmhb/chapters/chapter_7.htm
It’s been a while since I read C&C so I had forgotten about the Thule Patrol. Time for another re-read. And some sleepless nights. Thanks SamuelA!
You are thinking of the right guy! Nukemap still lives and is just fascinating. I live a couple of miles from USSTRATCOM headquarters. Nukemap is pretty bleak for me. 
I’ve not spent time with the C&C bibliography but it looks like I need to. And your other sources are just great. It’s time to jump down this rabbit hole. Thanks!
You want another thing to lose sleep over?
In the early B-52s, what did you have to do to arm a nuke and drop it?
Here’s the steps:
a. Turn the selector switch from “safe” to “airburst” or “groundburst”
b. (optional) press the control to open the bomb bay doors
c. Press the bomb release button
That was it. Nothing else was required. And, twice, inadvertently someone in the bomb bay hit the manual release lever, which was apparently located in the bomb bay near the door and was easy to grab by accident. If the nuke was armed, that was it. No, the doors did not have to be opened, the nuke was so heavy it would fall down and the doors would fail letting the weapon fall free.
“Easy”, you say, “don’t touch that dial”. Except for how early 1950s electronics worked. All that would happen when you rotated the dial is it would send +aircraft_bus_DC down wires through the plane, through a harness, into the weapon. It was possible for chafing in the wiring to short a hot wire to one of the arming wires somewhere in the circuit and arm the weapon. This happened more than once.
They later “fixed” this problem by adding a second dial to the cockpit, a “peace/war” dial. And it may have had a timing circuit and interlocking relays so you couldn’t just have one person turn both dials, not sure. Same fundamental problem with the wiring, however.
I’m not a very religious person but the sheer number of near catastrophes like those you mentioned where humans have gotten very, very lucky makes me want to believe in some kind of higher power. And those are just the issues that we know about.
How much longer will that “luck” hold?
To be fair, with nukes of that era, some of these risks were known. For this reason, there was a mechanical device that pulled a key part of the weapon’s core out of the nuke so it couldn’t go off. On takeoff and landing of the B52, it would be in this safe state. And during flight, most of the flight was over remote areas. So the catastrophe wouldn’t be all that severe - a few thousand people killed by the mushroom cloud in most cases.