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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Notes from the No Lone Zone: A computer scientist looks at ICBM security. |
| 2009-12-17 |
| Interesting and sobering article about our nuclear defenses and the folks who are stationed at these bases. Much more at link. If you can climb a fifteen foot ladder and fit through a two foot diameter hole, you can, with a bit of advance planning, take an extensive "top-to-bottom" tour of a Titan II ICBM launch complex, complete with missile silo and missile. Best of all, you no longer have to trespass or join the Air Force to do it. And so I just returned from Sahuarita, AZ and the Titan Missile Museum, a place known during most of the cold war as SMS Launch Site 571-7. I spent the better part of the day beneath the surface of the earth, part of a group of six hardy nuclear tourists under the direction of Lt. Col. Chuck Smith (USAF, retired, a former "missileer" at the site), exploring the nuts, bolts and welds of Armageddon. At the peak of the cold war, there were over 1,000 nuclear missiles in buried silos located throughout sparsely populated areas of the continental United States, all fueled and ready to be launched toward the Soviet Union on a few minutes notice. From 1963 through 1984, this included 54 Titan II missiles at sites in Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas, each equipped with a W-53 warhead capable of delivering a nine megaton thermonuclear yield. Nine megatons is horrifically destructive even by the outsized standards of atomic bombs, capable of leveling a good size city in a single blast. And the Soviets had at least as many similar weapons aimed right back at us. How did we keep from blowing ourselves up for all those years? |
| Posted by:Delphi |
| #4 Spent three years in the missile patch in Kansas maintaining the security cameras on those silos. Oh, and we were instructed not to call them "warheads", they are "re-entry vehicles". |
| Posted by: Steve 2009-12-17 19:56 |
| #3 How did we keep from blowing ourselves up for all those years? This world must be under divine protection. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-12-17 14:35 |
| #2 Titans? Why not Model T's? |
| Posted by: mojo 2009-12-17 13:46 |
| #1 Interesting place, I was there in '99. This "computer expert" can probably tell us all sorts of good things about Windows 7 security by examining the entrails of a Commodore 64... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2009-12-17 11:56 |