President Barack Obama was briefed this morning on an incident that occurred over the weekend at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. A technical “glitch” in the command and control system for 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), one-ninth of the U.S. missile stockpile, caused the missiles to go “offline”.
In other words, the United States lost control of enough warheads to cause Armageddon – but it’s cool, now. Everything is under control. Nothing to see, here.
sometimes computers need a reboot.
Lost control sounds like out of control, they were just down. There were still 400 others ready, plenty left to start armageddon.
at least it wasnt a radar glitch showing an attack…Like the ones Russia has dealt with a couple times. they even fired a guy realizing it was a glitch and not launching.
Yeah, “Shut Down” is a better description than “Lost Control”. Not that having that kind of equipment go offline isn’t terrifying, but it wasn’t about to launch on its own.
I’d like to hear more about the C&C computing platform. I’m willing to be most of that hardware and software dates back to the eighties, at the latest.
Is there some reason they don’t have backup generators? In the unlikely event of nuclear war, it seems incredibly stupid for our nukes to be taken out by a fucking power out.
Anonymoose: The backup is multiple sites, a power outage, a nuclear explosion, anything can take out one site and there are still others online, not to mention any submarines or carriers that might be packing nukes at the time. besides all that, we’ve still got the rest of the ordinance that is not nuclear.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/power-failure-shuts-down-squadron-of-nuclear-missiles/65207/
that article paints the picture a bit different. A quoted official says the nukes could still have been controlled by off-site air based launch systems the same way orders are sent to submarines carrying nukes.
It also sounds like when 1 of the 5 launch control systems started acting up they just shut them down, then powered them back up 1 by 1 until they found out which one was causing all the problems. So it sounds like they were “down” for however long it takes to reboot one of their computers.