On Oct. 23, 2010, at about 1:30 in the morning, the underground launch control centers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming lost communication with 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. Instead of showing the status of the missiles, the computer screens in the control centers displayed the acronym LFDN — Launch Facility Down.
Briefly losing contact with a few missiles wasn’t unusual. But having an entire squadron go down, simultaneously, was extraordinary. Closed-circuit television images of the missile silos, which sit miles away from their control centers, revealed that none of the Minuteman IIIs had lifted off. Almost an hour after the problem suddenly appeared, communication was re-established between the missiles and their launch crews. Nevertheless, heavily armed Air Force security officers spent the next few hours visiting all 50 silos, in the early morning darkness, to ensure that no security breach had occurred.
The Air Force dismissed the possibility that the computer network controlling its Minuteman IIIs had been hacked. The idea that a hacker could somehow disable 50 ballistic missiles — each of them armed with a nuclear warhead about seven times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima — seemed like the improbable plot of a Hollywood thriller.
An Air Force operations review board later found that the communications breakdown at F.E. Warren had been caused by a combination of equipment failure and human error: a circuit card, improperly installed in a weapons-system processor, had been dislodged by routine vibration and heat. But the incident privately raised concerns among high-level Air Force officials that America’s nuclear command-and-control system might not be secure against a cyberattack.
In fact, in January 2013, a Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Science Board, warned that the system’s vulnerability to such an attack had never been fully assessed. While testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee this past March, Gen. C. Robert Kehler, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, expressed confidence that America’s nuclear arsenal was well-protected against a cyberattack, and yet he acknowledged, “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
A world without nuclear weapons would, of course, eliminate the risk of accidental nuclear detonations. But that is an elusive goal, and until it’s achieved, America’s nuclear arsenal must be managed with the sort of ruthless efficiency and intolerance for error once championed by Curtis LeMay.
A world with many fewer weapons in fewer hands — carefully maintained, with no expense spared- – offers the best hope of avoiding mistakes whose consequences would be almost unimaginable. During his recent Senate testimony on command and control issues and the threat of cyberattacks, Kehler, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, was asked whether Russia and China had the ability to prevent hackers from launching one of their nuclear missiles. Kehler paused for a moment and then replied, “Senator, I don’t know.”
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The Obama administration was forced to punt once again at the talks on Iran’s nuclear program when the Iranians refused to budge on their maximal demands on uranium enrichment and sanctions relief.
