Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

CHEYENNE, Wyoming — On April 28, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl gained unprecedented media access to an underground control room at an Air Force launch control facility in charge of ten intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) tipped with nuclear warheads. Stahl’s 60 Minutes report on the aging ICBM arsenal, broadcast from the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, revealed that the US’s 450 land-based nuclear missiles are still controlled by 1960s computers, with a launch system that relies on eight-inch floppy disks.

Officials claim the outdated equipment keeps the nuclear weapons system safe from potential hackers, as it is not connected to the internet. As one commentator pointed out, this Air Force strategy is similar to one employed by the crew of the Battlestar Gallactica in the popular science fiction TV series, where the ship was saved from a disabling virus because its computers weren’t networked.

The security benefits apparently come with a sacrifice in functionality, as one missileer told Stahl about problems with the facilities’ analog phone systems.

“They’re awful. You can’t hear the other person on the other end of the line. Sometimes you can’t dial out, which makes it very difficult if you’re trying to do your job,” the officer stated.

In an apparent public relations backfire, Stahl said she suspected the Air Force granted her access to the facility to reassure the public in the wake of a widespread cheating scandal involving over 90 nuclear

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

BALTIMORE, Maryland — According to an obituary by Robert McFadden, James R. Schlesinger became so alarmed by President Nixon’s unstable behavior in the days leading to his August 1974 resignation, that Schlesinger “instructed the military not to react to White House orders, particularly on nuclear arms, unless cleared by him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.” Schlesinger, an influential Cold War hawk who served Presidents Nixon and Ford as Secretary of Defense, CIA director, and chief of the Atomic Energy Commission, and later as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Energy, died March 27.

According to research by Scott Sagan and Jeremy Suir, “From Oct. 10, 1969, through the rest of the month, the US military was ordered to full global war readiness alert, without any provocation, and with no explanation to US commanders as to the alert’s purpose.” Nuclear-armed fighter jets were dispersed, ICBM countdowns were initiated and ballistic missile submarines were deployed. “On Oct. 27, the Strategic Air Command was ordered to dispatch B-52 bombers, loaded with H-bombs, toward the Soviet Union … in an operation named Giant Lance. ‘The bombers crossed Alaska,’ Sagan and Suri wrote, ‘were refueled in midair by KC-135 tanker aircraft, and then flew in oval patterns toward the Soviet Union and back, on 18-hour vigils over the northern polar ice cap.’ This was all done in total secrecy — not from the Soviets, of course, since they knew quite well what was happening, but from the American people.”

— New York Times, March 28, 2014; James Carroll, “Nixon’s Madman Strategy,” Boston Globe, June 14, 2005