" Mein Fuhrer!... I can _VALK_!"

David Spain writes:

How does inhibit work? Is it simple majority vote? Typically there are
3 LCCs of which it takes two votes from two different LCCs to launch.
^s/from/one from each of/

If an inhibit code comes down from one LCC I assume it cancels one LCC
launch vote?


Say you have 3 active LCCs, two send launch votes and one sends an inhibit.
What happens on the loop? Do the silos accept the majority or does the
inhibit override one or both launch votes? Thus can one LCC prevent a
launch even if it's in the minority?

Also are the inhibit codes use once? Can an LCC send the same inhibit code
multiple times over the loop? Or does it only get one opportunity per
launch control unit?

If its the latter, I'd sure as hell, if I was the LCC duty chief and got a
false launch commanded, send my inhibit, get my deputy swapping out the
control unit as fast as possible and getting on the horn with the other
LCCs and command to find out WTF.

Now suppose I have lousy ears and my deputy and I are at alert status
but can't agree on receipt of a valid coded order, what's the standard
procedure? Would it be to sit that one out? Or am I duty bound to send
inhibits if I see what I believe to be unauthorized launch votes even
though I'm on a war alert status?

Dave

Glen Overby wrote:

Where's that one at? I hadn't heard of any in the near vicinity.

Cooperstown, ND

http://history.nd.gov/historicsites/...ile/index.html

please post pictures when you visit it

They snuck that one by; that's the first time I ever heard of it.


The actual silos are so unobtrusive that it's possible to drive past one
without realizing its even there...it's just a small fenced-in area.

I agree. And if you don't shake the fence, they won't even know you're there.

I think there would be a million and one things smarter to do than shake
the fence.
Peace protesters have broken through the fence on occasion, but there's
not a hell of a lot of damage you can do if you do get in.
Scuttlebutt has it that there are either remotely controlled machine
guns or grenade launchers in there in case you _really_ got out of line.
I do have a sign from off of the fence of a silo that was shut down.
It's surprisingly understated:

"_WARNING_ (big red letters)
U.S. Air Force Installation
It is unlawful to enter this area without permission of the Installation
Commander.
Sec.21,Internal Security Act of 1950; 50 U.S.C.797.
While on this Installation all personnel and the property under their
control are subject to search.

Supersedes AF Form 2523, Nov 81 AFVA 125-9
Distribution: F 10 October 1986 *U.S.
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1993-332-175"



The launch control sites are also fairly unobtrusive; just a long 1-story
building (with a fence and a helipad).
The SD missile museum's launch control
site is visible from I90, but unless you knew what it was, you might think
(like I did) "nice satellite TV dish". Oh, and the dish *IS* for satellite
TV!

On the other hand, they're by no means hidden.

Warheads and missiles are transported individually, with the warhead
attached after the missile has been lowered into the silo.

the Ellsworth AFB tour (sign up at the Esllsworth base museum & pay $7) goes
to the silo training facility, and both of those vehicles are there and one of
the armored vehicles used by security.

IIRC, the escort vehicles are called "Peacemakers".
Somewhere around here I have a photo of myself standing at the M60
machine gun on one.
Their crews say that they wear out pretty quickly due to being too heavy
for their suspension and drive train.
There's another vehicle besides the little warhead transporter that
drives over the top of the silo somehow, squats down while lowering a
half circular plate from either side to completely cover the silo, and
uses an internal winch to actually lower the warhead section onto the
missile, or remove it for transport. It probably also includes testing
equipment to make sure everything is successfully integrated between the
missile and the warhead section.

Pat

David Spain wrote:
(Derek Lyons) writes:
It was called ERCS (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/ercs.htm).

D.

Says they were 'inactivated' in early 90's. Does that mean
taken off alert or replaced by something else?

The article I linked to says they were replaced by secure military
comsat links.


BTW, they send the command codes to the LCC's but those are
still manned by two officers who have to 'turn keys'.
Call it semi-automatic. I trust no one has changed that?

Not since the movie "WarGames".
Obviously, Doctor Falken had never seen the movie "Colossus: The Forbin
Project", or he never would have built that WOPR thing. ;-)

Pat

Pat Flannery writes:

Directional antenna on the sub to find out the direction the signals were
coming from?

It could also be to let the sub triangulate its position in the same way by
locking on to several signals, or serve to let the sub lock on to the
frequency its launch code signal would be transmitted on.

That might help, but it would take precious time, time that boomer
commander may not have.

The "woodpecker" was pretty oddball also:
http://www.qsl.net/n1irz/woodpeck.html

Oh yeah. The Russian OTH radar, using ionospheric backscatter.

Back in the day, I got word from a 'very reliable source' that the
military enlisted the aid of the VOA to use their powerful HF
xmitters to perform experiments designed to use RF energy to
heat the ionosphere to try to manipulate the layers in an attempt
to 'punch holes' into it. The idea, I suppose, was that in a
national emergency, like a nuclear war, beam angles could be
adjusted to heat the ionosphere to hinder the woodpecker. Yankee
Doodle vs the Woodpecker. Sounds like one of your Marvel wonder
creations there Pat.

Of course now we have HAARP.

I used to have a shortwave radio, and would run into both it and another
strange and powerful signal that sounded like some sort of giant turboprop
aircraft engine and high RPM propeller.


That one I can easily explain. Your were listening to military FDM telex.
FDM = frequency division multiplex. The buzzsaw sound common on shortwave
was the result of hearing all the channels coming through at once.
It was (is? been awhile) quite common. The bandwidth on your receiver
was likely not narrow enough to separate out the individual channels.
Eventually I got my hands on a radio capable of tuning these stations.
Feeding it through my RTTY demodulator showed every channel was encrypted.
Supposedly there was a time when a few of these channels were pumping
out AP/UPI newswire traffic for the military's use. But I was never
able to get any of that 'in the clear'....

Dave

Pat Flannery writes:

Not since the movie "WarGames".
Obviously, Doctor Falken had never seen the movie "Colossus: The Forbin
Project", or he never would have built that WOPR thing. ;-)


"I don't know about you, but I sleep pretty good at night, knowin'
those boys (and girls) are down there."

:-)

Dave

David Spain wrote:

(Derek Lyons) writes:

David Spain wrote:

No kidding. I have a really hard time accepting that the codes for the
PALs on our warheads were 'set to zero'. Where the hell did he come up with
that piece of folly? Cites or sources?

It's pretty well known - this came out a couple of years back.

Cripes. At least they fixed it. Did the Navy do the same?
Well, maybe you can't say....

The SSBN force didn't have PAL's until the early 90's. Our interlocks
were procedural only.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

David Spain wrote:
Pat,

If it won't get you into trouble I'd like to discuss this a bit.
If you have to take a pass, that's ok. I was never cleared for
anything, and after this post probably never will be, so I'm ok.

Many years ago, back in the 80's when folks of the lefter side
of the political spectra were convinced Reagan was taking us all
down, there was a video produced and air'ed on PBS called 'Missile'.

Yeah, I saw that one also.


It has become one of my all time favorite videos. I have it on VHS
casette somewhere (with no functional VHS/VCR at the moment to watch
it on). It's a documentary on missile crew training for either
Minuteman-II or III (can't remember which I think was II) conducted
at Vandenberg.

IIRC two women were training for Titan II silo service.


Anyway, it gets pretty deep into the non-classified stuff. And it
discusses this in some detail. (Capt. Mike Greenhill, you're my
hero! If he's still in the Air Force he's surely not still a captain.)

Pat Flannery writes:
The other control sites can also override an attempted launch by any
individual control site they are linked to.

Right, you can throw the inhibit switch. It does not appear that that
requires pass through to the deputies' console. Is it not on a continuity
loop? It is covered by a plastic panel with a seal which will be broken
when panel is opened, but it does not appear to be keyed. It does have
its own MCU. I have my own (very low tech) theory on how these work,
but its classified stuff and I don't want to discuss my speculations
(which are probably wrong anyway) here.

How does inhibit work? Is it simple majority vote? Typically there are
3 LCCs of which it takes two votes from two different LCCs to launch.
If an inhibit code comes down from one LCC I assume it cancels one LCC
launch vote?

LCCs however, contain more that one launch control unit. In an emergency,
the LCC can send a code, pull the unit out of the commander's console,
replace it with a second unit and send the 2nd code. Thus missles can
be launched with only one LCC up assuming the site has time to get
the 2nd unit in and the code out.

But does an inhibit code *always* override a launch code?
So say an LCC sends a launch code which a 2nd LCC inhibits. It then
appears that it is impossible for a 1 LCC launch to take place, since
it's already expended one of its two codes (aka votes). The 2nd code
would have to come from a different LCC, unless an LCC has more than
2 control units on hand.

Or is it legitimate to resend the first code? I would think not,
but this is what I don't know. Launch commanded vs launch enabled vs
missle away...

I don't have a clue on how the details work as far as the wiring goes;
I've never read any details about it, and I assume it's classified.
(If you read the book "US Nuclear Weapons" though, and can latch onto a
Strike Enabling Plug, socket wrench and screwdriver, you can arm pretty
much any older type airdropped atomic device, as they actually have the
Air Force diagrams on how to do that on any particular type reproduced
in the book.)
I'll tell you one thing they found out that really surprised them, and
that's when a launch officer showed them how you could tie a string onto
a fork, slide the fork tines over the base of one of the launch keys,
sit down at the other key...and turn it while pulling the string, so
that both keys were turned simultaneously and the missile could be
launched by one person.
They gave him a commendation for figure that one out, and promptly
changed the design to prevent that being done.


The actual silos are so unobtrusive that it's possible to drive past one
without realizing its even there...it's just a small fenced-in area.

Until it fires. In emergency mode, do they still use explosives to blow the
outer hatch off?


Not off, but sideways down the track. Even with the ice scrapers on the
silo lid it's possible to get the thing stuck in severe winter weather
because of thick ice or heavy snow. Any explosive charge powerful enough
to blow something as heavy as the silo lid into the air would probably
destroy the missile.

Must be an interesting sign posted on that fence. Rivaled
only by the friendly welcoming signs posted outside the Pantex plant no doubt.
'Welcome taxpayer. You bought it, but don't f*ck with it. Use of
deadly force is authorized, and we're watching you, have a nice day....'

Can you fill me in on one another legend? Some of these missile sites appear
to have entrances disguised as 1-story ranch homes. The dead giveaway is
the neatly manicured lawn with a chain-link fence all around it. Is that
the case?

It's not a disguise, that's where the other site crew, security forces,
maintenance crew and official visitors can eat and live and the launch
crews can relax between shifts down in the launch capsule.
The security guards go out and look at the silos if anything odd is
suspected, or a large object is detected inside the fence by the
sensors.(and I'm willing to bet that they have seen _way too many_
Canadian geese sitting atop the silo lid.)
There are drawings of all the control site and silo related
constructions he
http://www.jonahhouse.org/WMD%20Here...%20graphic.htm
Note the emergency escape tunnel attached to the launch capsule; this is
filled with sand to protect it from collapsing due to the shockwaves of
a nearby nuclear blast, and you open the hatch to it inside the launch
capsule and let the sand run out into it before climbing up the tunnel.

What is being hidden, service entrances or LCCs? The movies
Wargames and the movie 'The Day After' would have us believe its LCCs


You do go down into the LCC from inside the building via a elevator.
Then you spend around half-an-hour waiting while the launch crew check
you out before they open the door into the launch capsule proper.
Between the time you arrive at the site and the time you end up in the
launch capsule is over an hour.
....and the same holds true for going down into a silo to do maintenance
on it or the missile.

but
I have my doubts based on what I've seen of hardened LCC entrances. We
don't have any of that stuff here where I live.

Both vehicles have a security escort when carrying a missile or warhead. All
the remaining missiles now carry a single Mk-21/W87 warhead from the
deactivated Peacekeeper missile system.

Yeah, and I'll bet they don't have a good sense of humor on the job either.

No, they don't. My family ran into two of them hauling a empty missile
trailer at a fast food restaurant once and they were quietly sitting in
a corner wearing very obvious large pistols, and eating as fast as they
could. We decide not to engage them in conversation.

Not a time and place for practical jokes. Pat, keep your turban at home.

I imagine my set of Soviet space pins and leopard-skin fez are right out
then. :-)

Pat

David Spain wrote:


Cripes. At least they fixed it. Did the Navy do the same?
Well, maybe you can't say....

Navy missile launch authority works in a way different way from the Air
Force one, using a chain of command system and multiple individuals each
knowing part of the launch sequence after the go code is received.
Details he
http://books.google.com/books?id=uAY... ge&q=&f=false


Yeah, but it appears Star Wars was giving them pause about that.
In a way, that was doubly good. Knowing that they were going ape
sh*t over Star Wars, really means they were taking a truly defensive
posture, since SDI would have been only moderately effective on
2nd strike counter-attack of reduced force, and not effective at
all on a full-on first strike. Well, at least with the tech at hand
at the time.

Actually it wasn't doable at _all_ at the time.
The space-based interceptors would to have numbered in the tens of
thousands, and the Excalibur X-ray laser just plain didn't work, as the
physics it was based on was faulty.
But the Soviets didn't know that, and the more our scientists said that
the whole thing was a pipe dream, the more convinced they were that we
had made some huge breakthrough and their whole ICBM and SLBM force was
about to be rendered ineffective, so they began spending a fortune to
either find out what we had discovered and copy it, or figure out some
way to render in ineffective.
Which is exactly what the Reagan administration wanted them to do, as
how can you defend against some superweapon that doesn't exist, no
matter how much you spend?


It would have been far more worrisome if the Soviets had just shrugged
their shoulders with a who cares attitude? You could have interpreted
that as "We'll use them *before* we lose them"...

If they had agreed to that nuclear weapon zero option that Reagan
pitched at Helsinki, and said we could deploy Star Wars also, it really
would have thrown us a curveball - as the idea was to get them to reject
the zero option while making us look like pacifists for developing SDI.
What would have happened then would really something, as I doubt either
side really wanted to go with the zero option, which would have put the
US and USSR in an inferior nuclear position to Great Britain and France.
And China...and Israel...and South Africa...and India...
Not going to happen.


Yeah. OTOH most scenarios I've seen start with counterforce, and quickly
escalate out of control. In generalspeak, 'We are in a fluid situation...'

Stick with the 'Bulletin of The Atomic Scientist' if you want something
reliable.
Vastly more reliable than most, but not without a distinct bias of
their own. (A bias that has grown noticeably more slanted over the
last decade and some.)


Yes, the slant has always been there. It's collective guilt.
I don't have much sympathy for that, it's just this side of
narcissism. Some of these guys are getting old and feel they
need to make amends to their creator before their time is up.

Truth is we're stuck with these weapons. Each generation is
going to have to learn how to deal with them. I love to point
out to people that live in the fantasy world of no nuclear weapons
that they're just making the world safe enough for WWII again....

Just wait till the antimatter salts and metastable helium bombs show up.
That's when the fun will really begin, as with nuclear weapons you have
to make a whole lot of thing happen very precisely for them to explode,
but with those two your only problem is trying to _stop_ it from exploding.

Pat

David Spain wrote:
I used to have a shortwave radio, and would run into both it and another
strange and powerful signal that sounded like some sort of giant turboprop
aircraft engine and high RPM propeller.


That one I can easily explain. Your were listening to military FDM telex.
FDM = frequency division multiplex. The buzzsaw sound common on shortwave
was the result of hearing all the channels coming through at once.
It was (is? been awhile) quite common. The bandwidth on your receiver
was likely not narrow enough to separate out the individual channels.
Eventually I got my hands on a radio capable of tuning these stations.
Feeding it through my RTTY demodulator showed every channel was encrypted.
Supposedly there was a time when a few of these channels were pumping
out AP/UPI newswire traffic for the military's use. But I was never
able to get any of that 'in the clear'....


Thanks, I always wondered what that was!
Did you ever pick up one of the "numbers" signals?
Those consisted of a female voice transmitting out numbers, generally in
Spanish on the ones I heard.
They were used with "one-time pads" to send messages to agents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
Here's the monster antenna that sent out the Woodpecker signal; it is
near Chernobyl: http://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/chernobyl-2-othr/

Pat

Pat Flannery writes:


IIRC two women were training for Titan II silo service.


Yes. Um, not sure they were training for Titan-II tho'.
One had had previous training and duty on Titan-II, but
I thought she was moving on to Minuteman? I do recall
they received high marks from their instructors...

I don't have a clue on how the details work as far as the wiring goes; I've
never read any details about it, and I assume it's classified.

I was asking more about the inhibit protocol. But maybe it is classified.

My 'hunch' is, one inhibit cancels one vote. I'm not sure if the same
inhibit code can be sent repeatedly, but I know additional launch votes
can be sent if sent with a different set of valid MCUs, that much was made
clear in the video. So even if you can only send a single inhibit, maybe
it's logical to presume the same procedure holds for the inhibit MCU.
That even if you are allowed only one shot at inhibit, if you can swap
the control panel in time, you can send another inhibit with another
valid inhibit MCU. I'm thinking if you're at war alert status, tho'
you're supposed to stay the h*ll off the inhibit switch.

Speculating further, if you can't authenticate an EWO, you let the
other LCCs decide. There are supposed to be at least two LCCs on duty
at all times. If you're down to two LCCs the other can launch if they can
get their launch command unit swapped in time. If you're up with three
the other two can decide. Also, I believe it is policy, unlike the movie
'Wargames' alerts for on duty silo crews are *never* 'simulated'.
Stuff like that is reserved for the training cabs. The point being there
is to never to be any doubt in the mind of the crew about the authenticity
of a valid EWO when on silo duty.

BTW IIRC, you screw with any of the seals on the equipment, you got some
'splaining to do there Desi and it'd better be good. Checking the seals
is on your checklist when you relieve the previous crew and you write
up what you find, lest you get the blame....

Why am I so fascinated by all this? I dunno. I guess it's because I believe
in citizen soldiers. We need to be able to trust ourselves with the highest
responsiblity that can be assigned to a human being today. I used to joke
with friends, it harks back to the days when real minutemen kept
their muskets at the ready over the fireplace mantle. This training should
be viewed like CPR training, a must-have for a well-rounded and educated
citizenry and military.

You know, if we trained boys and girls scouts in this stuff[1], (can you image
model rocketry that used LCC type protocols?) it might scare the crap out
of their parents enough to think more seriously about arms control.

[1] When my best friend from 6th grade and I got seriously into model rocketry,
we worked together on rockets. He build his own launcher. A wooden box
with a 12V lawn tractor battery inside, the ignition switch from a defunct
lawn tractor replete with a removable key, and an incandescent continuity
lamp with a door-bell button. It worked soooo much better that that
ElectroLaunch I had from Estes, since I never seemed to have fresh D
batteries for it on hand and it was only a 6V system.

(If you read the book "US Nuclear Weapons" though, and can latch onto a Strike
Enabling Plug, socket wrench and screwdriver, you can arm pretty much any
older type airdropped atomic device, as they actually have the Air Force
diagrams on how to do that on any particular type reproduced in the book.)

On display at the Smithsonian exhibit on the A-Bomb are/were the safing and
arming plugs for a Fat Man. Safing plugs were green, arming plugs were
red. And the difference, IIRC was the red ones had copper conductors inside.
It looked a little bit like an electrical cartridge fuse.

Anyway a bit easier and safer than stuffing cordite into a Little Boy....

Messing around with Strike Enabling Plugs sounds to me a lot like playing
with matches in a fireworks factory. No thank you.... :-)

I'll tell you one thing they found out that really surprised them, and that's
when a launch officer showed them how you could tie a string onto a fork,
slide the fork tines over the base of one of the launch keys, sit down at the
other key...and turn it while pulling the string, so that both keys were
turned simultaneously and the missile could be launched by one person.
They gave him a commendation for figure that one out, and promptly changed the
design to prevent that being done.


I do remember hearing this one, I can't remember where or when tho'.
To get away with that you'd have to *really* not like your team-mate and be
fast on the draw. They didn't ban forks in the LCC? :-) I'm thinking Pepsi
Syndrome here, but then again they're pulling long shifts...


The actual silos are so unobtrusive that it's possible to drive past one
without realizing its even there...it's just a small fenced-in area.

Until it fires. In emergency mode, do they still use explosives to blow the
outer hatch off?


Not off, but sideways down the track. Even with the ice scrapers on the silo
lid it's possible to get the thing stuck in severe winter weather because of
thick ice or heavy snow.

Yeah, I meant sideways, but I should have said so.
Wonder how many fence busting protesters know about that?
That's incentive enough to keep me away, but then again for the people
engaging in such recreational activity, it's likely we're somewhat off
the bell curve for rational thinking.

Dave