Hello all.
I'm writing a new story which involves an involuntary release of a nuclear missile.
I'm starting with statements made from Bruce Blair reported here : https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/25/keeping-nukes-safe-from-cyber-attack/
>"In the case of Minuteman, there are…potential entry points into the supposed fire-walled command and control system," Blair told Killer Apps in a Sept 25 email. "One of them is the radio antenna at the unmanned missile silos designed to allow airborne launch control centers to inject the three short signal bursts [telling the missiles to identify their targets, arm, and launch] in the event of a breakdown in the local underground command post system (for instance, their destruction by enemy nuclear missiles)."
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>If hackers were able to take over this antenna, "this entry point could provide access under a range of circumstances such as the loss of control experienced at FE Warren in a squadron of 50 missiles . . . or such as illicit actions taken by an ‘insider’ agent," added Blair.
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>"Another [vulnerability] are the thousands of cables that run 6-feet underground interconnecting all of the missile silos with all of the launch control centers in a given squadron. It’s possible to imagine outside parties surreptitiously tapping into one cable at one location or another, and thereby gaining access to the actual conduits that control and target, enable, and fire the missiles."
Who is Bruce Blair? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_G._Blair
So Bruce is referring to two things:
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The Airborne Launch Control System : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Launch_Control_System
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The HICS cable system : https://minutemanmissile.com/hics.html
The ALCS was designed to launch missiles in their silos in case the actual (manned) Launch Control Centre (buried underground) for each missile squadron was disabled.
So as far as I can tell, if you were able to spoof an authenticated message to the ALCS receiver at a given silo, the missile would launch with zero human intervention.
I presume you could achieve a similar goal via hacking into the HICS.
And if someone (say the President's daughter) obtained the launch codes, and decoded the message
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