The Minuteman III, offline
Last weekend there was a computer failure of some kind at the F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that took 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles temporarily off-line. As described by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, it appears to have been a breakdown in a launch control center computer that controls about five missiles; the ...
Last weekend there was a computer failure of some kind at the F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that took 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles temporarily off-line. As described by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, it appears to have been a breakdown in a launch control center computer that controls about five missiles; the failure then cascaded to others. The incident was serious enough to warrant a briefing up the chain to the commander in chief, President Obama.
Last weekend there was a computer failure of some kind at the F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that took 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles temporarily off-line. As described by Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic, it appears to have been a breakdown in a launch control center computer that controls about five missiles; the failure then cascaded to others. The incident was serious enough to warrant a briefing up the chain to the commander in chief, President Obama.
The military said the incident lasted about an hour and that it did not decrease Obama’s ability to control the weapons. There are 150 Minuteman III missiles on the base.
These weapons systems are hugely complex, and snafus have happened before. The failure of a simple computer chip once triggered a false alarm when Jimmy Carter was president. Another time, the insertion of a training tape into a slot set off a mistaken alarm.
The real question to be asked at a moment like this should be: why are these missiles on launch-ready alert, ready to go within four minutes of an order from the president? This alert status for land-based missiles is a legacy of the Cold War and one that makes no sense now that the superpower confrontation is over. One of the simplest moves that the United States and Russia could make toward a safer world today would be to build in a delay, say a few hours or a day, before the missiles could be launched. This “de-alerting” would have to be done by both sides, but it might let everyone breathe a little easier on those weekends when a computer decides to take a holiday.
Update: Bruce Blair has an good explanation for what happened in a comment to Page van der Linden’s post at ArmsControlWonk.
David E. Hoffman covered foreign affairs, national politics, economics, and served as an editor at the Washington Post for 27 years.
He was a White House correspondent during the Reagan years and the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and covered the State Department when James A. Baker III was secretary. He was bureau chief in Jerusalem at the time of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, and served six years as Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous Yeltsin era. On returning to Washington in 2001, he became foreign editor and then, in 2005, assistant managing editor for foreign news. Twitter: @thedeadhandbook
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