Right yeah, covertly fund someone to grab nukes off a base with 5,000 US military personal and thousands more Turkish. That is ever so highly plausible. You might as well ask what happens if terrorists steal an ICBM out of its silo.madd0ct0r wrote:So all Israel needs is to covertly fund someone o go and try and grab those nukes in order to nuke turkey and still have their own reserved?
The all zero story was only for SAC ICBMs in the United States prior to 1977, and the reason given is at least highly plausible at least, bad communications. Prior to EHF satellites and the remote firing ability for looking glass, nothing else could really be trusted to supply detailed coded information. SAC meanwhile historically certainly didn't give a damn about codes because it had been flying armed nuclear bombers with no code system for decades in things like operation Chrome Dome by the time any code system was introduced, with no problems. Plus after all with manned bombers once the crew got the codes, they could attack any target they wanted anyway. The same was not true of ICBMs which at least could only attack preplanned targets, and required much fewer personal which should all else being equal, make said personal even more reliable. The communication system on Minuteman meanwhile, as built, was less then ideal. In fact it didn't even have encryption on the first couple hundred silos. SAC solution was to order guards to look out for communist agents digging up the phone lines until they could backfit scramblers.ChaserGrey wrote:Well- first off, the "000000" story may or may not be true. Some folks say it is, others who did the same job at SAC have said the lock was kept at zero to make sure the tumblers would function correctly when the combination was dialed in, analogous to spinning the dial on a combination lock. I can try to find the article on that if you like.
Real codes were introduced for tactical nuclear weapons stored overseas much earlier though, but until the early 1960s the USAF allowed foreign warplanes to sit on alert pads with live US nuclear warheads loaded and the aircraft fully fueled, guarded by a single US solider. A lot has changed. My dad was in the army a long time and handled a lot of classified material, and said that literally almost every safe the army had back then, including ones holding stuff related to nuclear weapons, were opened by the combination 10-20-30. The only way the combination was something else was if a specific unit decided to reset the tumblers in the safe. This was kind of a big deal.. since the earliest way to secure tactical nuclear weapons was through the use of physically removable arming plugs which were kept in safes, and formed an integral part of the nuclear weapons firing mechanism.
Yeah the new system is pretty robust. Supposedly the nukes will also explode if you break a vapor seal inside the casing if your goal was merely to steal the fissile material. US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe meanwhile are stored in vaults built into the floor of hardened aircraft shelters, so access isn't easy. If you used enough explodes to break one open you'd almost surely break the nukes inside. Each vault can hold four B61s.
Regardless, new generations of safeguards have been produced and installed on old warheads. It's all electronic now, with no mechanical lock elements. I believe the latest generation is a keypad with a 12-digit code and a limited-retry feature which after a certain number of failed attempts locks up the system, requiring factory maintainence to reset. There's also a "dummy" code and a destruct code, which means if you put a gun to the head of the guy with the codes a la Crimson Tide he can either a) punch in a code which will destroy the warhead or b) punch a code that will cause it to say it's armed and behave as though it is, right up until you try to touch it off and it just sits there.