james_nicoll: The very best of British security

james_nicoll (

james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2007-11-15 14:51:00

The very best of British security
Newsnight has discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key.

There was no other security on the Bomb itself.

I feel the need to admit that as quaint as this system may appear to modern eyes, the system used never actually failed.

For some reason, I am reminded of the anecdote Orwell told during WWII of the night Churchill discovered that a surprisingly large fraction of the RN's wartime munitions were routinely kept in a dockside warehouse whose only guard was not issued a firearm.

Seen via casaubon

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	tavella 2007-11-15 08:02 pm UTC (link)
	And what a British reason for not doing it. Putting any sort of authorization security on them would be insulting to the officers' honor. Because officers of the British Navy could NEVER go nuts! (Reply to this)

autopope
2007-11-15 08:04 pm UTC (link)

A couple of points to note:

The RAF's nuclear bombs were guarded by guys with guns who would not look kindly on anyone attempting to arm one of the aforementioned physics packages without authorization. (On account of it being a life insurance premium inflating situation, you understand.)

That's how the Soviets did it, too. All their land based nuclear forces had a permissive action interlock mechanism called a KGB platoon, with orders to shoot and kill anyone who attempted an unauthorized launch.

And finally ...

Those Minuteman missiles in their silos with the swanky combination-lock PALs? Until very late in the day, the PAL code for any of the Minuteman missiles was 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0. Yup, they built the security devices as per Robert McNamara's instructions, but using them would just get in the way.

So much for bicycle padlocks.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 08:08 pm UTC (link)
	Some of the loaners Canada got from the US had what's basically a cotter-pin to prevent them from being armed and the US waived the usual security requirements for the Quebec facility so that it wouldn't open after the Ontario one. The Quebec facility was the one that people could easy drive to. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

james_nicoll
2007-11-15 08:12 pm UTC (link)

I expect in about 50 years, material will be declassified that explains how eg forty or fifty warheads are still probably sitting on rail siding across America where they were misplaced and their loss classifed during the Cold War, that approximately 40% of the Chinese nuclear strike force prior to 2030 used lead instead of fissionables to meet production quotas and that several W88s have turned up being used as decorative gate posts by people who thought they were decorative duds, in the tradition of Scampton.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	autopope 2007-11-15 08:14 pm UTC (link)
	You're going to have fun with "The Merchant's War" and "The Revolution Business", I can tell ... (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 08:33 pm UTC (link)
	Read the first at Farthing. Have not got the second one yet. When does the Heinlein pastiche make it into the queue? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

autopope
2007-11-15 08:40 pm UTC (link)

The second is my current WIP and is only 10% complete. If I mention that the title of Chapter One is "Empty Quiver" this should give you some idea where it's going.

The Heinlein tribute, aka "Saturn's Children", is in copy edit right now -- I should be getting the CEM in a couple of weeks -- and I expect ARCs will be going out any time after that. I don't know whether you get manuscripts or uncorrected proofs, but if the latter, it won't show up before January. (Publication is due some time between July and September.)

NB: I will freely admit that I cannot slavishly imitate Heinlein's sentence structure at novel length; and father/daughter incest is not one of my personal fetishes. If either of these are essential to your enjoyment of a Heinlein tribute novel, you'll find SC lacking.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	traviswells 2007-11-16 12:05 am UTC (link)
	Oh come now, I think that's unfairly labeling the sexual interests of a dead man. Don't you remember Time Enough For Love? That had brother/sister incest in it! No, it's more fair to just say he had an incest fetish :) (Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2007-11-16 01:44 am UTC (link)
	So will that particular nuke from MW play a role in the following parts ? Andreas Morlok (Reply to this) (Parent)

	mjlayman 2007-11-17 12:00 am UTC (link)
	Charlie, the bookgroup is doing The Family Trade in February and I don't have it. Does this mean SFBC isn't buying that set and I should get it elsewhere? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	autopope 2007-11-17 05:20 pm UTC (link)
	I have not been informed of an SFBC edition of those books. On the other hand, the first three volumes are out in mass-market paperback. WARNING: "The Family Trade" is the first half of a novel. Tor sawed it in two for publication. For the full intended effect, read it back-to-back with "The Hidden Family". (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	mjlayman 2007-11-18 12:40 am UTC (link)
	Aha! Thanks! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	casaubon 2007-11-15 08:22 pm UTC (link)
	I used to live near-ish to Scampton. googles Blimey. That could have been embarrassing. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	ffutures 2007-11-15 08:27 pm UTC (link)
	You're familiar with The Leaky Establishment, I assume? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 08:41 pm UTC (link)
	I know of it but have not ever seen a copy. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	autopope 2007-11-15 09:11 pm UTC (link)
	Hmm ... If you have sufficient copious spare time to read it, I will see if I can procure a copy and send it to you via fannish underground railway. (It has been alleged that the only reason Dave wasn't prosecuted for it under the Official Secrets Act is because it would have made HMG look extraordinarily silly in court.) (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 09:30 pm UTC (link)
	I have to increase my daily reading in direct proportion to the decline of the US "Dollar", so I have no spare time any more. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	autopope 2007-11-15 09:35 pm UTC (link)
	Sort of like my daily writing ... (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 09:44 pm UTC (link)
	You'd think a company owned by Germans would pay in Euros but nope. Anyone have connections in the Chinese publishing industry? (Reply to this) (Parent)

james_nicoll
2007-11-15 09:48 pm UTC (link)

Your problem is that your readers would notice if you stuck an 80-page infodump on the history of tachyon-propelled star sails to pad out the text. It's the downside of writing relatively lean prose.

I was reading a non-genre book written in the sort of stream of consciousness style where when I misplaced a one hundred page section it took me 60 pages to notice. There was that little internal structure to the book.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_angove 2007-11-15 11:52 pm UTC (link)
	Has David Foster Wallace taking to writing fiction again? Damn shame if he has. (Reply to this) (Parent)

julesjones
2007-11-16 11:42 am UTC (link)

I have 99% of my writing income in US flat rocks, so I've got even more incentive to write faster.

On the other hand, it's not my primary source of income, so I'm still better off than you...

(I finally got around to registering with HMRC as self-employed earlier this week. This involved explaining that whether or not I qualified for Small Earnings Exemption on Class 2 National Insurance Contributions depended entirely on the whims of the exchange rate. They've decided that I can put in for the exemption now and sort it out later.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	tiferet 2007-11-16 12:24 am UTC (link)
	********love********* (Reply to this) (Parent)

Technorati OpenID is Still Borked
(Anonymous)
2007-11-16 11:47 am UTC (link)

Of course, PALs on a *submarine* would be fundamentally absurd; given that the Royal Navy's Polaris/Trident captains are issued specific instructions from the Prime Minister personally on what to do if they conclude that the UK has already been nuked and the chain of command rendered non-functional, it would be very silly if all that was needed to end UK nuclear deterrence was one bomb on the ELF station in Scotland.

Now, the Thor and Project-E stuff in the 60s was really weird; the US insisted on having their own custodians in the loop and that the weapons only be targeted for NATO SACEUR rather than UK National tasks, but there weren't actually enough custodians to mark each nuke, so during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Bomber went to Alert Condition 3, the USAF custodians just had to watch the RAF ground crews checking out the loan nukes and loading them on V-bombers. "You will be careful with that thing now?"

(Reply to this) (Parent)

mark_pontin
2007-11-15 10:39 pm UTC (link)

Chas wrote: 'That's how the Soviets did it, too. All their land based nuclear forces had a permissive action interlock mechanism called a KGB platoon, with orders to shoot and kill anyone who attempted an unauthorized launch.'

Not necessarily so. The rumors about Dead Hand/Perimeter remain too opaque for us to know whether the USSR actually did construct the system proposed in an internal Central Committee document from 1985, in which, Oleg Belyakov, head of the Military Industry Department of the Central Committee, writes: -

"No [adequate] attention has been paid to a proposal, extremely important from the military and political point of view, to create a fully automated retaliatory strike system that would be activated from the top command levels in a moment of a crisis"

http://russianforces.org/files/1985_Belyakov_Letter.pdf

I'd prefer to view the whole possibility with great scepticism. But if the Soviets did build it, as some serious folks claim, it was your actual real-life Doomsday Machine a la Strangelove. And possibly remains that in 2007 as suggested by other accounts --

http://www.cdi.org/blair/new-nukes.cfm

'This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984 during the height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative engineering. It features hard radio nodes near Moscow that can use remote control to launch communications rockets, which in turn can launch virtually the entire Russian missile force without human intervention. But the Moscow-area radio nodes have grown vulnerable over the past 20 years. Kosvinsky restores Russia's confidence in its ability to carry out a retaliatory strike."

Just wanted to brighten everybody's day!

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 10:54 pm UTC (link)
	At least it was Y2K compatable. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	traviswells 2007-11-16 12:02 am UTC (link)
	Status report: Jan-01-2000 00:00 WARNING: Radio subsystem reports no contact with Moscow since Dec-31-1900 Jan-01-2000 00:01 No contact for 52034401 minutes, going to high alert status. Jan-01-2000 00:05 No contact for 52034405 minutes, all missiles armed. You have 30 seconds to abort launch! Jan-01-2000 00:06 All missiles successfully launched. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2007-11-16 11:39 am UTC (link)
	But, of course, despite all the porn nothing like that showed any sign of happening. Conclusion; Russians aren't actually subhuman. (Reply to this) (Parent)

fallenpegasus
2007-11-16 02:12 am UTC (link)

In the early 90s I programmed a testset that is used to test MM2 and MM3 silos. Basically, it pretended to be the missle, and then the silo could be run thru both a "real" launch sequence and a "testmode" launch sequence, without the the huge costs of actually lighting up that much rocket fuel. (And for most of the silos, a launch also destroyed the silo).

It had to, of course, handle the security interlock stuff. The testmode launches had a whole sequence of randomly generated and also edgecase keys that it would run, just to make sure that the silo could inter and pass on any possible valid key from the launch authority onto the missile.

Of course, my clearance at the time, I didnt get to see the testset log for a "real" launch sequence. Which is probably just as well, or I would have noticed the 00 ... 00 authorization key, and probably would have dived into the code looking for what I would have assumed had been a bad bug on my part...

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	autopope 2007-11-17 05:25 pm UTC (link)
	My understanding is that they fixed the eight-zeros PAL code some time in the 1980s. But for the first several years, that's apparently what it was set to. It was basically there to reassure the politicians who'd asked for PAL codes, and set to eight-zeros so as not to inconvenience the launch crews. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	fallenpegasus 2007-11-16 02:21 am UTC (link)
	That causes me to ask the question, what was the physical "thing" that the platoon was guarding? The Soviets surely didnt have to send a trusted person out to each silo to actually arm it when it was needed. That technique would work for bomber dropped Devices, but not for remote command launched ICBMs. Were they guarding the launch command bucker? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	autopope 2007-11-17 05:27 pm UTC (link)
	AIUI, much of the Soviet nuclear forces were above-ground, not silo based. The tracked launcher-erectors needed a crew on hand to drive them and get them set up. Those were guarded. The launch command bunker in silo-based missiles would also be a suitable choke point in case a local commander got frisky. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2007-11-15 08:58 pm UTC (link)
	As a minor note, the Churchill story comes from just before World War I, when he, then First Sea Lord, was holding the Fleet together (instead of its normal dispersion after summer maneuvers) in case this thing in the Balkans should prove disastrous. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	james_nicoll 2007-11-15 09:03 pm UTC (link)
	Ah, thank you. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Technorati Badly Needs to fix its OpenID Server
(Anonymous)
2007-11-16 11:37 am UTC (link)

Nix. It's actually a story from when he was Home Secretary, before becoming First Lord of the Admiralty; it refers to the political crisis of the summer of 1911.

Winston had just encountered an excited Lloyd George having "received a communication so stiff from the German ambassador that the Fleet might be attacked any moment"; he went on to a party where he ran into the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

The copper mentioned that the Navy's cordite stockpiles at two locations in the London suburbs had been "guarded for years without incident by a few constables". Winston asked him what would happen if twenty Germans in a few motor cars turned up; the copper said they could do anything they liked. Winston had a security fit and rang up the Admiralty to ask them to station some Marines there; no-one could do anything over the weekend, so he contented himself by calling Scotland Yard and ordering them to surround the place with armed police.

The tale is in the first book of WSC's "The World Crisis".

Anyway, if you're in a position to steal a NUCLEAR BOMB!!, I suspect you're probably also in a position to force the lock.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2007-11-15 08:58 pm UTC (link)
	As a minor note, the Churchill story comes from just before World War I, when he, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was holding the Fleet together (instead of its normal dispersion after summer maneuvers) in case this thing in the Balkans should prove disastrous. (Reply to this)

	montedavis 2007-11-15 09:35 pm UTC (link)
	There'll always be an England, maybe, with luck. (Reply to this)

	nexstarman 2007-11-16 12:44 am UTC (link)
	Aaah, reminds me of Spike Milligan's war story of the artillery battery that had no ammunition for training, so they became experts at standing behind their weapon and shouting, 'Bang!' in unison. (Reply to this)

	derekl1963 2007-11-16 01:26 am UTC (link)
	US SSBN's had their weapons systems similiarly protected until the early 1990's. The trick to nuclear security isn't fancy ass keying systems, it's all the procedurals around them. Edited at 2007-11-16 01:26 am UTC (Reply to this)

	xiphias 2007-11-16 03:08 am UTC (link)
	See, that works for me. Have you ever tried to pick a bicycle lock? You fuckin' CAN'T. I mean, the suckers are HARD to pick. You need specialized lockpicks, and they take freakin' FOREVER to pick even WITH that. Seems to me that most other forms of security would be easier to crack than a bicyle lock cylinder would be. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	sunshaker 2007-11-16 05:36 am UTC (link)
	Are you forgetting the bicycle locks that you could pick with a pen? Kryptonite Evolution 2000 vs Bic Pen (Reply to this) (Parent)

	eichin 2007-11-16 05:40 am UTC (link)
	Or a bic pen. (the empty plastic cylinder, and something to bang with.) Granted, this only become common knowledge in the last couple of years - it's really just a reminder that mechanical security "falls" over time just like computer security does... (Reply to this) (Parent)

	montedavis 2007-11-16 10:01 am UTC (link)
	My brother's response to the Newsnight story: "Senior Service officers can be trusted with bicycle lock keys and Allen wrenches ... though they may need the assistance of NCOs to actually operate them." (Reply to this)

(43 comments) - (Post a new comment)

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