Pentagon's nuclear missile system is run on floppy disks

boing
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OMG that is one of my favorite off-beat SF films!

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From TFA:

"The agency plans to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017."
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Investment banks, too. They hate them. Employees computers are (sometimes/always?) configured so they can neither read nor write to them. Everything is either over the network or via email for traceability.

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Well basically they get a citrix connection to do all the work from. The laptop may as well be a dumb terminal.

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I was wondering why I read about this same report in several places recently - now I am guessing that I might know the reason why:

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Well they are 8" when hard, but only 7" when floppy.

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Serious question, couldn’t an EMP pulse erase the floppy in question rendering the US nuclear system in-operable? or are they stored in a seriously shielded case?

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EMP will take out your computer equipment as well. These sorts of systems have some hardening against it (including shielding by being under ground). The real “protection” though is the ICBMS are supposed to be off the deck before that could happen.

ETA: Added quotes around protection. It’s not a protection, so much as the idea the missiles should have already launched so it doesn’t really matter. (By the time that happens, nothing really matters.)

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“Use 'em or lose 'em.”

Nukes were a deterrent. But if it looked like the deterrent failed - and there were a few false alarms - you had to launch them before incoming nukes arrived. And so large numbers of ICBMs were on a hair trigger.

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I’ve read several of the declassified accounts (US and USSR) where things came a little too close. I have to say I’m relieved there were some cool heads on both sides in the command chain. In a lot of cases it was really critical to have a human in the loop who could stop for a second and think: “Man, I really don’t want to be wrong about this.”

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And we all know what happens when we let the computers make those decisions…

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Seems to be a popular movie reference this week. :wink:

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Ahh, so their attempt to seem more modern is actually going to be their undoing…

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