Failure at U.S. Air Force Base Takes 50 Nukes Offline

Category: General News
Posted: October 27, 2010 04:16PM
Author: Nemo

A failure involving the launch control computers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming caused an entire squadron of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles to go into "LF Down" status causing a loss of communication with the missiles. The failure also meant that certain security protocols were down as well. While the missiles were still able to be launched, control was only possible via an airborne communications platform.

The missiles are controlled by a launch control computer (LCC) which is responsible for periodically querying the status of each missile for which it is responsible. Since the LCC pings the missiles in sequence, an out-of-sequence query will cause the missile to report errors. The missile control officers tried several quick fixes, but more and more errors began being reported which caused the officers to take all five LCCs off-line, leaving 50 missiles in the dark. The officers were able to then successfully restart four of the five LCCs. A similar cascading failure was noted 12 years ago at another Air Force base due to a hardware failure, leading investigators to concentrate on that as the prime suspect.

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