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Tuesday, May 31st, 2016

The Pentagon’s Huge Atomic Floppies

Author:     Mark Thompson
Source:     Time
Publication Date:     May 25, 2016
 Link: The Pentagon’s Huge Atomic Floppies
Stephan:   During the Cold War with the Soviet Union the dominant geopolitical military strategy was something called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), the idea being that if each side could blow the other to bouncing gravel that neither side would start such a war. And it worked. In those days being in the nuclear command was a hot career ticket. Then on the 26th December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist. And since that time the U.S. nuclear air  and land  forces have been frozen in time. The naval submarine arm of what was called the Triad, because the sea is such a demanding environment, has had to be more up to date, but even it is technologically far behind the times. Here is the truth about how really out of date land missile installations have become. And serving in that command is now a career dead end. And so, today, we have the most powerful weapons on earth, run and managed on systems that were out of date 30 years ago. It is a truly bizarre story.
Minuteman III Launch Control, Oscar Zero Missile Alert Facility at the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site near Cooperstown, North Dakota.

Minuteman III Launch Control, Oscar Zero Missile Alert Facility at the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site near Cooperstown, North Dakota.

When you hear the phrase “floppy disk,” your mind (assuming you’re of a certain age) flashes back to those ubiquitous 3.5-inch versions that were AOL’s Johnny Appleseed in the mid-1990s, spreading “You’ve Got Mail!” across the land. Only the aged among us can recollect what came before: the behemoth 5.25-inch models that owned the (tiny computer universe of the) 1980s.

That’s why it might give you pause to learn that the Pentagon—that epitome of cutting-edge technology and the inventor of the Internet—still uses gargantuan 8-inch floppy disks, fossils from the 1970s, to help operate the nation’s nuclear weapons.

“Legacy IT investments across the federal government are becoming increasingly obsolete,” the Government Accounting Office said in a report released Wednesday. “For instance, [the Department of] Defense is still using 8-inch floppy disks in a legacy system that coordinates the operational functions of the United States’ nuclear forces.”

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