ALERT! 50 Nuclear Missiles Suddenly Shut Down:

What powered down 50 nuclear missiles on October 23, 2010?

From Dateline Zero – What exactly failed is unknown. Depending on the source it was either a “power failure,” or “equipment failure,” or just “failure.” If what happened isn’t certain, what caused the failure is likely to remain a great big question mark.

What we do know …

Something shut down 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). A full one-ninth of the U.S. missile stockpile went temporarily offline on Saturday, October 23.

It happened at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. (View map.) The 90th Missile Wing, headquartered there, controls 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. They’re on full-time alert and are housed in a variety of bunkers across several states.

According to an article in The Atlantic:

Saturday morning, according to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what’s known as “LF Down” status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves.

LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline. In LF Down status, the missiles are still technically launch-able, but they can only be controlled by an airborne command and control platform.
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According to the official, engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of at least five missiles, usually ten of them, began to “ping” out of sequence, resulting in a surge of “noise” through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they’re not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.

Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark.  The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted.

The suspect LCC remains off-line.

The Atlantic also reports that the specific cause of the failure “remains unknown.” There’s speculation that it could have been cause by a breach of underground cables deep beneath the base, according to a senior military official.

Because it is allegedly “next to impossible for these systems to be hacked,” according to The Atlantic‘s source, the military does not believe the incident was caused by “malicious actors.”

A half dozen individual silos were affected by Saturday’s failure …

Continue reading the article in full at Dateline Zero.