Nuclear Launch Codes

[IROC]

Originally Posted by MRM

There's a famous book written by one of the scientists at Los Alamos who claimed that the safes supplied by the government to hold top secret documents overnight when the nuclear scientists went home came from the factory set with combination 0-0-0. For fun he used to go around after hours swapping secret documents from one office to the other as a practical joke because no one ever changed the settings. He got a reputation as a master safecracker and he never told anyone his secret until he retired and told his story. This was back when the formula for the A bomb and H bomb were the most closely guarded secrets on the planet. He joked in his book that he stole the most valuable property in the history of safecracking when he messed around with America's nuclear secrets.

I forgot who it was, but I'll see if I can look him up.

Feynman.

[VaSteve]

I saw a documentary with Matthew Broderick and he hacked the launch codes to the WOPR. It wasn't a bunch of zeros, that's for sure.

That whole thing where it figured out the codes (shown on the outside) looked scary cool when I was 10, but now I realize how silly it was.

[sammyg2]

Interesting side note regarding dad's involvement in the minuteman projects:

in the early 60's he was chosen as part of the team to develop the advanced minutemen design and proposal (MMII).
In that process he came up with a way to use an unconventional design of shape charges for thrust termination, which was 400 pounds lighter than the existing design on the MM.
He was given the green light for development and it proved successful, and his design was adopted by the air force on the MMII and also the Poseidon (C-4) and Trident (D-5) upper stages for the navy.
At that time the Air Force stated that the reduction of weight of upper stages was worth $1 million per pound.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by IROC

Feynman.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs588/safecracker.pdf

[sammyg2]

Found this re: dad's thrust termination design ....

The Hercules M57 third stage of Minuteman I & II had thrust termination ports on the sides. These ports, when opened by detonation of shaped charges, reduced the chamber pressure so abruptly that the interior flame was blown out. This allowed a precisely timed termination of thrust for targeting accuracy. The larger Minuteman III third stage motor also has thrust termination ports although the final velocity is determined by PSRE.

LGM-30 Minuteman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[sammyg2]

And they did it with slide rules.





When the computer senses the missile has reached the correct point in its flight path, thrust termination (TT) ports in the front of the third-stage motor are opened for negative thrust. The post-boost vehicle (PBV) separates from the third stage motor and is maneuvered by the MGS to the pre-determined points of RV deployment. The RVs are then pre-armed and separated one at a time from the post-boost system. The RVs follow individual ballistic trajectories, reenter the earth's atmosphere, arm, and detonate according to the planned target profile.