CONS: Barksdale Missile Number Six: The Stolen Nuclear Weapon, page 6

Originally posted by Gools

Originally posted by azchuck
I maintain whoever has the power to pull off the theft of a nuclear weapon through the Air Force chain of command has the power to obtain the codes.

Help me out here ATS.

Wasn't there some recent benign incident that occurred where Presidential codes were used/needed? I remember a thread about some such incident a while back. Anybody got a link?
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got it see page 2
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[edit on 9/11/2007 by Gools]

The codes required to authorize a National Warning System advisory are separate from those required to authorize a nuclear weapons release.

We had a similar incident in April of 1972 (I think) and I may have been the only civilian in the New Orleans metro area to notice it (it was during Saturday morning cartoons, and I was still a teenager - but I had also worked through the Shelter Manager Home Study Course at US Army Office of Civil Defense Staff College that summer from lack of anything better to do).

In any case, the actual "imminent nuclear attack" message instead of the "This is just a test" message went out. Naturally, I called my parish's Emergency Operations Center, who hadn't a clue of what was happening (sleep tight tonight, your government is on the job... ).

I'd think, too, that the threshold required before a warning message is issued is much lower than that required for release of nuclear weapons (although we're talking about perhaps thirty minutes prior to anticipated attack rather than fifteen, here)

There have been several upgrades in technology since the days when crewmen broke open the plastic-clad cards from the safe on the old B-52 in Dr. Strangelove - nanotech locks now protect nuclear weapon arming circuits and will irretrievably break (preventing a nuclear detonation of greater force than a pound or so of TNT) after a certain number of wrong codes have been entered.

Of course, there are plenty of folks around the world who have experience in using shaped charges to do things like cut metal downhole in oil and gas wells who could just replace the DOE arming circuits with improvised devices.

A major semiconductor company used to advertise one of its power operational amplifier chips with an obscenely low pulse rise time as being particularly useful for "nuclear weapons applications" back in the 1980s. Halcyon days, those. Just pull out the old arming circuit and put in the "Damn Fast Operational Amplifier" (I swear, that was the company's official name for it), and you're in business.

As far as decoupling the nuclear weapon's secondary from its primary by not having the proper codes, I doubt it. Once the primary (fission) device detonates, the wave of radiation which sets off the secondary (fusion) explosion can't be interrupted - it is, after all, a nuclear detonation. The radiation rolls over the holraum containing the fusion "fuel" and creates the requisite conditions for nuclear fusion to occur.

This means that if you have an intact W80 and manage to rewire the chemical explosive charges surrounding the levitated pit of the fission primary so that a nuclear detonation happens, how much of a fusion reaction you get depends on how much "fuel" is introduced into the holraum before hand (the "dial-a-yield" feature of the W80 which allows nuclear yield to be varied from 5 to 150 kilotons). Whether this process is controlled by the same devices which prevent an unauthorized detonation of the weapon's primary, I don't know. Adding one more opportunity for a malfunction to occur doesn't sound like sound weapons design practice to me, but I don't work at Livermore.