President Joe Biden came into office seeking to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in American policy. When something breaks, the Air Force maintenance crews pull parts from warehouse shelves, pay a contractor to make them to specifications, or even occasionally scavenge them from military museums. The entire ICBM fleet runs on less computational power than what’s now found inside the smartphone in your pocket.
Some systems have been updated over the years, but these advances are unrecognizable to anyone who lived through the personal-computer revolution, let alone the internet age. of America, defunct since 1987, and Hughes Aircraft Co., defunct since 1997. Look closely at the machines and you’ll find names of manufacturers like Radio Corp. military installed the equipment decades ago. Banks of turquoise electronics racks, industrial cables, and analog controls have been down here since the U.S. Walking into Moffett’s capsule at Alpha-01 is like walking into the past. We spend a lot of time saying to ourselves, ‘Hey, how are we going to make this work today?’” “You can hear them pretty clearly if you stand on an angle, on one leg, and jump up and down,” Moffett says, smiling. His classified phone line has such a weak connection that he can barely hear fellow Air Force officers who are commanding more than 100 other nuclear missiles spread across 9,600 sq. Moffett’s computer monitor-the one that enables him to keep watch on a fleet of 10 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)-has a flashing glitch on the bottom of the screen. Then there are malfunctions that aren’t marked.
0 kommentar(er)
