Some of the comms channels are even lower bandwidth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency (Though, apparently the US no longer uses this)

I think this is the primary.

High bandwidth comms are likely a lot more fragile than this. At the same time: there will be many different transmission channels, and I would expect this one to be useless immediately if someone really did something nasty.

Back in my Navy days, we were taught HF is the less susceptible to jamming so is used for critical comms like these in serious situations. My ship performed in one exercise related to a doomsday scenario. We sat all day listening to an HR receiver until we heard these same messages, and we would then record the characters spoken. The message was repeated so we could make sure what we wrote was accurate. We never responded. Instead, we then repeated the same messages on an HF transmitter, presumably as part of some relay.

Until someone decides the ionosphere needs to stop working for such relays. And there is only one way that I'm aware of to do that and that would be stupendously bad news.

I, too, was in the navy and supervised this very exercise on a ship. The exercise simulates a doomsday scenario that presumes satellite comms are out after a nuclear strike. Ships and other stations retransmit the messages over HF in order to eventually reach nuclear-armed subs for assured second strike capability. HF, with its semi-BLOS (beyond line of sight) range, is used to form a global communications network without satellites. The range of course depends on how much signal bounces off the atmosphere, which is why many stations are needed for redundancy. The whole exercise is Top Secret.

You can probably just point Claude or ChatGPT to decrypt it, it would find that there's some silly and obvious cipher is used that survived from the 60ies, with a 56 bit private key. /this is a wild guess, I don't have any special clearance or access/

Not a chance. OTP for sure.

An OTP is secure only if the key is truly random.

As we saw from eMudhra this week, people do stupid things.

eMudhra does stupid things, NSA does not. Not with NC2.

There are four lights.

I wonder if the programmer too got brainwashed-failed in ST:NG

What’s the significance of the first six characters? They repeat them multiple times before reading off the full message multiple times.

Those six are the preamble, they identify the message.

If you wanted to ask someone whether they received a message, you'd ask if they received the preamble, and not the entire message which can be quite long.

Sheesh, hopefully a governmental department that has the NSA nearby would've been warned about this...

Then again, it is the government...

I also dont know anything but Im sure AI / cloud / blockchain / mongoDB / (insert fad here) will solve it due to synergy and other buzzwords.

Nuclear strike orders do not require high bandwidth. The orders contain targeting information and arming codes, all of which is pre-programmed on the missiles (the target package is specified with a "pointer" -- the computers on the missiles already have all the details, the order simply identifies which set of details should be used). For ICBM crews it is conceivable that orders could be transmitted on high-bandwidth systems, but for submarines that is not even possible (ELF bands have to be used because of the physical properties of ocean water).

The basic launch sequence is this: a missile crew receives a series of characters and both missileers write the characters down. They check against a codebook and verify that they both heard the same message and that it is a valid launch order. If the message is valid, they unlock the launch keys (from a box secured by two combination locks, each missileer knows the combination for one lock), insert the keys, enter the missile launch unlock code, enter the warhead arming code, turn the keys, and then that's that.

(There are several other steps -- go watch a video of a test launch and listen to the operators read off the checklist, there are quite a few steps. If you are wondering why such information is public, it is meant to reassure the other side that there is no possibility of unauthorized or unintentional launches -- we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us)

> we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us

The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.

Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet

> The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.

Perimetr? That's misunderstood. The idea behind Perimetr was that the Premier of the USSR did not have first-strike authority. Only the Politburo did. After they got rid of Stalin, the later governments of the USSR were very wary of a leader with too much power. Further down, control was divided between the KGB, which controlled the warheads, and the Strategic Rocket Forces, which controlled the launchers.

The most the Premier could do on his own was enable Perimetr. If it detected actual nuclear explosions and could not communicate with any of the top command bunkers, it would, after a delay of hours, release the arming codes for ICBMs to lower levels of authority. So it only worked for a second strike where a first strike had taken out most of the leadership. That was more restrictive than the US system.

Today, both Putin and Trump have first strike authority. Sleep well.

Interesting information. Can any of this be found in source documents online ?

Yes. But you have to go beyond page one of Google results because there is so much slop, human and otherwise. See [1] for a technical overview. See page 14 of [2] for the strategic and political aspects of who controlled what in a crisis. "Cheget No. 1 (the Soviet premier's portable terminal) had priority status: its owner could enact heightened level of alert and, after the early warning system registered the launch of U.S. nuclear weapons, give launch order (transmit codes unblocking the launch command)." That's the key point. The premier of the USSR did not have personal first strike authority.

Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.

The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.

[1] https://subhranil.com/the-dead-hand-system-a-technical-analy...

[2] https://npolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Controlling_S...

[3] https://search.worldcat.org/title/51969872

> Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet

That's exactly what we were told when I toured a Titan II launch facility [0], but I have no idea if that still applies to the modern Minuteman III facilities that this article is about.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Missile_Museum