OT: Funny in a really scary way

[Thermodyne]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
The series of zeros wouldn't have been enough to launch the missles. There were switches and keys and whatever that had to be thrown in the proper order. It wouldn't be something where you bumped into the desk and accidentally nuked Vladivostok. But this did mean that if a base was overrun by hostiles or a missle crew went wacky they could make a deliberate action and launch without the proper authorization. I guess the military figured their security and training was sufficent to prevent this. Pretty scary, I agree.

Not to mention that few people had any type of hardware that could send the 8 bits of code. Also, they would need to know the transmission method, the client, the service, and the protocol. Based on the time frame, it was prolly a set of hand driven switches/relays that had to be set on site, and had to be input on site. Actually, IIRC there were cards kept in a safe that had switch settings on them. The operators would use the cards to set a series of rotary switches before they turned the keys. Those settings would then be converted to a binary instruction set for the systems on the delivery system. So, while the final output was 8bit binary, the input would have been 8 times the number of positions on the rotary switches.