Work has begun to try to replicate an electronics glitch and determine what disrupted communication between 50 nuclear missiles and a launch control center, a US Air Force official said on Wednesday.
Teams from F.E. Warren Air Force Base and and Hill Air Force Base in Utah think they’ve isolated the faulty part where the problem occurred, said Lieutenant Colonel John Thomas, spokesman for the US Air Force Global Strike Command.
“It could be the part, it could be the way that it was installed, it could be the way that it was queried,” Thomas said.
The incident early on Saturday affected 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles based out of Cheyenne. The equipment failure lasted less than an hour and the air force said it never lost the ability to launch the missiles.
The suspected problem part is small enough to hold in your hand, Thomas said.
“That’s where our primary weight of effort is. But we are also not ruling anything out and we are looking at anything that may have contributed to it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the air force has implemented procedures so it can address the problem more rapidly should it occur again before a permanent fix can be made, he said.
Air force officials said there was no sign of foul play.
F.E. Warren oversees 150 ICBMs in silos scattered around the prairie. ICBMs at bases in Montana and North Dakota were not affected.
The communications failure is the latest in a series of nuclear mishaps that have plagued the air force in recent years.
In 2008, the Pentagon disclosed the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four electrical fuses for warheads. The fuses originated at F.E. Warren but the mix-up apparently happened after the parts were shipped to Utah.
In 2007, a B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. The pilot and crew were unaware at the time that they were carrying nuclear weapons.
An internal report asserted that slippage in the air force’s nuclear standards was a problem that has been identified but not effectively addressed for more than a decade. Those findings led to US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to fire Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and General Michael Moseley, the air force chief of staff in June 2008.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS