The Ultimate Hack

The software that controls the launch of U.S. nuclear weapons has not been hacked, so far as we know, but it has some alarming vulnerabilities, according to Bruce G. Blair, writing in a New York Times oped. According to Blair we face the real possibility of a catastrophic cyber attack – or malfunction – in the nuclear arsenal. Blair’s credentials are impressive: He is a research scholar at Princeton and a former member of a Minuteman nuclear missile launch crew. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he was serving in an underground launch center in Montana when – as he recounted in another oped earlier this year – “we received an emergency message to prepare for nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” Today, he says, some serious questions are not being addressed, or not addressed adequately. Among them: Could a foreign agent launch another country’s missiles against a third country? Could a launch be set off by false early warning data that had been corrupted by hackers? This article concludes with a number of suggestions for reducing the risk.