This is a Minuteman 3 Missile, capable of carrying up to three thermonuclear warheads.
They range from 3-5 hundred kilotons.
That’s more powerful than 6 hundred million pounds of dynamite.
And this is a cutting edge computer from the early 1990s.
And is used as the system processor to launch the Minuteman 3 Intercontinental ballistic
missiles.This is how we would conduct nuclear war, on eight inch floppy disks.
This is an 8 inch floppy disk.
It holds just under 250 kilobytes.
It’s only good for text documents, a super low-res photo or a song.
Right now there are over 450 Minuteman three missiles buried deep under fields in the sparsely
inhabited regions of the United States.
They are connected by a spider-web of thousands of miles of cables, ready to strike at top
secret targets faster than you can get a pizza.
Welcome to F.E.
Warren Air Force Base, home of the 90th Missile Wing.
They command 150 of these Minuteman III missiles.
It's hard to imagine a weapons system more powerful than the one we operate.
And yet, these missiles, their launch control centers and their command capsules all operate
on this antiqued technology.
That processor that it uses to basically run the operating system, is about a 386 equivalent,
so you are looking at early 90s technology.
There is a cursor, it’s a square.
Like an old Atari 2600.
We use a trackball not a mouse.
It has 100 megabytes of hard drive memory and it has about 16 megabyte of ram.
The missiles itself, that guidance computer, uses an operating system about the size of
an 8 inch floppy disk.
It’s about 200 kilobytes of memory and one channel of communication uses that floppy
disk to tell the system how to operate.
It was cutting edge technology back in 1971.
Old technology is not necessarily bad thing.
With an older weapons system like the Minuteman 3, which really was designed in the late 60s
early 70s, if it still works, and it provides us some good benefits, let’s leave it in
place and not mess with it.
There are benefits to old technology.
Modern networked computers can be easily hacked and compromised with malware, and with these
machines, that’s more difficult.
We don't use modern technologies such as I say wifi, WiFi’s been around for decades,
Wifi, Bluetooth..
there's no cloud for the Minuteman III operating weapons system, we don’t use those technologies
and that gives us a certain amount of security because it reduces the number of vulnerabilities
we have.
To say anything is hackerproof, absolutely, 100% is, that’s dangerous and we would never
say that we are 100% hacker proof.
We take a great amount of effort to ensure that we are mitigating every potential vulnerability
that we can identify.
While these computers may be from the 70s, the missileers who run these facilities, skew
a bit younger.
Most of them are too young to remember the Floppy Disk, not to mention Pac Man or Pong.
In fact the disks they're handling are (in some cases) older than they are.
The missileers look for false alarms and fake intruder signals caused by stray deer and
bad weather.
The combination of old technology and humans is what has kept the Minuteman 3 safe so far.
Look, they're old, and we know that, but a lot of the obscure technology that we use
still works.
So if we don’t need to upgrade it, then we don’t.
With the Minuteman weapons system, because it is so important and so vital, and the destructive
power of the weapon’s system is so vast.
Above and beyond anything else we need to ensure that this weapons system is safe and
secure.
And I can tell you right off the bat, I have complete confidence in the safety and security
of our weapons system and the nuclear weapons that we use on the nuclear weapons system.
So although these machines might be antiquated, this is still arguably one of the most powerfully
impactful computer systems in human history…
So, any changes they're going to make will have to be really well thought out, and top,
top secret.
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