Lieutenants Allia Martinez and Benjamin Lenos inspect the automatic control and command system of the Warren base of the United States area force, which has 150 Minuteman III missiles Credit: United States Air Out
The United States nuclear missile system
has stopped using 8-inch floppy disks to give the launch order, and instead use solid-state digital storage drives.
The change of the diskettes to the digital storage units in a solid state of high security was carried out in June, as Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the 595 Strategic Communications Squadron of the Area Force reported,
to C4irsNET. However, the specific type of storage unit has not been specified.
For Lieutenant Colonel, it is a "unique", "very old and very good" system, about which I sometimes joked to say that it was the "oldest IT system of the Areas Forces".
An 8-inch floppy disk like the ones used by the automatic management system of the US nuclear arsenal, next to a flash drive
The 8-inch floppy disks are a type of floppy disk developed by IBM in 1967, of a larger size and smaller capacity (between 150kB and 512KB) that, since the 70s have been a safe, hacking-proof solution of the system US nuclear missiles because they had no IP address.
These storage units were used in the Series / 1 computers that formed the automated strategic command and control systems (SACCS), that is, the systems that sent the order to the control centers for the launch of missiles
But the challenge of maintaining the equipment that uses these diskettes, along with the fact that young people do not usually have as much experience with these old formats, has led the US Department of Defense to modernize them and replace them with another type of storage unit.
ADEMS
US nuclear missiles will no longer be controlled by a floppy disk – LA NACION
