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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Accidentally launching a missile is pretty hard and I'm confident that we have enough safeguards against that. I'm not so sure we have enough safeguards against terrorists stealing nuclear weapons (or the essential components for making one). You only need somebody with motive and motivation, and a mistake by pair of truck drivers. It's fairly hard to make a reliable system out of that failure mode.

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A friend worked with that kind of transportation in the 80s. At the time it wasn't 2 truck drivers. Perhaps 30 people with lead and follow cars. Iirc, most were us martials, everyone was armed. the trailer was a rolling fortress. Security was probably much better in the Cold War. My friend had a story about a truck hitting some ice, and tipping over. They had prepared for many contingencys and had it handled in a few hours. The only person who noticed something was up was another truck driver who stopped to help. He was confused that the trailer didn't tear itself apart, but didn't make a bid deal out of it.

Not cheap. But likely pretty reliable.

Perhaps without the Russian villains the system has atrophied. Stories like that make me think it can work, but perhaps require a bit more wherewithal to maintain it.

The Wiki entry[0] for the secure trucks reads like some kind of Tom Clancy fiction. They allegedly have automated weapons systems that will kill attackers even after all defenders become casualties.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguards_Transporter

My friend likely worked with the prior generation. They were unwilling to go into any sort of detail. they did say, you don't want to be any where near one if the operators think you shouldn't be there. Their phrase was something like "There are extensive anti personnel defenses".

While I doubt that anything could stop a truly determined and well equipped adversary, I would frankly not be shocked if the whole thing was basically packed in claymores facing out, just for starters. You won't care in that extreme about compromising the physics package; you'll already be scrambling every resource including NEST to the site. You just want to buy time, and there are a lot of ways you could do that.

Hell, maybe they include an EPFCG... that would be really clever.

A rail gun? Wouldn't that only hit one narrow target?

No no, an "EMP bomb".

"due to unspecified security features that prevent the doors from being opened except in "an approved security area""

I wonder what that means, public + private key checks in the door?

You have to assume that such a truck is constantly "phoning home" and hopefully has some kind of asset tasked to watch it constantly. Maybe the process to get in involves authorization from "home base" in the form of that private key?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/hair-trigger-alert/clo...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bo...

It's such a complex network of systems and people and policies; all of which is constantly in flux. All of which has to yield a perfect result, every time. You can argue about robust systems, but the reality is that these systems are far from robust.

Look at what happened when the USSR collapsed for god's sake! We're still cleaning that up.

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