Hacker News Reader

Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

Funny you mention Wargames. That scene was probably the only realistic scene in the movie. They got that suspiciously good. The one before it, where he arrives at the LCF and it's a disguised farmhouse was idiotic.

View on HN

In England we have defense facilities disguised as farmhouses. We don't have land-based missiles but this [0] is/was a government bunker from which launch orders could be given. I wondered if you meant idiotic in the sense of unrealistic for America, or as a bad idea tactically?

[0]http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/

Sorry, I meant the US ones are nothing like that. It was totally inaccurate. In the USA, all the farmers/ranchers know where the stuff is.

"Excuse me, we're looking for Sierra 7." "Yeah, it's down this road for a mile, then left on 127."

And the Soviets wouldn't have been fooled either. So they look like military installations.

That may be true in some but certainly not all cases.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/us/roswell-new-mexico-miss...

That's a decommissioned silo. When it was operational, it would have had the fence and usual such around it. The Northern Tier facilities are mostly underground, too. The actual silos (Launch Facilities) look like basically nothing from the top, were it not for the fence and nasty signage starting "Use of deadly force authorized". Also the Southern Tier silos had the launch control facilities integrated with them.

It's not about hiding the facilities from locals, it's about hiding them from satellites. Or at least providing enough uncertainty that the enemy doesn't know for certain how many or which installations are where.

More morbidly, in a first strike scenario you want the enemy to waste nukes on actual farmhouses it couldn't tell for certain were launch facilities or not. Then even if no facilities are missed (something you would be hoping for), that's still fewer nukes to be dropped on cities and conventional military installations.

There is no point dropping a nuke on a single tactical target. Nukes have a blast range of miles and a regular missle can take our a facility just fine.

Whatever the reasoning, the USAF didn't do the farmhouse thing. We did the big fence, nasty signs, and heavily armed guards.

Why is the farmhouse disguise idiotic? I'm pretty sure that sort of thing actually happened -- to disguise the location from satellite surveillance, of course.

Not in the USA, where the movie takes place. Funny enough, I was doing that for a living when the movie came out. I still enjoyed it, although, like the rest of Hollywood's masterpieces, it wasn't remotely realistic.

suspiciously good

They just copied some footage helpfully provided by the air force. (7:50) There must have been a "director's cut" of the same because we see it in "The Day After" where they're turning the keys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPEBROvR9w

Reply on news.ycombinator.com