Interesting nuclear fact

[JammedStab]

I know....it is not aviation but it is controlled by the Air Force. And I thought that it was interesting. I'm sure some of the alert pilots of the old days can relate to the extreme safety precautions.

"The silos are connected to each other and to the missile launch control centers by thousands of miles of Hardened Intersite Cable System cable, which carry crucial communications.

“You can imagine with the distances involved as well as the redundancies: You’ve got thousands if not tens of thousands miles of that buried under Farmer Brown’s corn,” says John Watson, a missile systems test engineer for the 309th MMXG. “The reason for the redundancies is that if a portion of this squadron gets wiped out, either due to a natural disaster or an incoming missile strike, one of the surviving launch control centers could eventually find a path to any orphan [launch facility] to continue on with the mission.
“They didn’t double up, they didn’t triple up, they quadrupled up in most cases,” he stresses.

This level of redundancy also ensures that if one crew goes rogue and begins enabling a missile launch, the other crews will see that activity and be able to cancel the launch"

[Pontius Navigator]

In UK there used to be two lines into each s
V-bomber station and dispersal. Every so often, it could have been as often as 15-30 seconds the bomber box would bleep. I don't know how many lines there were out of Bomber Command. Occasionally we would get a fail light on one line or the other. From the fault reports we knew one ran up west of UK.

Later the lines into the station were doubled to four so we rarely lost comma, if at all. On one occasion, in an exercise, Machrihanish reported loss of comms. We were just approaching the Scramble. I opened two Flash calls, one on the military circuits and a military Flash on the public service. The GPO beat the military connection by a good few seconds.

We also had direct sub-trunk lines too.

In SAC HQ, when the controller initiated a broadcast receiving units would respond through a light acknowledgment. I don't recall our stations acknowledging readiness calls but at my level we were usually too busy, the assistant may have done so.