Date

Jun 1, 1971

Description

This report assessed the technical practicality of launch-on-warning (LOW) as a means to assure Minuteman survivability in the face of an apparent Soviet strategic threat. With satellite-based warning systems providing nearly 30 minutes of warning of a Soviet ICBM attack, the National Command Authorities (NC) could order "the Minuteman [to] be launched within that 30-minute interval" and "the accuracy of the Soviet ICBMs will be unimportant because the Minuteman silos will be empty."

Whether the command-and-control system could function within the 30-minute time limit, whether the warning signals were accurate, and whether the Soviets might be able to defeat LOW by using submarine-launched ballistic missiles to "pin-down" Minuteman ICBMs were problems that the McDonnell Douglas analysts reviewed. For example, on false warning, the analysts maintained that the "probability of a false alarm by any one of the warning systems is negligible; the probability that two warning systems measuring entirely different phenomena would report correlated false alarms at the same time is infinitesimal." (Future analysts were not so certain.) On "pin-down," the analysts believed that the Soviets would not have the capability for several years and that it was possible to make "pin-down" impractical, e.g., by making Minutemen more resistant to radiation ("hardening").

In retrospect, one of the most problematic elements of the McDonnell Douglas analysis are the facts presented about the time required to make, transmit, and implement a decision to launch Minuteman missiles. According to the analysts, once the NCA made a launch decision, "significant delays" would occur, of which "the most important and the most surprising" was the "11 minutes required by the launch control crew to receive, decode, authenticate and execute the launch command." The analysts observed that "at one time," six minutes was the time required, bur 11 minutes was the "interval" established by "Air Force doctrine to insure that no crew attempts to launch before all crews have completed their prelaunch functions." Another four minutes was required to decode messages and transmit the launch command.

Bruce Blair, who was a Minuteman launch officer in the early 1970s, finds that the McConnell Douglas analysts were mistaken; it would take three minutes to launch the Minuteman at the most. The eleven-minute time line may have been the standard during the late 1960s but not in the years that followed.[23]

Source

U.S. National Archives, Record Group 383, Records of U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Bureau of Intelligence, Verification, and Information Management, 1968-81: box 1 of 1.

Document published in following posting(s):

The “Launch on Warning” Nuclear Strategy and Its Insider Critics

Jun 11, 2019