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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

More Signs of the Singularity! (Also: MORE BOMBS!)

Danger Room:
[F]or three-quarters of an hour Saturday morning, launch control officers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming couldn’t reliably communicate or monitor the status of 50 Minuteman III nuclear missiles…. A single hardware failure appears to have been the root cause of the disruption, which snarled communications on the network that links the five launch control centers and 50 silos of the 319th Missile Squadron. Multiple error codes were reported, including “launch facility down.” [The event was] not unprecedented: “Something similar happened before at other missile fields.” A disruption of this magnitude, however, is considered an anomaly of anomalies…. “I saw this happen to three or four missiles, maybe,” says John Noonan, a former U.S. Air Force missile launch officer… “This is 50 ICBMs dropping off at once. I never heard of anything like it.”

Er, awesome.

Another paragraph in the report seemed rather worthy of note:
The incident comes at a particularly tricky time for the Obama administration, which is struggling to get the Senate to ratify a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. In conservative political circles, there’s a distrust of the nuclear cuts — and a demand that they be matched with investments in atomic weapon upgrades. Saturday’s shutdown will undoubtedly bolster that view.

Oh, yes, undoubtedly. It's just another window into the Republican Reptile Brain:
Problem: Failures of safety measures for our apocalyptic nuclear arsenal pointlessly imperil world.

Republican Reptile Brain Response: MORE BOMBS!

[Note: MORE BOMBS! is always the response, whatever the problem. It's easier to remember that way for your average Republican Reptile Brain. Do not mock Happy Fun Ball.]

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