wdstarr@eddie.mit.edu (William December Starr) (09/26/89)
From: wdstarr@eddie.mit.edu (William December Starr)
While working on a future history for a hypothetical science fiction
story, I came up with the following idea: during a limited "slow
motion" exchange of nuclear missiles between a collapsing Soviet Union
and the United States, several missiles of unknown origin destroyed
Tokyo and a few other Japanese cities. While it was strongly
suspected that someone in the U.S. hierarchy had seized upon the
US/USSR war as an excuse to do serious damage to America's chief
economic rival, nothing was ever (or could ever be) proven.
My question is: is this sort of thing possible? How are US missiles,
both silo- and submarine-launched, targetted? Who has the authority
to retarget them, and how is it done? At what point in the chain does
meaningful data get stripped away from the retargetting orders? (That
is, at what point do the orders stop saying things like "Retarget the
missile to hit Moscow instead of Leningrad," and start saying far less
meaningful things like "Retarget the missile to hit Target #1463
instead of Target #974," where the recipient of the orders has no idea
at all where Targets #1463 and 974 are?)
A related question is: does the US maintain targetting data for parts
of the world that we normally wouldn't be expected to target? To use
the above example, the fact that we maintain data on how to send
to Moscow virtually any missile in our arsenal (assuming it has
sifficient range) is common knowledge. . . but do we also maintain
data on how to send missiles to Tokyo? To London? To south Florida?
[Please confine responses to the net to the technical
details, and address comments on the scenario to Mr.
Starr directly. --CDR]
--
William December Starr
Primary Address --> athena!charon.local!wdstarr@eddie.mit.edu
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