On Wednesday, September 4, 2002, at 08:12 PM, Peter Gutmann wrote:

"Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> writes:

...

there are no chips in nukes (p 8)

There are no ICs in *safety-critical* areas (they use discrete components and mechanical interlocks). An earlier slide is quite clear that there are ICs in there.

In my earlier life, I worked at Intel on issues of radiation effects on ICs, especially VLSI. I got to know Bob Gregory, the IC fabrication specialist for Sandia/Los Alamos. There was a lot of work being done even back in the 70s on migrating to IC-based systems. And one of the earliest talks I heard on public key crypto was one by Martin Hellman on using PK for weapons verification, e.g., fiber optic bands around missiles emitting regular beacons to demonstrate that they had not been opened or compromised. This would have been around 1978-79. Just some background notes. I have no idea when microprocessors first made their appearance in nukes, or what the model numbers were. Certainly the guidance systems for cruise missiles are very sophisticated. (I also advised Washington about how easy it could be to use modified commercial ion implanters, for example, to disrupt satellites. Disrupt them beyond the ability of their resident ECC to correct. The focus on most particle-beam weapons had prior to that been on using particle beams to mechanically "punch" a missile or satellite. I gave a talk in 1979 to a Jasons-related panel in La Jolla on how the beam fluence calculations usually used to show how impractical particle beam weapons would be were actually off by 5 or 6 orders of magnitude. Namely, that scrambling the memory and processors of state of the art satellites like DSCS (Defense...Communications Satellite) and TDRSS would be relatively easy to do. I gave calculations. A few days later, I got a call saying a special meeting was being called for the following week in Washington, and would I please give the opening talk? I did, but was excluded from the afternoon sessions, as they were classified.) --Tim May, Corralitos, California Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." --Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.