no ICs in nukes...

[Tim May]

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

> "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at 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.