Reposted by Captain Obvious
Belarus tests a new path back to the West
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has worked his way out of Western isolation before. Now, he seems to be launching yet another attempt.
kyivindependent.com
Belarus tests a new path back to the West
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has worked his way out of Western isolation before. Now, he seems to be launching yet another attempt.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Sept. 21 announced a "ma...
![Map of the USA labeled "Soviet SLBM [Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile] Time of Flight to SAC [Strategic Air Command] Targets." Shows both "nominal" and "depressed" trajectories. Absolute best (north central USA) is between 580 and 850 seconds (9.6 – 14 min). Absolute worst (everywhere else) is between 320 and 650 seconds (5.3 – 10.8 min). The variations are based on where they assume the subs are launching from.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d6lghffuwlinx22c2rtfbdwv/bafkreieglufuwafzowfgzaia7ofruyb3q22ltpaqy6ltw2juohhpqwpyn4)
![From the text explaining the diagram, which I have highlighted in a few places:
**In the missile-command loop, major uncertainty in the time required to complete the chain arises from the impossibility of predicting the reaction time of the NCA [the President and his advisors]. It is not really even possible to assign upper and lower bounds to this interval. Even if the NCA is assembled and a response plan is already selected, some time would be required to assimilate the nature of the attack. On the other hand, if the attack is a complete surprise and Washington, D.C. is attacked early in the exchange, just assembling the NCA, or what is left of it, may consume hours.** Because any assessment of this time interval necessarily must be extremely scenario dependent, this study adopted the approach of determining how much time could be allotted to this process given the probable attack parameters and the known time delays.
Once the launch decision has been made at the NCA level, there are still three significant delays before the missiles can be considered safe. **The most important and the most surprising of the delays is the 11 minutes required by the launch control crew to receive, decode, authenticate and execute the launch command.** This time delay is not a minimum or even the average of all launch crews but rather it is an interval which has been established by Air Force doctrine to insure that no crew attempts to launch before all crews have completed their prelaunch functions.
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The page goes on to explain that any Minuteman Launched Control Center (LCC) crew can cancel the order of any others, as a failsafe measure. This means that the launching of a squadron is thus "determined by the slowest crew" on purpose. It says also that a "common time reference" was established to avoid fratricide, and so it is total 11 minutes + 4 minutes of code processing = 15 minutes to launch.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d6lghffuwlinx22c2rtfbdwv/bafkreiak5b7gpcbffiyrbhnjc7ml2ebas2u3kqny2wlerxdmzrorfcr2hu)
