Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz
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And I assume there are also a high bandwidth comms channels, and this is just the backup which is presumably tested each day.
High bandwidth comms are likely a lot more fragile than this. At the same time: there will be many different transmission channels, and I would expect this one to be useless immediately if someone really did something nasty.
The basic launch sequence is this: a missile crew receives a series of characters and both missileers write the characters down. They check against a codebook and verify that they both heard the same message and that it is a valid launch order. If the message is valid, they unlock the launch keys (from a box secured by two combination locks, each missileer knows the combination for one lock), insert the keys, enter the missile launch unlock code, enter the warhead arming code, turn the keys, and then that's that.
(There are several other steps -- go watch a video of a test launch and listen to the operators read off the checklist, there are quite a few steps. If you are wondering why such information is public, it is meant to reassure the other side that there is no possibility of unauthorized or unintentional launches -- we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us)
The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.
Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet
That's exactly what we were told when I toured a Titan II launch facility [0], but I have no idea if that still applies to the modern Minuteman III facilities that this article is about.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Missile_Museum
Perimetr? That's misunderstood. The idea behind Perimetr was that the Premier of the USSR did not have first-strike authority. Only the Politburo did. After they got rid of Stalin, the later governments of the USSR were very wary of a leader with too much power. Further down, control was divided between the KGB, which controlled the warheads, and the Strategic Rocket Forces, which controlled the launchers.
The most the Premier could do on his own was enable Perimetr. If it detected actual nuclear explosions and could not communicate with any of the top command bunkers, it would, after a delay of hours, release the arming codes for ICBMs to lower levels of authority. So it only worked for a second strike where a first strike had taken out most of the leadership. That was more restrictive than the US system.
Today, both Putin and Trump have first strike authority. Sleep well.
Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.
The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.
[1] https://subhranil.com/the-dead-hand-system-a-technical-analy...
[2] https://npolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Controlling_S...
[3] https://search.worldcat.org/title/51969872
If you wanted to ask someone whether they received a message, you'd ask if they received the preamble, and not the entire message which can be quite long.
As we saw from eMudhra this week, people do stupid things.
I wonder if the programmer too got brainwashed-failed in ST:NG
Then again, it is the government...
Interestingly the article seems to forgo of mentioning the nature/purpose except for “go-no-go” which seems, from context here in HN to mean “release the nukes”?
Messages usually mean nothing. An uptick in activity means.. nothing. We're on the tail end of a major exercise so upticks in chatter are probably related to that.
Anyone who posts anything along the lines of "but there were 5x more messages or a really big message so N is going to happen!" is a crazy person. Ignore them.
It's neat, but it's not prophetic.
This might be the source of the "DO NOT ANSWER" phrase from Three Body Problem.
I was a Minuteman III missileer at F.E. Warren from 2012 to 2016.
missileer.watch listens to 11175 kHz, one of the Air Force's HF Global Communications System frequencies, through the KPH receiver at Point Reyes. When a message is heard, the site transcribes the characters from the voice using the GPU on my desktop, and listeners can fix what it gets wrong. I plan to migrate the transcription to a per-second GPU service in a bit.
A few of you said the text reads like AI which is Fair. I built it with a lot of help from Claude, but I'll spend the next few days rewriting it in my own words.
I'm happy to answer questions about how it works.
Also: has electronic music such as techno sampled these yet...? Seems rife for a dancefloor hit!
The broadcasted ones are usually simulcasted globally across several frequencies. Different frequencies work better/worse at different times of day… but when it’s global, you could be in any time of day.
Other calls are just at one frequency. And I think if an aircraft is responding, it’s just on one frequency (dunno how they choose).
The HF net uses several frequencies, 8992 kHz is common at night and 11175 is common during the day. I'm only using 11175 because the KPH receiver at Point Reyes has a great antenna that hears it well day and night.
Usual news headlines on the sources I frequent.
You might get something out of how frequently there are announcements on this channel. That's the only real info you're going to get out of this unless you're in a very select group.
Land based would take maybe twice that much.
Effectively the world has been 30 minutes from 'dead' since the 1960s.
Basically, you would run out of water, and even if you have clean water you would still run out of food, even if you survived the strike and the fallout. We cannot actually live without major transportation hubs to deliver food etc., which by necessity are located in or near the major urban areas that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. That, more than anything else, is why the US and USSR ultimately abandoned "civil defense" and focused on "deterrence."
It’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were repopulated so quickly.
But yes, good point regarding the rest of the infrastructure.
Rebuilding society would be very hard.
I don't monitor these regularly so perhaps I'm wrong, but given it's encrypted (likely with a OTP), you'd have to be mining metadata and making some second order dot connections to really get anything meaningful out of this without the cipher/OTP/some way to decrypt it and understand it.
(China is interesting because strictly speaking they follow a theoretically suboptimal strategy -- they keep their ICBMs in an unarmed configuration and would "absorb the blow" of a surprise nuclear first strike. The US and RF follow the theoretically optimal "launch on warning" strategy, which requires ICBMs that are always armed and ready to launch within minutes.)
But it costs a lot to feel confident in SLBMs, especially if the top of your target list includes the USA.
Otherwise, if you're talking about the USA specifically... ICBMs should probably be considered an expensive hedge.
Finally, "optimal" depends on your definition. China has chosen a public "no first strike", while also avoiding launch on warning likely for a variety reasons. China's publicly stated "minimal deterrence strategy" (which they seem to be walking away from) was probably at least partly a pragmatic choice, driven by resource constraints. Also, for what its worth, it does seem like China is also walking away from a strict "no launch on warning" policy as well.
The lack of launch on warning (this is my speculation) was probably a combination of lack of technical capability (both ISR and C2), wanting to maintain tight central control, and wanting to play up the advantages of being "the third player".
Here's a whole recent report on China's nuclear force: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2025.2...
One reason to maintain an ICBM force is that the ICBM silos protect the missiles against anything less than a direct nuclear strike; by placing the silos far from urban areas you force the opponent to expend many nuclear weapons attacking individual silos, which greatly increases the cost of a first strike. If you were wondering where bomber forces fit in, maintaining both ICBM and bomber forces creates a "synchronization problem" -- both must be destroyed at the same time to prevent retaliation, and by strategically placing the air fields and missile silos a country can make a synchronized attack more difficult (the attack will be detected long before anything is destroyed, but one of the two will have more time to initiate the retaliatory strike). Bombers also force the opponent to expend significant resources on air defense, resources that could otherwise be devoted to offensive weapons. Another reason to have a bomber force is that bombers can be recalled after being ordered to strike; missiles cannot be recalled once launched and even if they could be the other side will detect the launches and immediately retaliate.
The US and USSR developed an entire theory of the nuclear triad during the cold war, and both reached the same basic conclusions about the need for all three legs.
Until the apocalypse arrives that is.
Re: the partial EAM from "Crimson Tide".
> Preformatted is what you can hear: the same shape every time.
> hearing it is all anyone outside the force can do.
> The day has a shape.
I would recommend switching to a newer Claude model.
I prefer to call it Cloddish, myself.
Unfortunately only Gemini models can write text that isn't vomit-inducing.
Then Opus 5.5 came out and I switched back to Ant after 1 month of OAI. Opus 5.5 fixed all the previous Opus 5 problems, and while Fable still requires credits, there's hardly any need to use it since Opus 5.5 is so good and so token efficient.
"this is the worst it will ever be"
Having tuned in myself with a SDR, it isn't that quiet. There's pretty steady rate of messages.
Because if true, I see no reason to spend that extra money, but for me Fable clearly outperformed Opus on complex tasks. (Including giving the same task and compare results)
8hs of “prompt engineering” daily for a year or so.
I find Fable immensely better than 5.5 in their capabilities and results. Opus makes mistakes, a lot and big. Both on High Effort.
I just run Fable for literally everything including daily random use. Never run out of tokens on the 100 plan.
So I would argue the world is already "a darker place".
Spelling errors are so far still a good sign of human written output.
If you think of the the frontier AI models as people, there aren't hundreds or thousands of "intelligent human-like machines" that you're speaking to, there are like... two: whatever the best model is made by Open AI or Anthropic right now.
A programmer might be reading (or at least skimming) thousands of pages of text from just one (or at most two or three) models a week, week after week, for months now.
It's like the entire world is talking to two aliens that have stepped of their glittering spaceship. The aliens can hold millions of conversations at once, but they have only two personalities, so... that's what everyone is getting, and everyone has learned to recognise.
What makes things even more obvious is that unlike humans, the models don't "self adjust". On the contrary, they are inherently amnesiacs, and hence don't realise that they're awfully repetitive! A human using the same phrase fifty times in a row will dial it back a notch, but these dials are the weights of the models and are frozen for each released version.
You mean this site? Because I think the messages it's about is real. The AI stuff is just the dumb copy in the interface (e.g. "Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.").
https://towardsdatascience.com/hamilton-a-text-analysis-of-t...
These days they’re calling themselves the “Department of War”
yup :)
Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...
But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.
The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.
If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.
That’s the twist.
YES.jpg
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...
Americans it seems.
Also, in my country, there's a large shopping area next to an army base, very hard to spot which hangar-looking building is full of stores (or a single large store, or a trampoline park) and which belongs to the army.
I mean.. AI knows best, and we should trust it, even when picking targets, right?
Again, really difficult concept to grasp. Take some time.
> Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases,
I would pause at this assertion. The US is a global thing, with global friends and enemies. Iran being one of our big foes is a knowing thing.