I've grown up reading Tom Clancy and probably most of you have at least seen Red October, so this book caught my eye when browsing used books for a recent trip. It's a fairly human look at what's involved in sailing on a Trident missile submarine, with perspectives from the Captain, chief of the boat, a newbie, old hand, and a newly married sailor. It's also technical in places, revealing some of the interesting details about how things work. What made me tag it for posting here was the discussion of how they handle the release of the nuclear missiles. The movies always show the land based silos having the two key systems and Clancy has described a similar system for Russian subs, but here it goes much further than that. Everything is scripted, from the time they get the initial message everything is handled by two people, and it is definitely a multi stage/multi person process to actually do the launch.

From a security perspective, you have to appreciate the problem. First you need to make sure that you can't have a crazy captain launch missiles on his own (the author cites the sub as being the worlds fifth largest nuclear power), and you need a highly secure way to tell him it's proper to launch, and not a message from one lunatic upstream. The book discussed a mid 90's security review that ended up adding even more safeguards to a fairly secure system. The captain of the sub during the time of the book said it was theoretically possible for the crew working together to overcome all the security safeguards, but in practice it could never be done without detection and would be a lengthy process. It's all doctrine that the captain should have seen an escalation of events that makes the launch seem if not reasonable, at least contextual, and is obligated to phone home if any doubt exists - even if that means risking detection.

The other part I admire is that they do missile drills all the time, what we would call testing. Think about that. They run tests that do everything except eject the missile from the submarine on a routine basis. It's not just software, it's a lot of hardware too - how would you like to own writing or testing the process that let's all systems enter a simulation mode and doesn't accidentally fire a nuclear missile? That is pretty intense.

Big Red: The Three-Month Voyage of a Trident Nuclear Submarine available used at Amazon, something different for you to read.