Turning The Titan Missile Key

your weapon is President of the United States nobody else now wherever the president travels he has an aide that travels with him that takes carries around a little briefcase called a football now let's just for the sake of argument say well the president has decided it's time for us to retaliate what he's going to do is going to send a coded lunch order from that football to the war room at the White House that message will then get transmitted to us from one of two sources sac headquarters Omaha Nebraska 15 ther Force Riverside California it's a pair of speakers with a commander another pair over here for the deputy the electronics on level three will screen out the weaker of the two signals so you get a signal and you're going to hear a warning sound and we hear that warning sound commander you and your deputy are going to pick up your emergency action message books if you open it up you're going to see there's a forum what you're going to hear something like this ah actually that goes on for 35 characters and the two of you are going to sit and fill out those those forms using again this other state-of-the-art device known as a grease pencil at the end of that that transmission had the message repeat message at which point the two of you trade books and you're going to read each other's work if you are 100% accurate the two of you now have the authority to go over there and open the emergency warriors safe that read safe crews often called that to go to war safe now if you notice that safe has two combination locks on it one lock belongs to the banner the other one belongs to the deputy you don't know each other's combination so the two of you have to agree that you're going to take those losses so you do that and the first thing we're going to do is authenticate this launch now embedded in that message message is a string of seven characters you're going to look at the first two characters and find the envelope that has those first two characters on the outside say golf alpha you open that up you're going to extract a little plastic cookie now you're going to look at the final five characters in that string that I was talking about and compare that with the five characters on this cookie and if they exactly agree this is not a drill we now know we have an authenticated order from the President of the United States that were to launch our nuclear weapon what else do we do embedded in that message is a way to calculate a launch time the deputy will write that across the face of the clock Greenwich Mean Time again might be immediately might be two hours from now might be tomorrow morning you've all been to the war strategy at the Pentagon next thing remember Chuck talked about the butterfly valve law yes as far as I'm concerned that's the most important safety feature on this whole site to prevent unauthorized or unintentional launches now when you go back up topside and walk around go look at the first stage engine what you're going to see are two of an engine that has two thrust chambers each thrust chamber has an inlet line for fuel and under the line for the oxidizer four lines all four of those lines have to be open for this missile to fly all four of those lines are equipped with butterfly valves like this closed and open one of the oxidizer lines has a lock on it and in order in order for us to allow this missile to fly we have to unlock that and what were the way we do that is by entering a secret code six digit code that came in with that launch order it's the only and the first time you ever knew what that code was so the commander is going to order her be map to enter that right up here there's six little fun wheels now each thumb wheel contains 16 characters so how many possible combinations is that 16 to the sixth power I heard that sir a lot that's it actually commander they taught you that when you're training it's what it is it's actually slightly less than 16 million eight hundred thousand and only one works now those seem like pretty good odds don't think the Air Force didn't think sorted in order what they did they put a tries counter in here so you had six chances to guess that go in order to prevent some board crew member from three o'clock in the morning to come in here and start and fool around to see if they can guess the code you had six chances to do that if I'm the seventh chance even if you got it right this whole facility when I'm locked up and it would take many hours of many technicians work to bring the site back to active status commander if that happened when your crew is on duty you have not enhanced nobody touched that so what have we done we've authenticated the launch grip the launch time unlock the butterfly valve this was going to fly now last thing we do is we extract a pair of launch keys there's one here for the commander deputy you have one way to the rear two keys these two keys they're kind of like your car there there there and there they're spring-loaded in the off position they must be turned within two seconds of each other and held for five seconds now notice how far apart those keys are actually I measured it one times 87 inches don't know about you I'm not aware of too many people with an 87 inch wingspan maybe LeBron James cider plus with that spring loaded you can't come over here turn your key then click the run over here and turn that one I'm going to work so again here we have a situation the two of you have to agree that you're going to turn those keys you ready to do that okay stand up put your left hand on the key don't turn anything I tell you and hands on the gate whoa wait and I know I forgot to tell you guys something see this see this first light over here is a green light that says launch enable when you turn those keys that launch enable light is going to come on and when that light comes on you might as well say welcome to World War 3 because there is nothing you can do to stop it there is no whoops switch still on - okay let's have a picture go ahead and uh Mikey okay commander you're the boss so what you say is three two one launch and when you say launch the two of you turn the keys to the right and hold them three two one five six five seconds bingo you can you can release keys you have now started the launch sequence now things are going to happen fast much enabling we have the right butterfly valve lock and the missile will no longer take any orders from us battery activation to 28 volt DC batteries on the missile we're being charged with electrolyte takes 28 seconds ApS accessory power supply light when that light comes on this missile is totally independent of us and it is ready to fly bingo silo soft that huge blast door is now starting to slide open we went through this it went through the Tipsy beams that was the most visible way the crew knew that that door in fact was opening guidance go final diagnostic check through the guidance system now in a few seconds we're going to start pouring for pellets into the first stage we've developed enough for us those explosive bolts will pop and we have think about that from the time the two of you turns our teams to the time that missile was gone 58 seconds 30 to 35 minutes later some 6,000 miles the high target number 2 is going to disappear under a fireball many times brighter than the Sun three to four miles in diameter the commander you've done your duty is ordered by your president but you have a few things we need to do first of all we've got fires in the silo we essentially destroy the silo this these were designed for a single life finally you want to close that blast door because with that blast door open we're for we're too old so you do that then what we've been doing is following a checklist over there fine a lot of item on that checklist is await further orders hmm what are they going to come from we're in the middle of a nuclear war now the Air Force is good to us with definitely water therefore maybe 30 days that blacks valslide shut so we're now on recycle there we think we could probably survive down here for three to four weeks before we would start slowly suffocating to death we never ran that experiment so I don't know that not sure so you know commander after about three weeks if you haven't heard anything you have a tough decision today you're going to sit down here keep your crew down here and suffocate to death or are you going to take a chance to go out through that emergency escape group and do an unknown world it's your call don't thank God nobody on our side or their side ever had to make that decision as scary as it is peace peace new deterrence worked the altar is mutually assured destruction they didn't want that we didn't want that nobody wins that a nuclear war it's only degrees of losers with that where's my colleague

Channel: Sara Mowery

Views: 690,487

Rating: 4.9344687 out of 5

Keywords: Turning the key, titan missile, Titan Missile Museum (Museum), tucson, arizona

Id: FVZmFISzqwY

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Fri May 23 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/The_AverageGamer]

That was a wild ride! That man tells an amazing story and it legit gave me some goosebumps.

[u/ThePositiveAgnostic]

I hope the guys who end the world are as entusiastic as this guy

[u/vicaphit]

Where's lockpick lawyer to tell us how easily he could get into that safe?

[u/bozoconnors]

TURN YOUR KEY SIR

[u/carsonnwells]

Many unsung heroes protected humanity from random errors & false launch detections.

[u/savageotter]

I believe it was filmed here. https://titanmissilemuseum.org

Tucson also has the airplane graveyard and the Pima Air museum. if you like flying things Tucson is definitely worth a stop!

.

Edit:

While you are over that way,

• Los Alamos is not crazy far and has a ton of history of its part in the manhattan project.

• Albuquerque has a great nuclear science museum.

• The Trinity site, Although only open twice a year is also in that area.

[u/arctander]

Checkout the opening scene from WarGames (1983) staring John Spencer and Michael Madsen. There's also this critic's review of this scene you may enjoy. When I saw this in 1983 the tension was palpable in the theater.

"Turn your key, Sir!"

[u/SwannyWilkinson]

When you're so charming you convince some tourists to start WW3.

[u/dangerouspangolin]

This is really interesting. Now I want to know why are the russian spies always after the launch codes? What can they do with it except launch nuclear missiles against their own country?? It's not that they can launch american missiles against the USA, is it?