Tag: cold war

#18 Daily dose : US’s top secret nuclear launch code was frighteningly simple

Vaithi March 18, 2017

For nearly 20 years, the secret code to authorize launching U.S. nuclear missiles, and starting World War III, was terrifyingly simple and even noted down on a checklist. From 1962, when John F Kennedy instituted PAL encoding on nuclear weapons, …

#17 Daily dose : The IBM SAGE – The heavyweight of all the computers

Vaithi March 17, 2017

When the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, the United States government concluded that it needed a real-time, state-of-the-art air defense system. It turned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which in turn recruited companies …