Heads up. Hackers could launch ours or Russia's nuclear ICBMs

Old weapons, new terror worries

Russian and US experts meet this month to assess terror tactics, from hacking into systems to seizing a weapon.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

MOSCOW – Imagine this scenario: Computer hackers working for Al Qaeda break into Russia's nuclear weapons network, and "spoof" the system into believing it is under attack, setting off a chain reaction, and a real nuclear counterattack.

Another doomsday possibility made headlines when Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's No. 2, was quoted last month boasting that Al Qaeda had already acquired "some suitcase bombs" - radioactive material packed with conventional explosives. Mr. Zawahiri said that anything was available for $30 million on the Central Asian black market or from disgruntled Soviet scientists. Russia immediately rejected the claim. snip

The sobering results of the still- classified work by a Pentagon "Commission on Nuclear Fail-Safe" - to which Mr. Blair testified about Soviet nuclear safeguards, inside a vault at the Pentagon around 1992 - point to US vulnerabilities that could also apply to Russian systems today. Investigators found an "electronic back door" into the US Navy's system for broadcasting nuclear launch orders to Trident submarines.

"This deficiency allowed unauthorized hackers, which could be terrorists or high school mischief makers, to potentially insert a launch order and transmit it to the Trident," Blair says. The gap was so serious that Navy launch order verifications had to be revised.

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