When the officers in a control center turned their launch keys, the timer started. And when the timer ran out, if no message had been received from the other control centers, approving or opposing the order to launch, all the missiles lifted off. The problem with the timer, Rubel soon realized, was that a crew could set it to six hours, six minutes—or zero. In the wrong hands, it gave a couple of SAC officers the ability to wipe out fifty cities in the Soviet Union. An unauthorized attack on that scale, a classified history of the Minuteman program noted, would be “an accident for which a
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