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Comment by jacquesm

13 hours ago

Nice and soothing for when you're already a bit nervous about what the next 13 minutes might bring.

Is there something extra scary happening?

Usual news headlines on the sources I frequent.

  • My understanding is that this is just showcasing a website that introduces/makes it easy to digest the EAM as a concept, not that there's anything particularly worrying happening on these frequencies in the present moment.

    I don't monitor these regularly so perhaps I'm wrong, but given it's encrypted (likely with a OTP), you'd have to be mining metadata and making some second order dot connections to really get anything meaningful out of this without the cipher/OTP/some way to decrypt it and understand it.

    • It is OTP, that is not a secret. The secret is not how the orders are being communicated, it is the actual meaning of the orders (e.g. the targeting pattern) and certain strategically significant details about how a launch order would be executed (e.g. if only one pair of launch keys is turned there is a timeout during which another missileer crew can cancel the launch; the length of that timeout is secret). During the cold war nuclear strategy was the subject of extensive research by both the US and the USSR, which is why both sides wound up pursuing essentially the same strategy.

      (China is interesting because strictly speaking they follow a theoretically suboptimal strategy -- they keep their ICBMs in an unarmed configuration and would "absorb the blow" of a surprise nuclear first strike. The US and RF follow the theoretically optimal "launch on warning" strategy, which requires ICBMs that are always armed and ready to launch within minutes.)

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  • > Is there something extra scary happening?

    You might get something out of how frequently there are announcements on this channel. That's the only real info you're going to get out of this unless you're in a very select group.