[LINK] U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks

[Michael Wood]

As is acknowledged in the article, is this a good step or not?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html

Update Complete: U.S. Nuclear Weapons No Longer Need Floppy Disks

The Defense Department has transitioned away from a 1970s-era nuclear
command and control system that relied on eight-inch floppy disks. The
“modernizing” effort was quietly completed in June.
By Liam Stack
Oct. 24, 2019
Rest easy, people of Earth: The United States’ nuclear arsenal will no
longer rely on a computer system that uses eight-inch floppy disks, in an
update the Defense Department has cast as a step into the future but which
some observers might be surprised to learn was required at all.
The system, called Strategic Automated Command and Control System, or
SACCS, “is still in use today but no longer uses floppy disks,” David
Faggard, a spokesman for the Air Force Global Strike Command, which manages
the Air Force portion of the arsenal, said in an email. “Air Force Global
Strike Command is committed to modernizing for the future.”
The update is part of a broader overhaul of the United States’ atomic
weapons that began under President Barack Obama and has continued under
President Trump. The move away from floppy disks was completed in June but
was not widely reported at the time. It was reported last week by C4ISRNET,
a website that covers military technology.
“The Air Force completed a replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives
with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution in June,” Justin
Oakes, a spokesman for the Eighth Air Force, said in an email. “This
replacement effort exponentially increased message storage capacity and
operator response times for critical nuclear command and control message
receipt and processing.”
The role of floppy disks in the command and control operations of the
nation’s nuclear arsenal was highlighted in a 2016 report from the United
States Government Accountability Office. It said the disks were used in a
system that “coordinates the operational functions of the nation’s nuclear
forces.”
The report said that the Strategic Automated Command and Control System ran
on an IBM Series/1 computer — a piece of hardware that dates to the 1970s —
and used eight-inch floppy disks to manage weapons like intercontinental
ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft.
The report warned that the Pentagon was one of the several government
agencies whose computer systems relied on “outdated software languages and
hardware parts that are unsupported,” some of which were “at least 50 years
old.”
The report also cited aging or obsolete systems at the Treasury Department,
the Justice Department, the Social Security Administration and the
Department of Veterans Affairs.
But a “60 Minutes” report from 2014 pointed out a perhaps unexpected upside
of relying on such old technology. Because the systems are not connected to
the internet, they are exceptionally secure: Hackers can’t break into a
floppy disk.
All of this may leave the modern reader wondering: What is a floppy disk?
An artifact from a time when “the world was not wired,” according to Tom
Persky, who inventories and sells floppy disks at what may be one of the
largest such companies left, FloppyDisk.com.
Back then, if you wanted to get information like software onto a computer
or a large device, you had to put it on a floppy disk, insert the disk into
the machine, and then direct the machine to access the information.
“There was nowhere to log in to,” Mr. Persky said in an interview. “There
was no logging in and downloading software or data updates or anything like
that.”
In a nod to the fact that some readers, even of dry government reports, may
not know what a floppy disk is, the Government Accountability Office
provided a photograph of two disks along with a summary of their place in
the pantheon of information technology.
“Introduced in the 1970s, the eight-inch floppy disk is a disk-based
storage medium that holds 80 kilobytes of data,” it said in its report. “In
comparison, a single modern flash drive can contain data from the
equivalent of more than 3.2 million floppy disks.”
According to Mr. Persky, whose inventory contains more than 500,000 floppy
disks, the disks are more widely used than one might expect, especially in
industrial machines, aircraft, medical devices and complex hardware systems
like those used by the world’s militaries. He said he thought it had been
roughly five years since anyone had manufactured a new disk.
“A big industrial machine that is designed to last 30, 40 or 50 years and
in fact does last 30, 40 or 50 years — do you throw it away because there
is a new way to get information onto the machine?” he said. “The question
is, What is the cost of using the floppy disk as opposed to the cost of
transitioning to something else like a USB drive or linking to the
internet?”
That said, floppy disks have some advantages over other methods of
information transfer, like a Wi-Fi link or a flash drive, Mr. Persky said.
“We have an old technology that is not easily hackable, that is not
expensive, that is extremely well understood, it is extremely stable, and
as long as the bits of information you are trying to get into a machine are
small, a floppy disk is a perfectly good and O.K. thing to use,” he said.
“Is it going to be O.K. to use in five or 10 or 15 years? I don’t know.”
Mr. Persky outlined the many drawbacks of “physical media” like floppy
disks: They hold less data than can be uploaded via the internet; they are
slow and expensive to distribute; you need to find a specialist repairman
if the machines needed to read them break down; and, of course, no one had
made a new one in five years.
“There are certainly some advantages to physical media and huge,
overwhelming disadvantages to physical media,” he said. “And physical media
will go away, but it just hasn’t gone away yet. That is a long, complicated
messy business. Or at least I hope.”