There was a flap last week when some LANL USB sticks were found in the possession of a petty criminal.
An actual security breach, as opposed to a hypothetical one.
Now Prof Foland at Nuclear Mangos notes a claim in the media that the sticks contained PAL codes!
That would be not good. If true. The media is not exactly 100% reliable on these matters.
PAL codes are the arming codes for warheads in the US nuclear inventory.
Modern nuclear weapons, in the US, are "locked" - there is an electronic or electro-mechanical physical block to detonating the device. Without the code to unlock it, you would have to disassemble and defuse the weapon and the re-arm it, correctly, bypassing the lock.
Possible, given a good team, lots of peace and quiet and plenty of time in physical possession of the device.
With the PAL codes, in principle all you need is access to the weapon and two people who can type numbers on a keypad. Then the weapon is armed and can be detonated through a variety of means (altitude, contact, delay - depends on which device etc).
This is not so good. At all.
Now, most likely someone swiped the sticks as cheap and easy to steal and resell - with no knowledge of what is on them. Although they should not have been anywhere someone inclined to petty theft could get them, and it should not have been possible to take them out of secure areas...
If they were deliberately taken, knowing what was on them, the info would still have to be transmitted to someone unsuitable (ok, so that takes 12.3 seconds with a cell phone or laptop...), and someone would have to come into possession of an actual US nuclear weapon.
That last bit is tricky.
But, this should not have happened, and given the flap over the "missing disks" and other fake security concerns at LANL, the lack of excitement over this incident is irritating.
Either these things are serious, or they are not.
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Why would LANL have the PAL codes for operational weapons? It's not really their role. But it's still scary as hell.
Well, as noted the story may well be wrong. And, if I knew, I couldn't say.
But... if I had to guess - LANL has a major role in testing and verification of operational warheads. They're supposed to pull random samples out of storage or operational depots and test them.
IF I were doing such a thing, what I would do is open them up, remove the plutonium pit and replace it with something same density but inert, then put it back together and fire it like normal - which mean full turning on of PALs, fusing and faking the "launch" of a weapon. What they must test is the integrity of the firing circuits and the implosion, and that it all works together, not just in pieces.
Therefore they would have to have the PAL codes for at least the weapons they're pulling from the field - testing the PALs ought to be a big part of the test, be pretty serious if they failed, either way.
I would like to think that PAL codes for weapons containing functional plutonium pits are not made available to anyone other than the civilian and military authorities responsible for deciding when and whether to detonate such weapons. Consistent with this, I would like to think that these authorities would have sole control over the PAL codes and intact weapons until the pits are removed, and would only turn the weapons and PAL codes over to the entities responsible for testing the weapons after the pits had been removed.