Here's A Doom Nugget Buried Under Charlie Sheen's Unconscious, Drunken Body..

Not literally, people; come on.. Failure Shuts Down Squadron of Nuclear Missiles. Excerpts/Italics:

President Obama was briefed this morning on an engineering power failure at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that took 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), one-ninth of the U.S. missile stockpile, temporarily offline on Saturday.

The base is a main locus of the United States’ strategic nuclear forces. The 90th Missile Wing, headquartered there, controls 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. They’re on full-time alert and are housed in a variety of bunkers across the base.
..
..engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles, began to “ping” out of sequence, resulting in a surge of “noise” through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they’re not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.

Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark. The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted. The suspect LCC remains off-line.
And:
The defense official said that there had not been a power failure, though the official acknowledged that that explanation had made its way through public affairs channels.

“We’ve never had something as big as this happen,” a military officer who was briefed on the incident said. Occasionally, one or two might blink out, the officer said, and several warheads are routinely out of service for maintenance. At an extreme, “[w]e can deal with maybe 5, 6, or 7 at a time, but we’ve never lost complete command and control and functionality of 50 ICBMs.”

The Military says this happened previously in 1998 to two bases in North Dakota and Montana, and the same piece of hardware is blamed, too(see article linked), but I find the timing and magnitude of this incident particularly disturbing. I can't imagine the same programming/system problem that happened twelve years ago happened again because they couldn't isolate the bugs. 1998 was the Stone Age in cybertime, so no progress finding a fix? Really? Rating: Highly Suspect to Unadulterated Bullshit.

So.. What caused it? How did the Military lose command and control of one ninth our ballistic missiles? Escalating tensions between North and South Korea, China and Japan, Israel and Iran, Russia and Georgia, stealth cyber warriors everywhere and nowhere at once, and something locks up our nukes? And what if something were to actually take control of those nukes and turn them inward?

Have you noticed no one's talking about Stuxnet anymore? It must have just dissolved and gone away overnight..