Flush Force Series 2 Checklist

[Faustina Bartsch]

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If you received specific disposal instructions from your healthcare provider (e.g., doctor, pharmacist) for your unused or expired medicine, you should follow those instructions to dispose of your medicine. The best disposal option is to find a drug take back location, which may be found in retail, hospital, or clinic pharmacies; and/or law enforcement facilities.

FDA recognizes that the recommendation to flush a few specific medicines when a take back program is not readily available raises questions about the impact of the medicines on the environment and the contamination of surface and drinking water supplies.

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Robert Hopkins has done a public service by unearthing and publishing the 55th Strategic Wing EWO Checklist for 1964. The document and the commentary are illuminating and brought to mind my experience with SAC nuclear operations during the following decade.

Washington D.C., February 25, 2019 - A recently declassified Strategic Air Command (SAC) checklist sheds brand new light on the procedures that SAC would have followed in the mid-1960s if U.S. nuclear forces had gone to war. The National Security Archive at George Washington University is today posting this intriguing document for the first time.

The checklist provides the first fully declassified details of SAC procedures under Defense Readiness Conditions (DEFCON), from 1 to 5, along with the Emergency War Order red dot messages that would have directed SAC bombers and missiles to launch nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union and other targeted adversaries.

Independent scholar Robert S. Hopkins III obtained the new material through research in recently declassified U.S. Air Force records. He kindly provided the documentation, introduction, and document descriptions for this posting.

Perhaps the most significant part of the checklist is the recap of EWO messages. There are two categories: EWO Index and EWO Preparation Index. The former, known as Red Dot messages, were for use when war was imminent or underway. They authorized the launch and execution of SAC forces on their EWO routes, where, depending on instructions provided by Emergency Action Messages from the NCA, they would implement one of the options provided by the SIOP. The latter, the Blue Dot messages, covered arrangements that preceded the execution of EWOs, such as DEFCON levels, reaction postures, and command arrangements.

As the SIOP and the related EWOs evolved in complexity during the 1970s and 1980s, EAMs struggled to remain simple enough to avoid ambiguity and the risk of misapplication by crews. Specific JCS messages tied to specific Major Attack Options (MAO) and Selected Attack Options (SAO) replaced the Red Dot messages. SAC messages replaced the Blue Dot messages, with specific SAC actions for each message built into bomber/tanker CMFs. Missiles were a separate case.

It was thus arranged that the Red Dot 1 message authorizing SIOP execution used a Sealed Authenticator System code that no civilian including the president possessed. SAS codes were held and distributed by the military, especially the command-control facilities that supported senior military commanders with pre-delegated presidential authority and the executing commanders at the bottom of the chain of command (the bomber, submarine and Minuteman/Titan crews).

Red Dot 1 options were designated by a specific war plan number (e.g. '55') in the EAM, which also designated a 'E' hour, otherwise called the Execution Reference Time (ERT). For example, war plan '55' might have called for the execution of a major SIOP option that unleashed the full might of the U.S. strategic forces assigned to attack Soviet nuclear forces (a counterforce strike), but withheld nuclear strikes against cities. (We learned in the mid-1980s that SAC planners had designed the counterforce targeting in such a way that all the major Soviet cities would have been obliterated.) The ERT ensured that all U.S. forces carried out their strikes according to a common start time in order to ensure a properly timed laydown of warheads and bombs that minimized the chances of 'fratricide'. A 'Free Launch Schedule' (FLSS) governed the release timing of every weapon, or 'sortie', for the SIOP then in effect. Mistakes calculating the FLSS timing for delayed Minuteman sorties was one of the more common critical errors in crew training.

If a nuclear strike was aimed at China (or North Korea) alone, a Blue Dot EAM would have been used to prepare the bomber and submarine forces to execute it. To the best of my recollection (bomber EWO was not taught to Minuteman crews), a Red Dot 1 would not have been used because its war plan numbers would have involved strikes by U.S. Minuteman missiles whose great circle ballistic trajectories would have taken them over Soviet territory enroute to Asia. By the early 1970s if not earlier it was well recognized that such overflights by large numbers of U.S. missiles might cause Soviet misinterpretation and trigger a Soviet launch against the United States. Therefore, the main strategic nuclear war plans against China involved only strategic bombers and submarines whose routes and trajectories could circumvent Soviet territory, and I believe Blue Dot messages would have provided the EWO guidance. If the United States had gone to war with both the Soviet Union and China, then a Red Dot 1 message would have been sent to all three components of the U.S. strategic forces including Minuteman and Titan missile crews.

The Red Dot 1 nomenclature and mission that I was familiar with were compromised at least twice: once by an American spying for the Soviet Union, who evidently disclosed these secrets in the late 1960s, and a second time by a misguided young SAC officer in the early 1980s.

In the first instance, the compromise was not discovered and the Soviets thus acquired the ability to determine whether the United States was transmitting a SIOP EAM. Since during much of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s such SIOP directives would likely have been disseminated over insecure voice communications (especially the Primary Alerting System), it is quite possible that Soviet communications monitoring would have intercepted the SIOP message at the same time that it was being passed to the U.S. executing forces. It is thus likely that the Soviets would have known a large-scale strategic strike was imminent and taken steps to preempt it or to be better prepared to launch on warning. It is also possible that the Soviets learned from this spy how to inject nuclear EAMs into the Naval Broadcast Communications Network, a compromise that was not discovered until the mid-1990s when it led the Navy to revise its SSBN launch authorization procedures in case they received a Red Dot 1 (or the newer flag word that replaced it) out of the blue.

In the second instance, the discovery of the compromise in the early 1980s led the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Agency, and Strategic Air Command to devise new flag-words for execution EAMs, which may be still classified. If this second discovery had not happened, it is possible that the Soviets and later the Russians might have continued to have the ability to detect in real time the dissemination of U.S. Red Dot I directives to execute the SIOP. On a personal note, I asked the late Helmut Sonnenfeld, a former senior assistant to Henry Kissinger, who was married to an heiress of the Hecht family department store business in Washington, D.C., to inquire whether Hecht's would stop using Red Dot words and icons for their "special" sales in their local advertising during the 1980s. I and I imagine many others around town nearly had heart attacks when we turned the page in the Washington Post and came face to face with a flag word portending the onset of Armageddon.

[2] The unusual assignment of an ICBM squadron to a reconnaissance wing was purely a temporary administrative matter. As the senior SAC organization at Forbes AFB, the 55th SRW acquired the 548th Strategic Missile Squadron (SMS) on 1 August 1964 when its parent SAC 40th Strategic Aerospace Wing and 21st Strategic Air Division inactivated. The 548th SMS was itself inactivated on 25th March 1965 after its last missile was removed on 8 February.

Iptables is a firewall that plays an essential role in network security for most Linux systems. While many iptables tutorials will teach you how to create firewall rules to secure your server, this one will focus on a different aspect of firewall management: listing and deleting rules.

Note: When working with firewalls, take care not to lock yourself out of your own server by blocking SSH traffic (port :22, by default). If you lose access due to your firewall settings, you may need to connect to it via an out-of-band console to fix your access.

If you want to limit the output to a specific chain (INPUT, OUTPUT, TCP, etc.), you can specify the chain name directly after the -S option. For example, to show all of the rule specifications in the TCP chain, you would run this command:

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