Every day, the National Security Agency (NSA) prints a laminated card called the gold code, or the “biscuit.” The card is filled with a gibberish string of alphanumerics, but buried somewhere inside is a code the President of the United States recognizes. It’s the code he can use to launch America’s nuclear arsenal. The NSA prints a new biscuit everyday and, until recently, it did so using a decades-old supercomputer.
Like so much of America’s nuclear arsenal, biscuit printing recently got an upgrade that was only revealed because the old equipment got dumped in a museum.
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The old machines used to print the biscuit are now part of an exhibit in the National Cryptologic Museum outside of D.C. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new exhibit is a sign that the old machines have been retired to pave the way for a brand new system. “The NC2 exhibits in the museum, along with the rest of the artifacts on display, were installed in the weeks prior to the museum’s grand public opening on 8 October 2022,” Jim McGaughey, a public affairs representative for the NSA, told Motherboard. “Selected artifacts were chosen about two years ago by the National Cryptologic Museum director and staff.”
The museum was closed for two years during the pandemic. “We had the opportunity, during this time where we were down for COVID, when the entire country’s nuclear code system went through a dramatic change in our technology,” museum director Vince Hougton told the Wall Street Journal. “And so we have on display the servers and machines that created the nuclear codes for the United States from the 1980s all the way through a couple years ago.”
Among the machines on display are a DEC Alpha, a large workstation computer first introduced in 1992. The processing power of the DEC Alpha generated the codes for the biscuit, and a machine called an MP37 would print the laminated card. Were a president to order a nuclear launch, he would have—until recently—read out the secret code generated using these machines to authorize the launch, then pick from a menu of targets before giving the order.
Just a few years ago, the function of these machines was a closely guarded secret. That they are now in a museum speaks to the confidence of the NSA in the upgrades it made to the process. Such upgrades have been a long time coming. U.S. nuclear command and control was neglected for decades after the end of the Cold War. Portions of the operation were run off of floppy disks until 2019.
Not only were America’s neglected nukes running on old technology until recently, but the personnel involved have been plagued with scandals. The job can be boring and Air Force personnel guarding ICBM silos sometimes dropped LSD to pass the time. Airmen in the silos are routinely tested on protocol and procedure, and they’ve also been caught cheating on those tests. In 2021, U.S. soldiers working in America’s secret nuclear bases in Europe uploaded classified information onto flashcard websites online.
With these kinds of news stories floating around, the unceremonious biscuit upgrade represents an incredible flex. Nuclear deterrence is about signaling to your opponent that you have nuclear weapons and creating just enough ambiguity around your willingness to use them that it warns them off. But all of that posturing falls apart if your ICBMs are falling apart, the equipment you’re using is 30 years old, and the soldiers around the nukes are caught cheating and using hallucinogens.
The war in Ukraine has everyone thinking about nukes. Putin has danced around making a direct nuclear threat and has been bragging about his upgraded nuclear arsenal for years. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, it feels like there’s a real possibility of a nuclear exchange between America and Russia. Experts thankfully still think that possibility is low.
That doesn’t mean America is above flexing. Biden has warned Putin away from pressing the nuclear button. Upgrading the machines that create the nuclear biscuit and then putting the old machines in a museum signals confidence in the new system. It tells the world that America is thinking about nukes again, and that the old system that was once so highly classified can be immediately confined to a museum on the outskirts of Washington, D.C for all to see.
