Ron Rosenbaum (The Secret Parts of Fortune, Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars) is working on a book about “the new face of nuclear warfare,” which is cause for excitement.  In his Slate column, he writes about the deeply hidden nuclear “Letter of Last Resort”:

At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.”

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub’s missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister’s posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.

The old-fashioned, pen-and-ink-on-paper quality of it all (quill pen, perhaps?) somehow makes the system seem like it emanated from a 19^th-century madhouse out of Wilkie Collins. Which makes it even more profoundly shocking that the system is still in place.

Rosenbaum also gives us a glimpse of his research for the book:

In 1997, the U.S. Navy discovered that there was a “backdoor” electronic entrance to the nuclear missile submarine launch control system, according to Bruce Blair, head of the World Security Institute, a Washington think tank. Blair told me the “backdoor” entrance would have allowed a diabolically ingenious hacker to insert a launch order into the system.