Operation Boomerang…

The other day I was thinking, why don’t we hack the Russian military and more specifically its guided missile, nuclear warhead, get them under our control and send them back to the folks who launched them or to a strategic city in Russia? 

This would of course be a seriously bad surprise for the perpetrator and would bring a stop to any attempt to use its nuclear arsenal to one unfortunate and self-flagellating try. Obviously the question that we should ask ourselves is whether a guided missile be hacked? It would seem possible in theory depending how the weapon is guided. 

If it’s “wire guided”, and the communication link between the firer and the missile is a long, thin wire that unspools behind the missile. That makes the launch hard to take over. Many missiles are designed to lock on their target and once they’re fired, there is no communication going on between the missile and its source and it would have to be destroyed externally. 

To make things more difficult, most missile flight duration is very short, and would make it that much harder to “hack” between the moment it’s fired and the time it reaches its target. If there is more time available or its a cruise missile and if there’s a way to electronically hijack the missile this might work. Instead, what’s more frequent is to try to decoy the target with an alternate heat signature or jam it with radio frequency interference. 

As far as nuclear missiles are concerned, defense systems that have nukes try to reduce the risk of hacking by relying on manual inputs since any computer connection could be vulnerable to a compromised network. This is why Russia and the US make sure that targeting data is manually uploaded via a floppy disk or thumb drive and avoid using any kind network or at the very least work with closed network. 

This said, I’m certain that some good thinking from smart and astute people could potentially create a “boomerang effect” and send the nuke back to its sender or to prioritized target in its neighborhood. The Ukrainians would love it!