A friend of mine is a retired US Air Force missleman. He spent a number of years in that duty, as many Air Force officers do, before he received a psychological down-check and was medically retired. Apparently this is not an unusual phenomenon among the guys who spend their careers down in the launch capsules of the missile force.

Sitting around a campfire at a medievalist event one evening during the Cold War, a few of us ex-military types (as a former Merchant Marine officer denied the right to serve in the Navy, I'm considered an honorary member of the club) got to talking about MAD and the possibility of someone going crackerdog and lobbing a rocket at the Soviets. All eyes turned to my friend the missileman for the straight skinny.

"How many of you have seen the movie WarGames?"

Everyone had.

"You remember the scene at the start of the movie where the missilemen get The Word, verify it, and go through the launch procedure? And then the senior of the two refuses to turn his key without hearing from a real human being that it's a for-real launch order?"

Everybody did.

"Well, that's pretty much how it really works. You'd get an announcement with a launch code over the speaker, verify that it is your shift's launch code, and then you go through the ritual of turning the keys at the same time. The producers of WarGames got that much right.

"What the writer and the director didn't get right - probably because no one told them, or they didn't ask, or it didn't work dramatically - given that the scenario they were setting up for the movie was to turn control of the missiles over to a computer, is that even if both officers had turned their keys at the same time, nothing would have happened."

Why not?

"You know how having two guys turn their keys at the same time is a fail-safe built into the system so that no one man can launch the missiles? Well, that's only the first human fail-safe built into the system. You need to understand what happens when the two misslemen in their capsule turn their keys.

"It's called 'casting a launch vote.' Each capsule has control over a number of missiles, not just one missile. Another capsule shares control of those missiles with your capsule. Until two valid 'launch votes' are cast, the missiles cannot launch. The system was set up that way back in the 1950s. It would require a conspiracy of at least four men, all turning their keys at the same time, to enable the missiles to fire. And the guys down in the capsules do not know which missiles in the missile field are controlled by which capsule. Things are set up that way on purpose. The theory is that it renders an accidental launch impossible."

I pointed out that the Navy boomers did it much the same way, only the keys that had to be turned were spread out at point in the control room too far away for one or even two men to turn them at once. Plus which, the missile drill of the Navy requires the submarine to be brought to launch depth, and the radiomen would know if a launch signal had been received or not. It would require at least as big a conspiracy for a Navy missile submarine to make an unauthorized launch as it would for the Air Force to do so. A retired chief torpedoman who had done time in the Poseidon boats confirmed my position. He added that there are no secrets on a submarine; it's such a small community, everyone from the captain to the cook would know if the sub had gotten launch orders.

Maybe the Russians do have a doomsday system left over from the Bad Old Days. I'll concede the possibility, but no more than that. Besides, I'd like you to consider something else.

Systems like that require constant maintenance to keep them ready for immediate use if required. Given that the Russian military has lots of Soviet-era ships, submarines and aircraft literally rotting away at their bases because the Russian government has no money to operate or maintain them, what makes you think their doomsday system, if it really exists, is in any better shape?