The incident affected roughly ten percent of the US ICBM nuclear arsenal for a period of about 45 minutes. According to what the engineers were able to find after the incident, it appears that the cause was the underground cable system linking launch control centers to the missile silos.
US officials, including President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael G. Mullen, were notified by the problem, even if the Pentagon now tries to play down the gravity of the event.
A defense official said that, if there was any need, the nukes could have been fired by the President at any time (despite the fact that officers claim they received "launch facility down" warnings). Also, there was no way for the ICBMs to launch on their own. The Pentagon rules out any hacker attack as the cause of the mishap.
Unrelated (or is it?), a former US Air Force officer, Captain Robert Salas, made a big fuss back in September about some extraordinary alien-related revelations (for the record, nothing extraordinary was revealed).
Salas claimed that back in 1967, when he was working as a missile-launch officer at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a freak incident somehow disabled 10 of the nuclear missiles he was taking care of. This happened, Salas claims, soon after UFOs were spotted in the sky...
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