British nuke subs to run on XP
The British Navy is now using a specially modified version of Windows XP on board its fleet of nuclear submarines. Officials say they went with the commercial operating system to cut maintenance costs.
The system, known as Submarine Command System Next Generation (SMCS NG), is now on 12 submarines. Its main use is in gathering data from sensor equipment and producing an accurate picture of where friendly and enemy vessels and weapons are located.
The original SMCS was a dedicated application with its own operating system. The new version is based around Windows XP and runs over standard Ethernet cabling. This will save an estimated $33 million in the next 10 years, a 25 percent reduction on the old system’s costs.
The savings will apparently come from lower maintenance costs and considerably lower training requirements (because many, if not most, personnel will already be familiar with Windows).
The modification and installation is the work of BAE Systems. The firm’s Paul Laity said:
We have improved the availability and operability of a mission critical system while reducing its cost to the customer. We have also proved that a system based on commercial off-the-shelf hardware and software can deliver effective operational capability in a demanding naval environment.
The obvious question is whether this makes the system more vulnerable to hackers, though enhanced security measures were reportedly part of the modification process. While the information on the system clearly needs an extremely high level of protection, there is some comfort in knowing the machines will be on self-contained networks which should be about as safe from physical tampering as it gets.
The move is certainly a contrast to the United States Navy, which already uses Linux for its warship systems citing better security and easier customization. The US Army is converting many Windows systems to open source for similar reasons.
It doesn’t appear that the firing of British nuclear weapons themselves will be controlled through a Windows system. That could certainly bring a whole new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death.
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December 29th, 2008
Obviously the Poms are blissfully ignorant of the divide-by-zero error that crashed an NT server on the U.S.S. Yorktown in 1997, leaving the vessel dead in the water for a few hours. The Yorktown had to be towed back to port (oh, the shame!), and it took a few days for the problem to be fixed. One imagines that the U.S.N. was using Windows because of the “lower maintenance costs” (stop that snickering up the back, please!)
The moral of the story is that Windows is fine if you are playing Solitaire or writing a letter, but for work of a serious nature you need a *real* operating system.