Whenever a nuclear device is detonated somewhere in the world — regardless of whether the clandestine event takes place in the middle of the night and in the most remote corner of the globe — a cadre of enlisted Air Force men and women likely is among the first to know.
The critical decisions they make, based on a torrent of data, could result in an embarrassing false alarm, or worse, trigger an international diplomatic crisis.
Fortunately the satellite signals they interpret already will have been processed by ICADS, the Integrated Correlation and Display System, created for the Air Force by Sandia National Laboratories.
ICADS, the guts of the ground station where the operators work, includes the antennae, hardware, and more than a million lines of software code that gather, correlate, and help make sense of defense satellite data available as part of the United States Nuclear Detonation (NUDET) Detection System (USNDS).
USNDS’s mission is to reliably detect, locate, characterize, and report in near real-time nuclear detonations anywhere in Earth’s atmosphere or near space.
USNDS operators must use the evidence provided through ICADS to determine what happened, when it happened, and exactly where on this vast globe or in space a detonation took place. Ultimately the information would be combined with other evidence to assign responsibility, the second move in the high-stakes diplomatic chess game that would follow.
Above-ground NUDET events have been nonexistent since the U.S. and former Soviet Union declared a nuclear test moratorium in the early 19 0s. But USNDS is no Cold War relic. With budding nuclear weapons programs in at least two nations — Iran and North Korea — possibly pressuring whole regions into nuclear deterrence postures, the USNDS may be called upon to gather the facts about a round of 21st century nuclear detonations, which — depending on who carries them out and why — could change the course of history.