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The next time a nuclear detonation occurs in space or in Earth’s atmosphere, enlisted men and women in U.S. Air Force ground stations will be the first to know.
As data from dozens of satellites flood into their control rooms, it will be their jobs to decide quickly whether to refer the event to higher-ups as a violation of international law or to designate the event as something less nefarious — a lightning strike or, perhaps, a satellite sensor glitch.
The snap decisions they make could trigger an international diplomatic crisis or, if they are wrong, result in an embarrassing false alarm. Fortunately, the data will be processed, and their decisions simplified, by ICADS — the Integrated Correlation and Display System, created for the Air Force by Sandia.
ICADS is a key part of the U.S. Nuclear Detonation Detection System (USNDS), a network of Global Positioning System (GPS) and Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, multiple detectors on board each satellite, and a handful of fixed and mobile ground stations.
“In some scenarios a nuclear proliferator or terrorist group might detonate a device in a way that makes it difficult to assign blame,” says John Williams, Sandia senior manager for the USNDS program office. In that case, he says, U.S. policy makers would need accurate realtime information about the time, location, yield, and any other evidence available via USNDS.
With budding nuclear programs in at least two nations — Iran and North Korea — USNDS may be called on at any time to gather the facts about a modern nuclear detonation that could change the course of history.
“USNDS may be more important than ever to strategic national security,” says Jerry McDowell, Sandia Vice President for Defense Systems and Assessments. “The threats are real, and USNDS provides critical global awareness.”
ICADS includes the antennae, hardware, and software that help gather, correlate, and make sense of USNDS satellite data from multiple USNDS satellites.
The system allows operators to quickly compare live satellite signals with hundreds of event profiles in its event database. Certain atmospheric phenomena — lightning, solar storms, and even pings to a satellite by energetic micrometeorite particles — can cause the sensors.