[rgovostes]

I visited the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson, AZ, where you can see the control room from which the missile could have been launched.

> At launch, orders from the National Command Authority would have specified one of three pre-programmed targets which, for security reasons, were unknown to the crew. ... Target 2, which is classified to this day but was assumed to be within the borders of the former Soviet Union, was designated as a ground burst, suggesting that the target was a hardened facility such as a Soviet missile base. [Wikipedia]

While explaining this, my tour guide showed some punched tape that could be fed into a computer to program the targets. I wonder if the tape was original, and if so, how difficult it would be to decode its coordinates.

[rootusrootus]

> I wonder if the tape was original

I'd be very surprised. We used punched tape for initializing our crypto gear when I was in the Air Force, and it was accounted for carefully and destroyed promptly. Even more carefully than our regular classified documents, though maybe that was just a culture thing. I can't imagine them just giving it over to a museum.

[kens]

Yes, the Titan museum is very interesting and I recommend it.

I wondered the same thing about the punched tape, if I could extract the coordinates from it. I read somewhere that they were extremely strict about keeping the targets secret; before any maintenance on the computer, a special team came in just to ensure that the coordinates were erased from memory. It would have been a huge oversight if they didn't encrypt the punched tape, so my guess is that it can't be decoded.

[beerandt]

Y'all are overthinking it- true lat long "coordinates" would be meaningless to this computer. What was fed into the computer (ahead of time) was a series of firing instructions (per target for 3 targets), calculated to take into account the launch site of each missile. (Core memory values persist long term, even through power outages, hence the need to manually erase values before maintenance.)

So even two missiles/warheads launched from different sites at the same target would have different guidance instructions.

You'd need to do some major reverse engineering and geodetic calculations even after decoding targeting punchcards to figure out what the actual targets were.

The punchcards used to select the target during launch are simply instructions to execute "target stored in memory 2" or something similar. The minutemen would not have had the ability to change the set of targeting options programmed in the missile, only select one of the pre-programmed options.