America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) have reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks which were used earlier to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.Defense official from the Air Force 595th Strategic Communications Squadron has stated that the unit that actually manages the system – in reporting that earlier this summer, the antiquated IBM floppy drives was replaced with what was described as a "highly-secure solid-state digital storage solution."

It is said that the 4GB thumb drive will be used in the defense models, but the officers haven’t confirmed it and have left itto our imagination. The SACCS machine, a 1970s-era IBM Series/1 behemoth charged with keeping track of both missiles and aircraft, made headlines back in 2016 when it was among the outdated systems described by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) in a damning report about the continued use of obsolete technology by Uncle Sam, including ancient mainframes and critical applications written in COBOL.

The eight-inch disks, developed in the 1960s at IBM's San Jose skunkworks, each held about 80KB of data on the current state of the nation's nuclear forces. The drives had been among the units slated for replacement as part of a "modernization" effort. These drives are built with high security-based technology and will be installed in the defense driven systems very soon.