“HICS, as originally installed, operated at 1.3Kbps.”
The US keeps 400 Minuteman III missiles in the midwest, and Air Force journal articles indicate their fields still talk over that same 1.3Kbps cable network. Crawford’s best read is one shared bus per flight, tens of miles long, which explains why the Air Force keeps finding it infeasible to make HICS faster. The cables give each launch control center four-way redundancy and give individual launch facilities none. The doomsday network runs slower than a 1990s modem.