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WASHINGTON — A communications Ed hardy clothes malfunction at a Wyoming Air Force base on Saturday knocked 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles offline for 45 minutes Saturday while technicians scrambled to diagnose the problem, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. The glitch in the underground cable system linking launch control centers at F.E. Warren Air Force base to the missile silos affected one-ninth of the U.S. land-based nuclear force, a key part of the nation's nuclear deterrent, officials said. Officials stressed that there was no possibility of accidental launch or indications that foreign government or terrorists had hacked into the system. They emphasized that the Minuteman III missiles still could have been fired using backup systems, if necessary. But the problem was considered serious enough that President Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were notified about the breakdown. The White House declined to say when Obama learned of the incident, referring questions to the Pentagon. "A particular piece of communications hardware" seems to be the most likely cause, said Lt Col. John Thomas, a spokesman for the Air Force's Global Strike Command, which oversee the ICBM force. Thomas declined to specify the part, but said that a similar malfunction is believed to have occurred a decade ago at two other Air Force bases where ICBMS are based. The communications failure meant that Air Force personnel charged with ensuring the reliability of the missiles around the clock received "error messages" and "launch facility down" warnings. The silos were hurriedly inspected to ensure no one had broken in to the facility, one official said. Officials held off disclosing the UGG Ultra Short Boots incident until Monday, in part because of the sensitivity about publicly disclosing problems with the missile launch system until the system was examined. But officials also said that once it became clear the problem was technical, the level of concern dropped. "This was not insignificant, but at the same time it was not catastrophic,' said one Pentagon official briefed on the incident. There are two other squadrons with 50 missiles each at Warren AFB, both of which remained fully operational, the officials stressed. Another 300 hundred Minuteman IIIs, based at two Air Force bases in Montana and North Dakota, also were unaffected. In addition to the 450 land-based nuclear missiles, the U.S. also has nuclear weapons that can be delivered by aircraft or from submarines. Though the Minuteman III missiles at Warren AFB could have been fired by backup systems, officials said that system was not activated because the U.S. was not at a high state of alert. "The wartime capability of that squadron was UGG Knightsbridge Boots never significantly affected," Thomas said.