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Nuclear Truckers Haul Warheads Across US
Hugh Pickens writes "As you weave through interstate traffic, you're unlikely to notice a plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer or have any idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead. Adam Weinstein writes that the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) employs nearly 600 couriers to move bombs, weapon components, radioactive metals for research, and fuel for Navy ships and submarines between a variety of labs, reactors and military bases. Hiding nukes in plain sight and rolling them through major metropolitan centers raises a slew of security and environmental concerns, from theft to terrorist attack to radioactive spills. 'Any time you put nuclear weapons and materials on the highway, you create security risks,' says Tom Clements, a nuclear security watchdog for Friends of the Earth. For security, cabs are fitted with custom composite armor and lightweight armored glass, a redundant communications system that links the convoys to a monitoring center in Albuquerque, and the driver has the ability to disable the truck so it can't be moved or opened. The OST hires military veterans, particularly ex-special-operations forces (PDF), who are trained in close-quarters battle, tactical shooting, physical fitness, and shifting smoothly through the gears of a tractor-trailer. But accidents happen. In 1996, a driver flipped his trailer on a two-lane Nebraska hill road after a freak ice storm, sending authorities scrambling to secure its payload of two nuclear bombs; and in 2003, two trucks operated by private contractors had rollover accidents in Montana and Tennessee while hauling uranium hexafluoride, a compound used to enrich reactor and bomb fuel."
Even the inventors of nuclear bombs didn't want the damned things to exist. They knew they were possible and somebody would invent them - so they did. Oppenheimer said afterward that on watching a nuclear test he was reminded of a verse from the Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
So we don't like these things. We don't want them to have to exist, but they do. And they've got to be moved around, which means over the roads we have. If you shovel enough shit, eventually you get dirty. Shit happens.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The way I heard it is that nuclear non-proliferation treaties that the US has signed to limit the number of warheads in its arsenal. However warheads in transit do not count towards this total, and in the interests of security the US is not obliged to reveal how many warheads it has in transit at any one time or where they are going. By keeping a percentage of it arsenal perpetually driving around the US, the US government can effectively sidestep nuclear warhead limits imposed by non-proliferation treaties.
Bogus. Read the treaties. Here's a good place to start:
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/140035.pdf
The reason is that it's far cheaper than flying them around, not to mention that an airplane crash is far more likely to cause either widespread contamination than a semitruck flipping over. The trailers can be designed to contain the materials compeltely at the energies involved - what are they going to do on an aircraft, put the nuclear materials inside a giant "black box"? (-;
Another risk involved with transporting them by air is that there's a much higher chance of them getting lost. There are in fact a good number of warheads buried in inaccessible locations because of aircraft mishaps, including a few in the CONUS.
In the UK, nuclear weapon convoys are unmistakable, and they are incredibly heavily guarded. The weapons are carried in armoured articulated lorries, but they are accompanied by escorts from the police, the nuclear constabulary, the regular army, the marines, decoy trucks, recovery tow vehicles, fire tenders...
Regional roads are closed entirely for them while they pass by, patrolled by police on foot. Nothing is allowed to block their way. They don't stop.
This is how you're supposed to do it.
Uranium hexafluride is nasty stuff just in chemical terms.
For civiil nuclear transport anyway, don't know about weapons. Here's a video of them testing one of the nuclear containers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJflu7z4QyI
The US convoys are better protected than suggested by this article. When I lived in Knoxville, I was encouraged by an acquaintance to apply for one of these escort jobs when I complained about how little I was paid as a university teacher. Apparently he was in the process of applying, or was being courted to apply, as a combat veteran. Anyway, the work he described to me indicated a great deal of heavily-armed protection that was kept covert. He was able to send me to a website of a company that produced some of the vehicles used for escort duty; the ones I saw there had concealed mounts for remotely-operated miniguns. I don't have first-hand knowledge, and I'm presuming that my acquaintance also did not. I was relieved, actually, given the rumors I often heard about suspicious characters trying to monitor waste, parts, and weapons shipments out of Oak Ridge.
a) NaCL does not decompose to HF Gas when exposed to moisture, and HydroFluoric Acid is VERY corrosive
b) NaCl is not radioactive
Ain't the same hazard level here.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Except that the longest distance in Great Britain is ~600 miles North to South, that is roughly distance from New York City to Cincinnati. It is still another 2100 miles from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. The amount of coordination required to get all of that escort in place to move nuclear material from coast-to-coast means just about everyone would know when these trucks were moving.
Pakistan is an unstable and violent country located at the epicenter of global jihadism, and it has been the foremost supplier of nuclear technology to such rogue states as Iran and North Korea.
..(From the first article you linked to, FYI) than from any superficial similarities in the ways that the US and Pakistan transport nuclear materials.
"b) NaCl is not radioactive"
But your granite countertops and or any granite buildings you go into and or any granite mountain you happen to be near is.
Uranium is just not that radioactive. It isn't like cobalt 60 or any of the real scary stuff.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.