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Nuclear Officers Napped With Blast Door Left Open
Lasrick writes "AP's Robert Burns reports that 'Air Force officers entrusted with the launch keys to long-range nuclear missiles have been caught twice this year leaving open a blast door that is intended to help prevent a terrorist or other intruder from entering their underground command post.' Why is that signifcant? At least one of the officers was napping at the time. Airforce officials said other violations like this have undoubtedly occurred and gone undetected. Yeesh. 'The blast door violations are another sign of trouble in the handling of the nation's nuclear arsenal. The AP has discovered a series of problems within the ICBM force, including a failed safety inspection, the temporary sidelining of launch officers deemed unfit for duty and the abrupt firing last week of the two-star general in charge. The problems, including low morale, underscore the challenges of keeping safe such a deadly force that is constantly on alert but is unlikely ever to be used.'"
It gets hot in there, and Johnson is always farting.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Oh thank God, here I thought 12 o'clock was just a matter of time.
-AC.Falos
Hey there troops, listen up! It's your job to sit in this drab, overbuilt concrete coffin, sitting on your lazy asses like the cold war relics you are, until such a time as you are instructed to commit the greatest mass slaughter in human history. Any questions?
...if nuclear silo duty is the best job in the Air Force or the worst.
As best as I can tell, you haven't had to do anything since...uh....longer than anyone's been on active duty.
Or they could just be setting up a trap. "Come on into remote location, I promise we're just napping".
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
You'd think about the obvious reasons for nuclear disarmament, but nobody ever spares a thought for the poor sods who have to sit there watching these doomsday devices: if they ever get used it's the end of the world, if they're ever attacked it will be with overwhelming force, and they are expected to be running their AAA-game 24/7/365, no holidays, no vacations.
(Interesting thought experiment: replace "nuclear weapons officer" with "megabank sysadmin")
"A weapon unused, is a useless weapon."
You're stirring up my cold war nostalgia :'(
If you planned to take a nap on the job - Why the hell wouldn't you close the door? It at least makes getting caught a bit less likely.
Maybe this is a clue as to some of the reasons a couple of high ranking officers have been fired in that command recently. Figures.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
No longer in effect.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I would nap and probably do a bunch of much worse stuff too if I were them. My other buddies from the academy are stationed in tropical paradises picking up the locals when they go on leave, General Sleeps with His Biographer is getting some, and here I am stuck in America's asscrack buried deep in a bunker with another guy who won't shut up and keeps eating my lunch out of the fridge.
Seriously do these guys get hardship pay or anything? Is it a rotational program where they get to go somewhere better after they do their time in the bunker? Or is this really just the worst assignment in the Air Force?
Anecdotally by buddy's father who is in the Air Force Reserve was deployed somewhere in the Arabian Sea doing logistical support for the operations over there. He said it was the best vacation he ever went on. He loaded and unloaded planes, planes that sometimes came frequently and sometimes did not. When he wasn't loading and unloading planes he was playing golf, hitting the beach, or hanging out with his fellow airmen. I would be pretty envious if I were stuck in a bunker in Idaho.
I had no idea Homer had taken up a military job. Must've missed that episode.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Where the Russians were napping next to a mobile ICBM launch vehicle. Hopefully the US Nuclear Officers will get to bang a hot adversary like in the movie.
Can we not use the phrase "abrupt firing" when talking about nuclear missiles please?
A) There are two blast doors.
B) They are [REDACTED] meters below ground.
C) There is an elevator
D) They are their for more than a day, so they sleep.
This isn't really much of a deal. There is nothing that can happen that they can nap through.
Their Job is extremely boring, and their isn't a regular thing to watch. Like gauge, or pressure valves.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's ok, though, because between the NSA spying on literally everybody, the TSA feeling us up at the airports, and the government spending millions pursuing "terrorists" such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, there is no way somebody is going to be able to walk through an unsecured, open door and wreak havoc; because the sheer irony itself would tear a hole in space and time.
This is one of the most important missions that the Air Force ever will have. I'm sure they put their best officers on it.
That's DEEP SARCASM.
This is a command problem.
How about a nice game of chess?
Ever since we built enough nuclear ICBMs to threaten mutually assured destruction, the most important military personnel have been those who diligently guard their country's nuclear weapons arsenal . As long as we possess nuclear weapons, their job performance (or lack thereof) may one day save or destroy millions or billions of lives. Like the Night's Watch in GoT, being a nuclear officer is not a glamorous job, but this work is infinitely more important to the safety of regular citizens than any other section of the armed forces or law enforcement (obviously TSA would be near the opposite end of the spectrum of usefulness). Its time we reassess our definition of heroism around the people that really make the difference in our continued survival.
... if all the lauch codes are zero anyway?
(Well, alright that was some time ago, but really... this points to systemic issues, and I don't think they'll have been fixed within a few years.)
HAND.
"Shall we play a game?"
How come we're not all dead? I thought (was told) there was a terrorist hiding around every corner.
Billy Joel -- Cristy Brinkley now that was marrying above his pay grade. Gives hope to us all
This is why the Navy is better than the Air Force. This could never happen on a Trident!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Such thinking requires you to think logically and predict the outcome of your actions. These are probably not traits you want in the person with their finger on the button because they are also likely to reason:
1) If I press this button millions of people will die.
2) This will probably include myself and my family.
3) Ergo, never push the button.
If this incident has you freaked, don't even think about reading Command and Control.
I bet the button pushers job title is "Mass Population Control Specialist" /DNRTA
They're SUPPOSED to sleep during their 24 hour shift.
They're just supposed to close the door when they do it.
You know, if we didn't have any nuclear ICBM's, we wouldn't have to worry about anyone falling asleep while guarding said ICBM's against potential terrorists.
somebody's got to keep the aliens out!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Was talking with a new acquaintance who mentioned to be in the Navy. Turns out he was on nuc subs. He mentioned that the reason that many of the other forces struggle with stuff like this to him was really simple. In the Navy, on a nuc sub, if you screw up, you're likely dead (sunk). Tended to keep everyone's focus. Navy is often seen as somewhat lax compared to the other uniformed services, but maybe in this case, they're not.
And that's why the commander at the very top of the Global Strike Command mission got the axe.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Oh, I think of the 'poor sods' in the missile silos... to laugh uproariously at them and how 'hard' they work. They're on duty in the silo for 24 hours once a week or so, and when they're not on duty they work 9-5 and get weekends off. When something in the system breaks, they phone home and someone else comes out to fix it.
I sat my missile fire control console six on, twelve off, mumble feet under the North Atlantic for sixty to eighty days a pop. If the system went down, it was on us to fix it. No nine to five. No weekends. No meals at home. No sunshine. And back then, the Walkman was brand new and the absolute height of personal electronics. (Not that personal electronics make up much for what you're missing.) I truly had to have my AAA game, because there were dozens of ways to die or be badly injured surrounding me 24/7 for days on end.
When it comes to a hard life in the strategic weapons world, the chumps out there with the prairie dogs aren't close to having the hardest. That (dubious) 'honor' belongs to my brothers and sisters boring holes out there in the deep blue.
x-FTB2/SS, USS Henry L. Stimson 655B 1983-87.
Good grief, and I thought my wife's dog was a coward. He can't hold a candle to an AC.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yeah, because that would be doable in a finite amount of time.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
One of the reasons there are two officers there is so that if one goes crazy and rigs a spoon and string to turn the other's launch key, the other can shoot him.
"Keep the troops busy". There are drills and so on of course but it's just plain mismanagement to let people get bored.
No need to pocket a nuclear bomb if you can turn two keys and kill millions.
There are fortunately some other safeguards. For example, I believe any other launch control crew can override a spurious launch, and it would be insane if the keys were live during peacetime.
You're missing my point.
This commanding general gets officers scraped from the bottom of the barrel. Of course he gets canned, but he's getting shit officers to work with.
But of course the Air Force won't do anything to change THAT!
Of course this presumes the intruder comes from the outside. Fort Hood anyone?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You claim the guys inside the bunker are well trained and screened.
Well trained and screened soldiers would close the fucking blast doors if that is the order they have received. These guys didn't, so clearly the screening and/or training isn't worth shit.
Really what kind of idiot tries to claim how well trained group X is in a story showing group X not doing what they are supposed to do. Do you stand next to rusted wreck that spun out on a corner about how well it corners (see you can get a car analogy in every story)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Your other choices?
It's not only that the game should not be played, the whole game need not exist anymore.
The only reason why nuclear missiles are still around is to justify the salaries and profits of the people and contractors who maintain them.
This price is too high, we could just retire all those people and let them sleep as much as they wish, at their own homes.
From "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power" by Rachel Maddow.
SAY YOU'RE A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN 2007. WE'RE FOUR YEARS into Iraq, and six years into Afghanistan. If you're feeling a call to patriotic duty, a sense of adventure, thinking about the training opportunities offered by a career in the US Armed Forces, where do you tell that recruiter that you'd like to end up?
Probably not in a missile silo in Minot, North Dakota. In the post-9/11 era, who'd want the job of sitting through the nuclear winter on the high plains, running maintenance on the thirty-five B-52s, guarding the "silos" that housed 150 giant and largely untested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), babysitting the hundreds of smaller nuclear warheads stored in sod-topped bunkers like canned fruit shelved in a tornado shelter? The munitions maintenance team and the weapons handlers and the tow crews in Minot could call those bunkers "igloos", but giving stuff funny names didn't make life there any more fun.
"Our younger airmen, once they've reached that decision point, if they have been stationed in one of our northern bases where the environment's a little bit tougher, they tend to leave the service", an Air Force general told the Senate. Those who didn't leave the service didn't stick around the tending-the-nukes life for long.
In 2007, an Airman assigned to a nuclear bomber wing could look around and note that more than eight in ten members of her wing's security force were rookies. One senior officer in the Air Force's nuclear enterprise admitted that standing alert duty in missile silos is not considered "deployed", and "if you are not a 'deployer', you do not get promoted."
The Air Force pleaded for more missileers, but "deployments in support of regional conventional operations [i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan] decrease manpower available to the nuclear mission." But even without Iraq and Afghanistan siphoning off military talent, would anyone expect that ambitious young airmen would be clamoring for silo duty?
BTW, that's from a chapter titled "An $8 Trillion Fungus Among Us".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Never a good idea over the long term
"There is nothing that can happen that they can nap through."
I just had an image of an officer *snort* walking up looking around and saying, "shit I missed it".