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The Disgruntled Guys Who Babysit Our Aging Nuclear Missiles
Lasrick writes This is a rather disturbing read about the troops who guard our nuclear weapons."'The Air Force has not kept its ICBMs manned or maintained properly,' says Bruce Blair, a former missileer and cofounder of the anti-nuclear group Global Zero. Nuclear bases that were once the military's crown jewels are now 'little orphanages that get scraps for dinner,' he says. And morale is abysmal. Blair's organization wants to eliminate nukes, but he argues that while we still have them, it's imperative that we invest in maintenance, training, and personnel to avoid catastrophe: An accident resulting from human error, he says, may be actually more likely today because the weapons are so unlikely to be used. Without the urgent sense of purpose the Cold War provided, the young men (and a handful of women) who work with the world's most dangerous weapons are left logging their 24-hour shifts under subpar conditions—with all the dangers that follow."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I watched Colossus: The Forbin Project on someone's recommendation the last time one of these topics came up.
As a fan of 70's dystopian sci-fi, it was a wonderful watch.
We might now be able to get rid of all of them, but we could get rid of MOST of them
We have already done that. America's nukes peaked in the 1960s at over 30,000 warheads. Today we have less than 5,000. Here is a nice graph. The average yield per warhead has declined as well. Our current policy is to continue to decommission warheads until we reduce our stockpile to 1550 by 2021.
From: http://www.esmerel.com/circle/...
Gruntled, however, is now in the dictionary, in use since the 1920's, from people taking the "dis" off of disgruntled.
The military needs ditch diggers, too. How many Air Force personnel are pilots? 1%? I guess I could look it up. There we go...
324,820 Active Duty
13,811 pilots
A little over 4%. So good luck with that pilot path.
Submarine launched missiles are all mirv capable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
14 warheads per missile.
I can certainly see maintaining a land based missile fleet but it's always been the easiest part of our defense to target and the most provocative for any attempt of a first strike.
ICBM have a range of Anywhere On The Globe. SLBM have a range of about 4300 miles.
You must be talking of ICBMs and SLBMs that belong to some other country - certainly not the U.S.
The U.S. SLBM, the Trident II D5, is a much heavier missile than the Minuteman III (130,000 vs 78,000 lb) so with the same warhead loading will travel much farther than the Minuteman. The shorter range you see quoted is only due to the fact that it carries up 14 warheads, versus a maximum of 3 for the Minuteman.
The maximum range of Minuteman III missile is about 13,000 km, but the farthest place in the world from U.S. missile fields is 20,000 km away. A good part of the Earth is outside of U.S. ICBM range.
But here is the kicker - the farthest point of land from an ocean in the world is the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility which is only 2645 km from the shore. So we can place submarine warheads truly anywhere on Earth.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I was a Titan launch officer. There were two keys, one at the commanders console and a second one at the deputies console. In order to launch a message would come down with a series of letters that would have to match a sealed packet, kept in a safe with two locks on it. The keys were also kept in there. Additionally, we would receive a series of numbers to unlock a valve to allow fuel flow in the first stage.