Hrrm.
Recently, a nuclear missile was damaged while military workers were removing it from its silo in a submarine. Someone accidentally left a ladder in the silo, and while they were removing the missile with a crane, the nosecone banged against the ladder. A hole got punched in the side of the missile. And, since it was off the coast of Canada, some Canadian officials are angry.
Hmmm.
Thing is, if you know anything about nuclear weapons, you'll know that this couldn't have caused the missile to go off. Nuclear warheads don't go off because you bang on them. You could walk up to one of those things and start beating it with a baseball bat--or even shoot it with a bazooka for that matter--and the worst you'd do is disable it, render it unable to detonate. Indeed, the dirty little secret is that nuclear warheads are surprisingly complex and delicate, and there's good reason to think that many of them wouldn't detonate even if launched in normal operation under perfect conditions. (International bans on nuclear testing have raised the odds of failure significantly, by the way.)
So let's be clear: a nuclear missile that was being removed from a submarine got banged around a little, in a fashion that would only make it less likely to go off. Odds of a maniac launching the missile without permission or detonating it on purpose are much higher than it going off from being banged around. So what's the deal?
Oh yeah. "The deal" is that most politicians and members of the public don't know anything about science.
Chris Noble is angry at the Canadians for demanding explanations and demanding inspections. Personally, I'm not. If Canadians are afraid that they were endangered and want answers, I don't blame them. What I really blame is the ignorance of science and technology that leads people to think that damaging a nuclear weapon by banging it against a ladder could make it go off. No, all it could really do is ruin a multi-million dollar weapon, rendering it useless.
Years ago I read a story about a US Navy diver and explosives expert who was part of a test to see whether atom bombs could be carried by carrier aircraft. The A-bomb was dropped onto the desert (to simulate a deck-landing crash). The bomb did not go off and upon inspection was still safe.
They may make big booms, but they are a bit more complex than a firecracker.
It seems that what most people know about bombs is what they learned from a Road Runner cartoon.
The thing that gets me about this particular incident is the fact that it became a CEM (Career Ending Mistake) for at least a couple of officers, and may involve jail-time or other punishments for some enlisted personnel. The Captain was relieved immediately by another Captain who happened to be on-site for an inspection. I believe his Exec was also relieved. All this because the crewmen rigged a ladder for access to the missile, attached cables to the missile, then broke for lunch. Upon returning to the worksite, they forgot to remove the ladder before hoisting the missile out of the tube.
Granted, procedures were not followed. Safety is a primary concern. But it appears that damage was limited to structural impairment of the nosecone. Nothing I saw indicated that the "guts" of the missile were compromised in any way. Certainly, no radio-active material was released. It's easy for me to be an arm-chair quarterback and wonder "What the Hell?", but I'm thinking a Captain's Mast would have been appropriate, not full Courts-Martial. But then, I'm not in charge, am I?
Close Dean, close.
I actually agreed that the Canadians have as much a right to know as we do and I have no problem with the fact that they asked.
"Canada is out ally and that they had a right to know about the issue, just like all Americans had a right to know also." (Damn, where did I learn how to spell?)
And:
"After this incident is investigated and concluded,..."
I have no problem with the idea that things need to be investigated, or that Canada is asking questions.
What I do have a problem with is the way in which Mrs. Davies lectured while demanding the answers.
But you are right about most people not understanding a thing about the nature of nukes. And I think that relatively astute anti-nuke politicians know how to play that ignorance like Charlie Daniels plays a fiddle.
Donnie,
I have no problem whatsoever for terminating the carreers of commanding and executive officers of US warships whose men screw up and cause serious difficulties with some of the ships ordnance, nuclear or otherwise. Even if their is absolutely no danger of inadvertant detonation of a damaged missile, assuming that is always true, the missile is not deployable for the purpose for which it was designed, built and paid for US taxpayers, and is therefore rendered useless.
Those men are trained professionals and are totally responsible for everying that happens on board their ships. That is exactly why the officers are considered responsible for what the enlisted men under their command do or fail to do. If mistakes are made by anyone, for any reason, they pay the price, including being relieved of command and never again getting another one.
There just is no room for errors in their profession. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
As to Libby Davies of the Canadian peace activists, I hope the US Defense Department, politely and with all due respect, advises her to stuff it up her peace activist ass. Unless she wishes to take up US citizenship and pay US taxes, she can confine her ecological and other concerns to British Columbia.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Well you make a good point, Arnold, but given the circumstances I feel that losing command forever is disproportionate to the offense. If someone had screwed up and punched a nine-inch hull in the skin of an F-17 fighter, which is probably the equivalent in terms of its cost, I doubt it would have been a career-ender. Simply moving a missile with a crane is not a particularly dangerous or delicate operation by comparison.
Now, someone careless with the firing mechanisms, with the codes to launch or detonate one of those puppies, that's a completely different animal. Carelesness there should be not just a career-ender but a likely prison sentence.
"A bazooka...?"
A couple things about the missiles on these submarines. First, the warheads are burried pretty deep inside. You've got the missile shroud, which covers the missile bus and reentry vehicles, then you've got the reentry vehicles (those are the smaller cone shaped dealies) which cover the individual warheads. Second, the warheads we use today are almost impossible to set off by accident. For example, they use less than critical amounts of Plutonium. The only time the bomb can assemble a critical mass of Plutonium is after it has been imploded to sufficient density, and this only happens when the symmetry of the implosion system is very high (i.e. when the implosion system operates nearly perfectly). And that's only one element of the safety precautions used in modern warheads. Basically, unless the boost gas has been injected into the core, the neutron generators are on, and the implosion system operates correctly, you are not going to get any nuclear yield.
Also, it's kinda funny that the Canadians need so much hand holding on nuclear weapons handling issues. For two decades ending in the early 80s Candian jets in Canada and Germany carried borrowed US nuclear weapons.
This whole notion of accidental detonation of nuclear weapons, or accidental nuclear war, is one of the Big Lies of the peace (i.e., disarmanent) movement. Our nuclear weapons and weapon systems are and have long been equipped with so many fail-safes that, as you point out, the real danger is that they may not go off when we _do_ need them.
Hollywood has produced an endless series of movies based on that false premise, beginning with "Fail Safe" and "Dr. Strangelove". Sidney Hook, an anti-Communist liberal of my father's generation, did an excellent job refuting that movie "Fail Safe" in his little 1963 classic "The Fail-Safe Fallacy".
Precisely because so many things can go wrong to _prevent_ a missile from detonating, reaching its target, or even getting out of the silo, our military deploys several times the actual number of missiles needed for any given counter-attack, so that if, say, 9 missiles fail, there will be at least 1 out of the 10 that will work. This built-in redundancy is known as "overkill".
And -- surprise, surprise -- the nuclear freezers use _this_ as a perennial argument, too: "Why the overkill? How many nukes do we need to kill one human being?" Well, I just answered that in the above paragraph. But most people are unaware of these facts, so they buy the nuclear freezers' arguments. To the detriment of our national security.
I should not need to say that, since it is nothing less than our _freedom_ that our nuclear weapons are there to protect, I will defend to the death the nuclear freezers' right to argue as they do. I only wish the public was more aware of the facts that refute the nuclear freezers' arguments. We need _real_ education in this country!
Just perhaps Canadian officials are tired of, say, not getting apologies when Americans accidentally kill Canadian soldiers, and this seems like a bit more of the same.
It's ridiculous just how complicated atomic bombs are and you'd no sooner set off an atomic bomb with a baseball bat than you could focus a camera with a sledge hammer.
Howdy
i think you are wrong about nukes not being dangerous when mishandled!
it is true that a nuclear explosion is very difficult to trigger and requires precision timing and detonation. Nukes have been dropped and banged up with no explosion.
but nuclear yield is not the danger with the bangor mishap. The danger is that the conventional high explosive could have been triggered, which would create a nuclear 'dirty bomb' scenario. Every nuclear missile is surrounded with a halo of high-yield explosive. The conventional explosive is the trigger for the nuclear reaction. If the conventional explosive is accidentlly triggered, say by a ladder, then you will have a rather large explosion, full of extremely toxic plutonium and possibly other nuclides. In a situation where a dozen (or more) missiles are in close proximity, the explosion due to conventional explosives could be extremely large and damaging.
There is presently a hydrogen nuke buried in mangrove swamps on the coast of North Carolina. its was dropped several decades ago from a damaged bomber. the Pentagon does not want to disturb it for fear of detonating the conventional explosive, which would create an enormous radioactive mess, not to mention endager the recovery crew.
In the 1960s (dont remember when exactly), a nuke was dropped from a plane in spain and exploded. The nuclear materials still contaminate the region. Same deal with a bomb accident in Greenland in the 1960s.
So you are absolutely wrong to dismiss the gravity of what occurred in Bangor.
dan steinberg