TT: Sorry for fear mongering, but I found the article below extremely
interesting... especially the part where they list "that was close"
situations. Did you know for example that USA B-52 bomber crashed in
1961 and almost accidentally detonated a couple of hydrogen bombs. Each
of those bombs would exceed the yield of all munitions (outside of
testing) ever detonated in the history of the world by TNT, gunpowder,
conventional bombs, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts combined.
Scary stuff.
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Nervous about nukes again? Here’s what you need to know about The
Button. (There is no button.)
Let’s talk fingers and buttons.
“He shouldn’t have his finger on the button,” Hillary Clinton said about
Donald Trump in June.
“I will not be a happy trigger like some people might be,” Trump said on
the “Today” show in April, adding: “I will be the last to use nuclear
weapons.”
“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear
weapons,” Clinton said during her convention speech July 28 in Philadelphia.
On Wednesday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claimed that Trump asked a
foreign-policy adviser three times why, if we have nuclear weapons,
can’t we use them? (A Trump spokeswoman denied that this happened.)
One reason: The detonation of 100 nuclear warheads — there are about
15,000 on the planet right now — could kill 2 billion people, according
to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In a presidential campaign, America confronts its own destructive power
and the single person entrusted with it: Whose finger is on the button?
Fact check: There is no button.
There is a briefcase, though.
It follows the president everywhere — onto Air Force One, onto the golf
course, onto elevators. Inside is a manual for conducting nuclear war. A
how-to, really.
The briefcase is aluminum, 45 pounds, clad in leather and descends from
a line of durable, airtight cases made specially for Erle P.
Halliburton, the oil-field engineer who founded the company that would
become infamous because of its associations with Dick Cheney, the Iraq
war and the Deepwater Horizon oil leak.
Carrying the briefcase is a job shared among five military aides, one
from each branch of the U.S. armed forces. The manual inside is more
like a takeout menu, but instead of picking between numbered Chinese
dishes, the president would choose cities or military installations in,
say, Russia or China (or both) to attack.
Zero Halliburton is the company that has been known to make these
briefcases, but it’s not certain about the current football; the White
House, which refused comment on football matters, bought a bunch about
eight years ago and hasn’t yet ordered more. Zero Halliburton has also
supplied cases as props for the TV series “24” and the Arnold
Schwarzenegger movie “True Lies.” In both, nuclear weapons explode with
an unsettling degree of ease. Since the beginning of the atomic age,
it’s an image we’ve seen again and again. In popular culture, nukes are
detonated by keys, buttons and — in the case of “The Dark Knight Rises”
— countdown clocks.
The briefcase is referred to as “the football,” the card as “the biscuit.”
Jimmy Carter is rumored to have sent the biscuit to the dry cleaners
accidentally.
Bill Clinton allegedly misplaced the biscuit and didn’t tell anyone for
months.
After Ronald Reagan was shot, hospital staff cut off his suit and the
biscuit fell with it to the ground; it was later scooped up as evidence
by the FBI, which initially refused to return it to the military.
The biscuit was presumably in one of President Obama’s pockets in May as
he became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, where 160,000
Japanese people were killed or injured by the first combat use of a
nuclear weapon 71 years ago Saturday.
“We have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of
history,” Obama said there, “and ask what we must do differently to curb
such suffering again.”
At the president’s disposal right now are about 2,000 nuclear warheads
deployed on various “delivery vehicles” around the planet. Some sit atop
missiles buried in the ground in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming,
Nebraska and Colorado. Some are carried by submarines that are
patrolling the North Atlantic and western Pacific. Others are ready to
be loaded onto aircraft in Missouri, North Dakota, Belgium, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.
Some of these warheads can be launched within minutes of the president’s
order, hit anywhere in the world within a half hour, and deliver 20
times the explosive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The
president can order this without consulting Congress, without being
checked by the Supreme Court.
“The longer I’m in the Senate, the more I fear for a major error that
somebody makes,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told CQ last month
after a hearing on plans to develop a new nuclear cruise missile that
could cost $20 billion. “One man, the president, is responsible. He
makes an error and, who knows, it’s Armageddon.”
America just nominated two people to inherit this ultimate power. The
winner will also inherit an unnerving history of close calls.
In 1961, a B-52 bomber broke up over North Carolina and dropped two
warheads to the earth; each had the potential to explode with the force
of 200-plus Hiroshimas.
In 1979, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was
told that hundreds of missiles were on their way from the Soviet Union;
a minute before he called the president to coordinate a devastating
response, he was told that the military had misinterpreted a training
exercise.
[Yes, “The Day After” was really the profound TV moment “The Americans”
makes it out to be]
In 1983 and 1995, Moscow came within minutes of retaliating against
false alarms — the first prompted by sunlight reflecting off clouds, the
second by a NASA research rocket.
In 2007, six warheads were mistakenly flown from North Dakota to
Louisiana before anyone realized that nuclear weapons had been in the
air over the United States.
In 2012, an 82-year-old Catholic nun and two fellow peace activists
easily intruded into a weapons site in East Tennessee that is nicknamed
“the Fort Knox of Uranium” and hosts perhaps the biggest stockpile of
fissile material in the world.
In March, 14 airmen at a Wyoming base that manages nuclear missiles were
suspended for illegal drug activity.
Obama, in his first speech abroad as president in 2009, said humanity
should seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Now we’re readying to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to
modernize the U.S. arsenal, according to the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies, and essentially keep it operational into the
2080s.
And the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic estimation of global peril, has
ticked closer to the midnight of Armageddon since 2010. It was six
minutes to midnight then. In 2012, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
moved the clock to five minutes to midnight. Last year, to three.
Ticktock. Ticktock.
What if Trump is elected? Clinton?
“I have one of the great temperaments,” Trump said on ABC Sunday in
reply to Clinton’s line about baiting him with a tweet. “I have a
winning temperament.”
North Korea tested a nuclear bomb in January and may be readying another.
Troops are massing along European borders with Russia, which deployed
nuclear-capable forces after it annexed Crimea in 2014. In May, NATO
began operating a U.S. missile-defense system in Romania, just across
the Black Sea.
From 2010 to 2014 the National Nuclear Security Administration was
hacked 19 times, according to documents obtained by USA Today.
In the past two years there have been 2,700 cases of illicit trafficking
of radiological material around the world.
Former defense secretary William Perry witnessed three false alarms
during his service in government, which ended nearly 20 years ago. And
yet: “The likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than
during the Cold War,” Perry said last month in Washington at a dinner
with journalists.
There’s the possibility of accident or miscalculation, he said.
Or the threat of nuclear terrorism.
Or tensions between India and Pakistan.
Then again, the scariest thing about the football and the biscuit may be
that they exist at all. So thought the late Jesuit priest and peace
activist Richard McSorley, who once pegged nuclear weapons as the father
of all conflict — as devices that damage even if we don’t detonate them.
“The taproot of violence in our society today,” he wrote, “is our intent
to use nuclear weapons. Once we have agreed to that, all other evil is
minor in comparison.”
One’s mind goes to armed drones. To assault rifles. To violence against
women, against police, against protesters.
“So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap
out of them, would you?” Trump told his supporters at a rally earlier
this year. “Seriously.”
There may be only one biscuit and one football, but there are buttons
everywhere.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/nervous-about-nukes-again-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-button-there-is-no-button/2016/08/03/085558b6-4471-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1