FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
The dangers of our aging nuclear arsenal
How bad is the situation?
The Pentagon recently admitted there are "systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise." Thanks to arms-control treaties and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has reduced its stockpile of nuclear weapons from 31,000 to about 4,800 over the last 48 years. But as fears of nuclear war eased, the government failed to adequately maintain and update this immensely dangerous arsenal, which still contains enough collective destructive force to lay waste to every country on Earth. The U.S.'s 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are stored in decaying 60-year-old nuclear silos in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming that look like a poorly maintained Cold War museum. The demoralized Air Force personnel safeguarding the weapons have been plagued by scandals reaching to the very top of the command structure — including drug rings, mislaid missiles, and widespread cheating on readiness tests. Today, the real nuclear threat to America isn't an enemy strike, says Air Force Lt. Gen. James Kowalski. It's "an accident. The greatest risk…is doing something stupid."
The average age of a U.S. nuclear warhead is 27 years. Many of the buildings where the nuclear missiles and bombs are stored date back to the 1950s — and it shows. Blast doors on the country's nuclear missile silos are too rusty to seal shut. The roof of a security complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that houses most of the U.S. supply of enriched uranium collapsed in March. For years, the three ICBM complexes had just one working wrench available to tighten the bolts on the missiles' warheads. When the wrench was needed, the workers would FedEx it from base to base. Today, the principal information technology used to operate and launch the ICBMs is an 8-inch floppy disk from the 1960s.
That's an understatement. The Air Force officers spend long shifts in a hole underground waiting for a launch order that will probably never come, while "their buddies from the B-52s and B-2s tell them all sorts of exciting stories about doing real things in Afghanistan and Iraq," Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project, told Mother Jones. That sense of frustration has led to trouble. In 2013, the Pentagon announced it was investigating a drug ring across six missile launch facilities. Then, when examining the phones of two Montana officers suspected of using ecstasy and amphetamines, Air Force commanders unwittingly uncovered a cheating scandal implicating 98 missileers. The officers had been texting one another the answers for the monthly exams, which test a missileer's knowledge of security procedures and classified launch codes. The institutional rot has led to a number of frightening near-misses.
In 2007, six nuclear missiles went missing from a North Dakota facility for 36 hours. It turned out they'd been accidentally attached to a plane's wings and flown over several states to Louisiana, where they were left sitting unprotected on the tarmac for hours. A year before, four missile nose cones were accidentally sent to Taiwan instead of helicopter batteries. The most serious near-disaster occurred back on Jan. 21, 1961, when two nuclear bombs slipped from the belly of a B-52 flying over the North Carolina city of Goldsboro. Both bombs were set to detonate, and failed to do so after suffering minor damageto the parts needed to initiate an explosion — a stroke of luck that saved the city from annihilation.
http://theweek.com/articles/533721/dangers-ouraging-nuclear-arsenal
Maybe America should invade itself so that it can spend trillions of dollars to fix up its nuclear and WMDs arsenal.
How do you ship nuclear weapons instead of helicopters or accidentally drop a pair of nuke in North Carolina ???
This is hilarious and sad.
EDIT: God knows what the Russian nukes look like though, they must be at least 100% worse condition.
Which is pretty scarey.
