70 Punished in Accidental B-52 Flight (armed, yet!)

CWO4 Dave Mann wrote:

Glenn wrote:


"CWO4 Dave Mann" wrote in message
. ..

Herman wrote:

I suppose it would have been allright if they had flown over any
other country. Americans are, after all, more important than other
people.

Regards,
Herman

"Square Wheels" schreef in
bericht news
http://news.aol.com/story/_a/70-puni...19214309990002



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I was an Army SIOP custodian for 2 years.

Rules for flying over anyone's country with special weapons on board
are complex and strict. As for these careless assholes, I would have
preferred to see a Danny Deever Drum Out starting with the Secretary
of the Air Force.

This incident really has not gotten as much publicity and public
outrage as it should have. But, considering the Army kept the fact
of a loose SADAM secret for some 25 years, I am not surprised to read
some of the bull**** which was spread by the "official press releases".

I say cut their nuts off and post them on the bulletin board.
****ups like this absolutely must never be allowed to happen again.

Dave


I thought that Nukes were always flying around America. Or used to.
However, you're comments about rules about Nukes in foreign countries
being strict etc, we're told in Australia that
we can not be told if they have Nukes on board the carriers or not. We
just assume they are. Or are you saying that our Government knowingly
lets Nukes in.
That would be not quite how they portray it.m(but then all politicins
are lying little *******s) And kind of makes more sense on the Kiwi
stand of not allowing them.





A priori: ALL politicians of whatever stripe are duplicitous thieves to
whom prevarication is a way of life.

The official US Government policy concerning Special Weapons is to
neither confirm or deny existence in any one particular place or time.
That means that the Aircraft Carrier on a port call may or may not have
SW on board. Same with storage facilities, and so forth. It is nothing
more than a political charade since any real enemy knows where they are.

For example, back in the days of thousands of ICBM's on constant watch,
the US Government would not release to anyone the locations and which
were armed with nuclear weapons. However, at the diplomatic level, the
US State Department routinely exchanged map coordinates of US and USSR
missile installations as part of various strategic verification
measures. Thus, while the tax-paying US citizen was denied information,
our arch enemy the USSR got it for free.

Anyway, you can use common sense if you are a military person or combat
buff. Any vehicle which has a "strategic mission" can be guaranteed to
be nuclear capable. That includes cruise missiles carried aboard ships
at sea, various air craft, submarines and so forth. Look at Jane's and
you will see that there are such things as nuclear depth charges,
torpedoes, demolition devices, and so forth, in addition to the odd 20
Megaton Hydrogen fusion device (reportedly the largest in the US
inventory).

Back in the day when the Army Engineers developed plans to deny the
Fulda Gap to an on-rush of Soviet tanks, nuclear demolition charges were
stockpiled and ready to be easily emplaced. Not much thought was given
to the surrounding countryside of course, since it was assumed that
should those devices be employed, tactical devices fired from 155mm,
120mm and 8" howitzers would have already been used.

Today the greatest challenge facing the US nuclear inventory is "will
they still work". That is because of the exposure of internal
components to hard radiation and deterioration of said components. That
is why the PanTex facility continues to take in devices shipped from all
over the place and either rebuild them or de-militarize them. De-milled
weapons are separated into the fissile and non-fissile materials. The
fissile materials are either placed into storage or processed for other
uses or re-processed to make new weapons grade fissile materials. The
mechanical parts are recycled as scrap after destruction so that their
identity as components of a special weapon is erradicated. For pieces
of equipment which are radioactive, they are reduced to a shredded mulch
and stored in a nuclear waste container and facility.

We do not need as many nukes as we needed back in the old days of The
Main Enemy. It was always strategy that at least one half of deployed
weapons would be rendered ineffective by combat action before use (fancy
words meaning that your missile silo was hit by an enemy nuke before you
could launch). That added to the strategy of the Nuclear Triad (silo
launched sytems, submarine launched systems and airplane launched
systems) required something like 40,000 special weapons. That inventory
include such oddities as Davy Crockett Atomic Mortar rounds, Special
Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADAM) -- the quintessential "suitcase
nuke" although it was actually a backpack-able device slightly smaller
in size of a 5 gallon paint can and weighing about 75 lbs. (See, if you
were a Special Forces Engineer, you would parachute into enemy territory
and set the timer for a few minutes and then attempt to be a mile or two
way when it went off.).

Today, the USA still has enough special weapons to rule the world many
times over. Note that I do not use the phrase "destroy the world". We
ARE the preeminent nuclear power in the world and will be so for the
foreseeable future. Even China and the old Soviet Unions various
fragments can't possible approach our capabilities for deployment and
strategic or tactical employment. For example, think about the
potential of launching nukes at the capital cities of every nation in
the world which has ****ed us off in the past few years. So we use up a
couple hundred nukes? We still have several thousand left to make sure
the melted stay melted and irradiated for a hundred years. The Lesser
Countries of the World may yap all they want, just like the stray dogs
they resemble, but at the end of the day the USA still has several
thousand nukes which can be delivered in an elegant and effective
manner. This, of course, is the penultimate Jingoistic Wet Dream, but
most people in the world would not believe just how many Americans of
all colors, religions, political perpetuation, have frequent dreams of a
world cleansing by the USA with the attendant bending of that world to
OUR rules.

The End



And yet some politicos want to strip this cushion away...

grrrrr

JT

"Herman" wrote in message
...
I suppose it would have been allright if they had flown over any other
country. Americans are, after all, more important than other people.

Except for Australians.

We rule

"Herman" wrote in message
...

I suppose it would have been allright if they had flown over any other
country.

Isn't that what they're for? (tongue in cheek)

Seriously, I doubt that anyone would have anything to worry about unless
they were the intended recipient of the parcel. It's more an expression of
faith than actual knowledge, but I believe that for a nuclear event to
occur, there would need to be a much more complex unbroken chain of errors
than actually happened. Maybe I'm mistaken.

Americans are, after all, more important than other people.

We *are* "other people".

TP

"Square Wheels" wrote in message
news

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/70-puni...19214309990002


--
G O T R I B E !!!

Vote Kenny Lofton for Governor of Ohio!



Not armed. Loaded, as in "Put aboard an aircraft". The aircraft carrying
these missiles, wasn't even equipped to arm and launch the weapons. Quite a
difference.

Al G

Al G wrote:
"Square Wheels" wrote in message
news
http://news.aol.com/story/_a/70-puni...19214309990002


--
G O T R I B E !!!

Vote Kenny Lofton for Governor of Ohio!



Not armed. Loaded, as in "Put aboard an aircraft". The aircraft carrying
these missiles, wasn't even equipped to arm and launch the weapons. Quite a
difference.

Al G



If they had been armed I really would have worried!

When a Special Weapon is at rest in it's individual packing case,
shipping case, or storage container, it is impossible to make the weapon
go into nuclear detonation. The essential elements are not there but
are someplace else.

When the weapon is prepared for use, certain elements are inserted into
the weapon and the device is then capable of being armed.

When the weapon is ready for deployment, certain steps are carried out
by authorized people in concert with each other to make the weapon into
a nuclear weapon ready to be detonated.

After the weapon is dispatched onto it's way to the target the weapon
may be detonated by an automatic procedure or by a manual remote control
procedure, or it may be "stunned" and the ability for it to produce an
atomic explosion canceled. The weapon may still end up on the target as
in a gravity bomb, but the detonating conventional explosive only will
explode.

It is highly unlikely that the device would be stunned after deployment
unless it were "en route" to the target with enough time -- say a few
tens of seconds -- to stun the device. That would not be a preferable
action, however, since fissile materials would be scattered by the
conventional explosion.

Anyway, hopefully this entire SNAFU will cause a very detailed re-look
at SIOP and Special Weapons procedures. Along with a whole bunch of
nuts pinned to the post bulletin board.

Cheers,

Dave

My tuppence worth:-

Tereis no way it would get anywhere near being Armed; Armed means
ready to drop.

Loaded is entirely different; weapons can be loaded on an aircraft
and be perfectly safe, but armed is a whole different kettle of
fish. Particularly for Special Weapons, which need, typically, three
components with extreme safeguards on each, to be brought together
and assembled before anything remotely like instant sunshine can
occur. On top of that special coded sequences while in flight have
to be carried out for the weapons to self -arm (in the old days Core
assembly in flight was done manually).
Cunning Plan!!! I'll give you a Cunning Plan!

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