Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?

[marmar]

from Rolling Stone:


Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?
Air Force officers at America's nuke sites work 24-hour-shifts in antique underground capsules launching fake attacks straight out of 'Strangelove' — and they're ready to blow

By Nina Burleigh June 18, 2015


For two and a half years, Air Force Capt. Blake Sellers donned a green U.S. Air Force flight suit, and motored across barren Wyoming grassland in sun, rain, sleet or blizzard, for 24-hour shifts, 60 feet below ground, in a fluorescent-lit buried capsule. Sellers was one of the roughly 600 officers, known as missileers, who are responsible for launching America's 450 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each ICBM in the arsenal is capable of rocketing to the other side of the planet in 30 minutes or less and incinerating 65 square miles. Missileers are the human beings who have agreed to render whole cities — like Moscow, Tehran or Pyongyang, but really anywhere there is civilization— into, in the jargon of the base, smokin' holes. Air Force Academy graduates like Sellers tend to dream of flying jets. In a corps full of eagles, he and his compatriots are the moles.

The route down America's underground WMD silos begins with five months of training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. There, the first requirement is signing a document committing to end the world if so ordered by the president. But what if, somewhere along the way, a missileer has a change of heart and decides he or she is not OK incinerating millions of civilians? "They say, 'Well that's OK, but we are going to separate you from the Air Force and you will pay back everything we paid for your education,'" Sellers recalls. "In the Air Force Academy, that's $300,000. So you will be unemployed and owe $300,000."

During training at Vandenberg, pairs of missileers enter a simulated launch capsule, with swivel chairs facing a console — four black-and-green screens, and two keyboards — that resembles Matthew Broderick's workstation in the 1983 movie, WarGames. The pairs open a small metal box with two coded padlocks, and the senior member of the crew removes The Key. A grid on one of the screens displays the status of 50 nuclear missiles, 10 of which are under his or her control. The senior commander and the deputy read and repeat a series of steps and codes from various manuals. When the word "critical" flashes in small red letters on a screen, the senior missileer inserts The Key.

....(snip).....

The Air Force has ordered countless studies trying to figure out what's wrong with its post-9/11 missileers. Most of these blame burnout on what researchers call the culture of "micro-perfection" and the general "inability to accept small errors" at nuclear launch centers. But interviews with current and former missileers suggest that the monotony and perceived irrelevance of the job also led to ethical breakdowns, like cheating and criminal behavior. In 2013 researchers with the defense contractor RAND linked severe burnout to fears over job security in the post-Cold War era. They found that with a realignment of the nuclear world, there was a pervasive fear among missileers that one wrong move could end in discharge. But that fails to explain another finding from an unpublished RAND study: court-martial rates in the nuclear-missile force are more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force.

Sellers says he found the cheating excusable because it was the only way to survive the grinding minutiae of a job that is arguably obsolete. "I don't know if it was ever prestigious," he says. "The leaders, they try to rah-rah you every day — a little at Vandenberg and then more when you get to the bases. They kind of know how shitty and awful it is. So it's 'Hey, guys, this is so important, we are saving the world every day from nuclear annihilation.'" ................(more)

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/are-we-on-the-verge-of-a-nuclear-breakdown-20150618#ixzz3dVzD40uF

[SheilaT]

1. Nuclear war.

the first requirement is signing a document committing to end the world if so ordered by the president. But what if, somewhere along the way, a missileer has a change of heart and decides he or she is not OK incinerating millions of civilians?

The wonderful and still timely movie "War Games" starts with a drill in a nuclear silo, and one of the two men inside refusing to launch the missiles. They don't know it's an actual drill, and apparently this keeps on happening during these drills, so higher ups decide to remove the human interface. Guess that hasn't yet happened.

I actually thought that many of the silos had been decommissioned and many were of uncertain reliability as to launching, since they're so old.

[Kelvin Mace]

2. There are three prongs to our nuclear force

1) Bombers
2) Silos
3) Subs

Bombers will never reach their target, since a single airburst nuke can knock them out of the sky.

Everyone knows where the missile silos are, so they will be attacked first and probably neutralized.

Boomers are the only remaining prong that can actually work since they are VERY hard to track and can pop up anywhere and rain atomic death on an attacker.

Save money, increase safety, get rid of #1 and #2.

[SheilaT]

5. I'll admit to being completely horrified that

anyone at all is still thinking nuclear war is something that should ever happen.

And I'll admit I'm slightly confused:

Boomers are the only remaining prong that can actually work since they are VERY hard to track and can pop up anywhere and rain atomic death on an attacker.

What are boomers in this context? Just a name for subs that carry nuclear weapons?

[Kelvin Mace]

6. Sorry, shouldn't use jargon

Boomers are ballistic missile subs carrying nuclear missiles.

Yes, the idea of nuclear war is horrific, but still considered since there are still around 10,000+ warheads in the world. If we are going to have these weapons out there, then they should be viable systems, handled by trained and reliable people. The Air Force has failed at this task and bomber based and silo based missiles are obsolete systems which should scrapped to save money and make us safer (we are less safe with these weapons in the hands of poorly trained people with bad morale).

Of couse there is no political will to scrap the Air Force's nuclear forces.

[Ghost Dog]

3. The Obama administration, unable to fend off entrenched political and military-industrial interests"

- Quote from the article.

How long must this go on?

[CanonRay]

4. I wonder; do the Russian personnel sitting in their silos

have the same problem, or are they all drunk 24/7 on bootleg vodka?