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Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

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Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#131

Post by knappe »

gedy wrote: post #128
knappe wrote: post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

> We've been reckless I worked around nuclear weapon systems and TBH came away with the opposite impression. I grew up terrified of the military and panic mongering about of "THE BOMBS!" from family, media, etc. But after this, I ironically came away feeling much safer seeing how professional and serious people took their jobs.

I'd be curious what your takeaway is from the book.

At one point one of the regulators in the Safety Commission stopped receiving reports about accidents because the Air Force knew that this would be used as ammunition to fix the Titan II safety issues that had been in place for decades.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#132

Post by rangibaby »

rflrob wrote: post #63
ars wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather live in a world where 20 countries have 50 warheads each, then one where two countries have 4,000 warheads each. I absolutely would not. Those 2 countries know far more about the process then those other countries, and they have the budget to do it right. You would have to duplicate labs, and computers, and other efforts 20 times in your scenario, and each of those labs will not be as good as the 2 highe…

> No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war. Or if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the other nuclear power has declared total war. There's been a number of false alarms that have been successfully ignored, but what if one of those false alarms came during the Cuban missile crisis or immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan?

> Cuban missile crisis

US dropped depth charges on a USSR submarine and the latter thought WWIII had begun. Three people had to agree to use nuclear weapons and two did.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#133

Post by yk »

tzs wrote: post #114
knappe wrote: post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

> Further the book, at one point, talks about America's position on Russia and the attempts to keep them from getting "the bomb". It is exactly what has played out and will continue to play out with North Korea and Iran. History is repeating itself and we sure haven't learned from it. Is it actually similar, though? The US got the bomb in 1945. The Russians got theirs in 1949. Given the size of the Soviet Union, how…

Trouble with NK is, they don't have second strike capability, so a disarming first strike from the US is possible and NK knows that. That puts NK in a use it or lose it situation with their nuclear weapons and it may be, that the regime calculates that they (the generals) can survive one. Or they don't, they calculate that their only chance is rapid escalation and basically calling the bluff of the US, or they may just prefer to go out with a bang rather than with a wimper. That means that the nuclear threshold for NK may be a lot sooner than it would be if they have second strike capability. And the US knows that, and knows that they may have to use a disarming first strike before NK decides it's only chance is rapid escalation. NK knows that the US knows. Toss twitter into the mix and you have a pretty toxic stew, even though nobody is actually very unhappy about the status quo.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#134

Post by countryslicker »

PostOnce wrote: post #127
wildmusings wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure we can. We have the capability to totally annihilate as much of North Korea as we need in order to prevent a counter attack. The question is if we are willing to do it, and kill millions of North Korean civilians. Trump is sure trying to convince the North Koreans that he is.

> We have the capability to annihilate as much of NK as we need to prevent a counterattack ...from North Korea If we start launching nukes in the direction of NK, how does China know it's going to stop in NK and not hit them? Do we call them up first? Then what do they say? Is it totally out of the question that China would panic (or reason?) and counterattack? NK doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in fact NK wouldn't ex…

China would intervene for very good reasons.

NK is an ongoing humanitarian disaster right now. At the moment, everybody is standing by blaming the NK regime for not acting to resolve it. If you remove the regime, the crisis gets much worse. If you bomb the country, the crisis gets much, much worse.

When you are done bombing the snot out of NK, who will pick up the pieces? Who will be on the hook for millions of starving people? Who will be the neighbor that gets slammed by the masses of humanity in desperation?

You think China hasn't thought about all this? You think they won't automatically recognize the obvious and enormous threat to themselves? Every missile that lands in NK is a direct threat to China.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#135

Post by knappe »

valuearb wrote: post #106
knappe wrote: post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

Have we been reckless? We've never had a serious accident. So maybe it's not luck, maybe there are a lot of controls that actually work well.

There are not a lot of controls that work really well. And a lot of the controls that do exist were fought for tooth and nail. That is the entire point of the book. :)

For example, the locks in place at each Titan II facility all had exactly the same code (1111). And they were left unlocked.

Regarding the accidents, here are a few examples:

Thule Airbase crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash

Damascus incident? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

How about the two hydrogen bombs that were accidentally dropped from a B-52: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bo...

Or what is probably the worst incident to date, the B-52 that caught fire and almost blew up with 75,000 people within the blast radius: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-08-13/news/910328029...

The list goes on and on. That is the reason why the book specifically called out that it was a miracle we haven't had any (known) detonations.

Here is a list of the _known_ broken arrow events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear...

Keep in mind that the article we're discussing is about a 53 year old event that was _just_ revealed. There are more of them -- we just don't know about it, yet.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#136

Post by baby »

knappe wrote: post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

This is probably what will happen with terrorist attacks. There is no way they will stop now that medias love to talk about them, and there is no way they will decrease. We'll just grow tired of them.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#137

Post by countryslicker »

abandonliberty wrote: post #72
knappe wrote: post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

Hey it's not all bad, we managed to convince Ukraine to destroy their nuclear weapons and it worked out really well for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

It worked out even better for Libya.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#138

Post by forapurpose »

gedy wrote: post #128
knappe wrote: post #54

I recently finished Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety [0]. I can't recommend the book enough for how eye opening it really is into how blasé we have been with nuclear weapons. We've been reckless and by all accounts it is a miracle we haven't had a serious accident (there have been a few, just not on our own soil). The number of close calls is just astounding. Fur…

> We've been reckless I worked around nuclear weapon systems and TBH came away with the opposite impression. I grew up terrified of the military and panic mongering about of "THE BOMBS!" from family, media, etc. But after this, I ironically came away feeling much safer seeing how professional and serious people took their jobs.

> I grew up terrified of the military and panic mongering about of "THE BOMBS!"

It's probably not intended that way, but the above is a bit of a strawman. There are many serious reasons to be concerned.

For example, a few years ago it was discovered that the Air Force units operating the missiles had very low morale, there was widespread cheating on qualification exams, significant disregard for safety regulations, and a problem with drug use. Also, the general in charge had a drinking problem so bad that he went on a binge in Moscow.

Before that, it was discovered that the Air Force lost track of several nuclear weapons. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Bob Gates, fired multiple Air Force leaders.

Outside the missile field, maybe 10 years ago peaceful civilian protestors penetrated a complex storing highly enriched uranium or plutonium (weapons-grade materials, IIRC), and spent something like 20 minutes adjacent to the building containing the materials before security discovered them.

IMHO, with something this dangerous, the greatest threat is complacence and trust. We are dealing with human beings who we are requiring to be vigilant over a period of generations - something people are very poor at for even a short time. Trust, but verify said Reagan of the Soviet Union, and that applies to our side too.

Re: Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed

#139

Post by kbenson »

dogma1138 wrote: post #129
kbenson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From missile launch to missile detonation is enough time for NK to shell large chunks of high population areas of SK. They have the guns already pointed and ready for exactly this reason.

You assuming that NK has an early warning system which consists of more than a guy with binoculars and circa 1960s radar which they don’t. The US is more than capable of launching a preemptive strike against NK without Seoul being hit nearly as hard as one would think. The main reason they won’t isn’t the shelling of Seoul is that China won’t allow US troops on its border and neither the US, SK nor China wants to dea…

> You assuming that NK has an early warning system which consists of more than a guy with binoculars and circa 1960s radar which they don’t.

You don't think China has such a system and won't give a friendly call to North Korea? You'd be willing to bet the lives of South Koreans on that?

Also, as much as we like to think of North Korea as a joke nation, I'm sure there are some very smart people in the government. In fact, there may be more smarter people in government than in the United States. There are plenty of opportunities in the private sector here for a smart ambitious person. There's less private sector opportunity in North Korea, and statistically, 25 million people is bound to produce quite a few very smart people. As long as they can identify and capitalize on some of them, you can bet they are likely government resources.

So, I think it's much more likely that North Korea doesn't have early warning system technology because they've decided they don't need it, and they can focus their research elsewhere. If China gives it to you for free (for the reasons you outlined), then why waste those resources? I would be hesitant to assume any perceived shortcoming of North Korea's situation wasn't specifically sought by them. Not because they are geniuses and masters of strategy that have designed every aspect of their situation, but at least some aspect are, and complacency and underestimating your enemy have no place in war, much less a nuclear war.

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