The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is planning to upgrade the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex, returning our country to a Cold War capability of designing, developing, and producing new nuclear weapons. Fortunately, a mandatory environmental review of the DOE"s "Complex Transformation" initiative allows you to submit comments on this ill-advised draft plan. Although your chance to comment is coming to a close, it"s not too late if you act soon"the deadline is April 10.

Please write today and tell the DOE that we don"t need the capacity to build NEW nuclear weapons; we need to take the lead in moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

Union of Concerned Scientists:
http://ucsaction.org/campaign/2_22_08_complex_transformation/?qp_source=wacucs%5fhomearspotlig

For anyone who would like to continue to see Miss U.S.A. say each citizens most important goal is "World Peace" and not the more factual: "to have the most technology advanced collection of the biggest, baddest NUCLEAR weapons of mass destruction" (that we can't keep track of anyway)

What's the point of ordering an inventory when they can't find 2.3 trillion dollars misplaced by the Pentagon. http://whereisthemoney.org/

I spent six years in the US Navy as a Sonarman specializing in anti-surface and anti-submarine weapons systems. I was a member of the Personnel Reliability Program and a member of the Nuclear Weapons Handling Team, Nuclear Security Alert Team, Backup Alert Force and Accident/Incident team as an unrestricted badge holder. I participated in Nuclear Weapons Acceptance Inspections(needed to certify a ship as nuclear-capable), annual Nuclear Technical Proficiency Inspections and Technical Surprise Inspections. This just points out to me an alarming overall degradation of Nuclear Weapons Safety and Security service-wide. I wrote a critique of the Defense Science Board report on the Barksdale Incident you can find here:

http://forums.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?showtopic=127316&st=0&p=1297530&#entry1297530

Read my critique for the relevant info. I'll post an excerpt below:

This is totally unsatisfactory. Any military enterprise involved in the nuclear mission MUST be subject, not only to Certification inspections, but also to annual and random surprise inspections so the nuclear mission can be maintained at the highest degree of readiness. All operating personnel MUST be aware of the special needs of the program and fully engaged in the safety, security and operational requirements needed to sustain that readiness. The fact that, for the past 63 years, there has never been an accidental nuclear detonation gives evidence that the procedures themselves are sound. In this case, those procedures were not followed to the letter and this result was predictable.

I sent off faxes to my Senators when the last nuke incident happened requesting a Congressional investigation and got no reply. I guess this one will be met with a shrug also. What has to happen before someone pays attention ? This shit is very scary!

I think it's a lovely way to celebrate the Anniversary of Three Mile Island.

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=2633

(March 28th, 1979)
Happy Anniversary, everyone!

Hope all our nukes show up!
;)

The inventory will uncover a surplus of nukes explainable only as Saddam's "missing" WMDs.

Having had a career in the US military, with some of my assignments with commands possessing nukes, it seems that the once near perfect (as close as is humanly possible) system for safeguarding
US nukes and their use has been allowed to lapse into a less than good system by POLITICAL officers who define their professionalism by not standing up to the Zionist NeoCons. Folks, back in the "old" days, it was America FIRST (except for the USS Liberty). Wake UP, America!!

Understand smart people that if China had sent Iran the same types of components we would say that China transferred nuclear technology to the Iranians. Anyone who buys this official story would be very interested to hear about all the mushroom clouds Saddam had.

Understand Good people that their was no nuclear material involved in this . It was a screw up but not and atomic one.

Woopppsss, leave it to the Bush team to drop the bomb ... I mean the ball.

So let me see if I have this straight.

We set up a special program to help the former USSR cotnrol its nuclear weapons 'cause we didn't want any of them going astray.

If I recall properly, we were told we needed to invade Iraq because Saddam was going to give some of his many WMDs (including nukes) to his best buddy Usama.

Currently, we have Iran in the cross hairs because they can't be trusted with nukes.

We're engaged in "negotiatioins" (more properly Javanese shadow puppet show) with the nut job in North Korea because of his dangerous nukes.

Problem is, we can't seem to keep a proper inventory of our own.

All this from the Administration of the only Party we can trust with our national security - or so I recall being told.

If they're referring to BILL Gates, there's a reasonable chance it will get done... and quickly. This is trifling stuff for Microsoft but, apparently, an overwhelming, mind-numbing challenge for the stumbling morons who serve Commander Codpiece.

DoD Directive Number 4540.5. It's a pretty big (implausible) mistake to make.
posted by ryoshu at 5:04 PM on September 12

Wheather or not any bombs are currently missing we probably will never know.

What we do apparently know -- conspiracy websites aside -- is that somehow, six nukes got loaded onto a plane and flown across the country without anybody knowing about it. Considering the failsafes that go into nuclear weapon handling, this is a tremendous breach of security.

This is the kind of thing that you expect to happen in former Soviet client states, not the USA. It's chilling.
posted by Avenger at 5:08 PM on September 12 [3 favorites]

http://www.metafilter.com/64655/Well-boys-I-reckon-this-is-it

From the original article:

The AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile was designed to carry nuclear weapons. No non-nuclear warhead is available for this missile. So the only possible error could have been loading nuclear warheads on the missiles instead of practice dummies.

The practice warheads have standard blue and yellow signs declaring "Inert, non-nuclear". The nuclear warheads have at least three distinctive red warning signs. This error is therefore highly improbable, absent tampering with signage.

Nuclear weapons are transported from the storage bunker to the aircraft in a caravan that routinely includes vehicles with machine guns front and rear and guards with M-16s. All steps in the process are done under the watchful eyes of armed military police.

Rules require that at least two people jointly control every step of the process. If one person loses sight of the other, both are forced to the ground face-down and temporarily "placed under arrest" by observant security forces. All progress stops until inspections are made to assure the weapons weren't tampered with.

All nuclear weapons are connected to sophisticated alarm systems to prevent removal or tampering. They could only be removed from the storage bunker by turning the alarm off. And the squad commander clearly would not have authority to turn off the alarm.

I did a little Googling -- this seems to be the right story as to how it all works. If so, I cannot see any plausible or even far-fetched mistake that would allow a nuke to go wandering.

Please -- feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 5:03 PM on September 12 [10 favorites]