Another example of the (necessary?) dark humor popular among those in the US military charged with the responsibility for actually launching or dropping nuclear weapons:
Other examples:
Still more:
And, of course:
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LIVE NOW: Senate Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing on "Department of Defense Budget Posture for Nuclear Forces in Review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2022 and the Future Years Defense Program." armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/depar…
Here are the witnesses (Andrew Walter is a hardline holdover from the Trump administration who somehow still has a job):
Chairman Angus King (I-ME) opens by describing a recent trip he and ranking member Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) took to inspect Minuteman ICBMs and B-52 bombers at Minot AFB, North Dakota.
LIVE NOW: Senate Budget Committee hearing on "Waste, Fraud, Cost Overruns, and Auditing at the Pentagon." Ranking Member Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) is using his opening statement to claim that threats are increasing so military spending must increase. budget.senate.gov/hearings/waste…
So far, only Graham and chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are present. Here are the witnesses:
During witness statements, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) arrived. Still, for a 22-member committee, this is a very low rate of attendance, especially for a hearing to discuss wasteful and fraudulent spending by the government's largest department.
Where do (defueled) US submarine nuclear reactors go to die? Trench 94 in the 218-E-12B burial ground at the Hanford Reservation in Washington State. Once full (>100 reactor compartments), it will be filled with clay and maintained and monitored for decades if not centuries.
Here's a more recent unannotated photograph showing several dozen additional reactor compartments in the trench.
And here's a photograph by Robert Del Tredici taken from inside the trench in 1998 which shows the scale of these massive structures:
Starting today in 1982 in "Doonesbury," Mark, B.D., Bernie, Zonker, Mike, and Boopsie gather in Walden College's computer lab for a computer-generated nuclear war game, reflecting real-world concerns about the Reagan admin's arms buildup and plans to fight and win a nuclear war:
April 13, 1982: Bernie explains the rules for the nuclear war game, which begins with a false alarm, surprising Mark.
April 14, 1982: The nuclear war game continues. With Soviet/Warsaw Pact troops massing on the border between East and West Germany, Mike makes a fateful decision.
Today in 1950, the crew of a B-36 bomber on a 24-hour nonstop simulated nuclear strike combat mission from Eielson AFB, Alaska, to Carswell AFB, Texas, suffered engine trouble off western British Columbia and jettisoned an unarmed Mk-4 atomic bomb before abandoning the aircraft.
The bomb, which contained 5,000 pounds of conventional high explosives but not its plutonium capsule, was set to detonate at 1,400 meters. The crew later reported they saw it explode above the ocean, about 50 miles north of the town of Bella Bella on Hunter Island.
At five minutes past midnight (Feb. 14), as the aircraft flew over Princess Royal Island, the 16 crewmembers and one passenger bailed out. Despite three of six engines being shut down, the plane flew on autopilot another 350 kilometers before crashing inland into Mount Kologet.
The fifth person through the door behind Vice President Pence in this video is his military aide carrying his duplicate nuclear "Football," which—just like the briefcase that follows the president 24/7—follows the vice president everywhere s/he goes.
Earlier that afternoon, a C-SPAN camera captured a glimpse of a different military aide carrying Pence's "Football" through Statuary Hall after the Joint Session of Congress adjourned to consider Republican objections to counting Arizona's electoral votes:
This article has the clearest video yet of Vice President Pence's military aide carrying his duplicate nuclear "Football" while hurriedly evacuating the Senate chamber ahead of the rapidly advancing insurrectionist mob on January 6: washingtonpost.com/investigations…