Nukes on a Plane

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Albert Einstein

"For want of a nail, the shoe is lost; for want of a shoe the horse is lost; and for want of a horse the rider is lost."
George Herbert

So, the US government had these really cool nuclear warheads, bombs really, in North Dakota. They loved them but the little bombies were getting old and needed some sprucing up. The problem was, to do the sprucing, the g-men needed to get their lovely babies down to Louisiana by Thursday. How to do it? Hmmm. Put them on a high-tech, ultra safe, specially designed cargo plane and fly them via a secret route which has been mapped out and planned perfectly? Or maybe, a safety equipped and highly monitored train? Or how about wrapped in bubble wrap, slapped in a box and UPS’d? (At least you can track them via UPS.)

No, they decided to strap them to the wings of a B52 bomber and just send them on their way cross country; sans monitoring, authorization, tracking, etc. (They kept their fingers crossed for safety measures, I’m sure.)

Unfortunately, believe it or not, this method may have a few tiny flaws. The main booboo being the warheads (which the military assures us are TOTALLY safe, gosh) were missing...oh, just say it..LOST, for over three hours! Yes, these toys of Armageddon were absent, unaccounted for, awol as it were, during a flight which crossed from the top to the bottom of our country. Ooops!

FYI, each of the bombs which were “strapped to pylons on the wings” of the planes equaled between 5 to 150 kilotons of TNT. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 was approximately 15 kilotons.

I don’t know about you, but bombs, especially nuclear ones scare the crappola out of me. Ever since I saw the movie,The Day After, in the early 80’s I’ve been jumpy about the whole issue. Something about the vision of the world being hit with a searing blast which dissolves us all into one big mass of ultimate destruction and pain (ie. Hell) that bothers me. I guess I’m just a crybaby like that.

But I feel, the real point of this story, like those bombs, is missing. The really scary thing here is not that our government just lost a few potentially world destroying pieces of equipment. It’s that our government...many governments...have at their finger tips the ability to lay waste to the planet. Nukes, that’s what’s scary.

I say, lets not just get a better system or better workers to handle the nukes. Let’s get rid of the nukes, ALL nukes, including nuclear power plants.

Bumper stickers I’ve come up with:
Thank you very much, but I’ll pass on the nukes today.
Nuke free for me.
Go nature, not nukes.
Nukes suck.


Read `em and weep....

New York Times: Loose Nukes: Warheads in the Sky, By Mike Nizza

AP:'Military Times' Scoop: U.S. Plane Carried Nuclear Warheads to Louisiana

Aljazeera News: B-52 in US 'nuclear error' flight

Strategic Security Blog: A project of the Federation of American Scientists--
Flying Nuclear Bombs

Britain drops nuclear bomb. Fortunately it doesn’t go off

Article: U.S. Nuclear Stockpile Today and Tomorrow