So… if I’m reading this correctly, this is a different base than the one that lost a machine gun and a box of grenades a couple of weeks ago.
If you want to be really terrified about the us nuclear arsenal I recommend “
Broken Arrow - The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents”
To me it underscores the utter folly of nuclear deterrence: the game theory says that you need to have weapons sprinkled all over the country in secret locations, ready to launch at a moments notice. So you need to move them around and you need to practice constantly. But psychology says that humans are very good at fearing the known but have trouble maintaining fear of the everyday ( even if they know it’s dangerous). Also people get bored. And people make mistakes- especially on routine tasks.
This article reminds me of the time I served in the Army while stationed in Germany back in the mid-70’s. For awhile I was in a Field Artillery section. We had M109A1 155mm Self-Propelled Howitzers. While on a training exercise in Grafenwoehr, our driver decided to drop a hit of purple micro-dot acid. He told me this once we got into firing position. Immediately I told my chief of section. He decided it best not to have the acid head drive back to base camp. No disciplinary action was ever taken. The 70’s were so long ago.
“Wow, man! The colors, man! Look at that psychedelic orange glow! I’m tripping balls so hard it looks like the flesh is melting off of my bones! Oh, wait a second! It really is!!!”
A friend of mine who was stationed in Germany in the early 1980s told me a story about how he dropped a hit of acid and then was told that he had to drive a general on a six-hour round trip to Berlin and back. He was shitting (rainbow) bricks, but the whole thing went off without a hitch, and with the general none the wiser.
The whole “Drug Ring” wording is so stupid, like some big profit-making operation. These were just a bunch of bored guys getting high. And this isn’t a new thing. I knew a bunch of the actual button-pushers in those silos back in the Seventies, and we used to do LSD frequently, and pot constantly (except when they were working). Sometimes we’d talk about their duty and what they’d do if they ever got the order to fire. I suspect many of the missiles would end up not fired in such an instance, based on the many conversations I had with those guys (yes, when NOT doing LSD).
If you saw the most recent episode of Madam Secretary, where thousands of warheads were thought to be en route from Russia, one has to wonder what the real purpose of a counterstrike would be. Revenge? The nuclear winter that would result from the Russian strike alone would likely create more suffering and slow death in Russia, if revenge is the goal, than the much quicker death under a hail of US missiles. And the chance of a full-on counterstrike being ordered due to a mistake (and that’s really almost happened in the past, not just in fiction) would basically be a world-ending event. Why have those land-based missiles at all? They’re the ultimate accident waiting to happen, and LSD certainly wouldn’t be the reason. If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend watching that Madam Secretary episode, because it lays out the insanity very well.
He was lucky. I spent 4 years in Germany and I could write a novel of the drug experiences that went on in my battalion. We were located about 20 so miles north of Frankfurt. That city as a mecca for drugs.
