December, 1960, fifteen members of Congress serving on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had toured nato bases to investigate how American nuclear weapons were being deployed. They found that the weapons—some of them about a hundred times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—were routinely guarded, transported, and handled by foreign military personnel. American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
The Kennedy Administration soon decided to put locking devices inside nato’s nuclear weapons. The coded electromechanical switches, known as “permissive action links” (pals), would be placed on the arming lines. The weapons would be inoperable without the proper code—and that code would be shared with nato allies only when the White House was prepared to fight the Soviets. The American military didn’t like the idea of these coded switches, fearing that mechanical devices installed to improve weapon safety would diminish weapon reliability. A top-secret State Department memo summarized the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961: “all is well with the atomic stockpile program and there is no need for any changes.”
Eric Schlosser on the reality of Dr Strangelove in The New Yorker (2014)
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December, 1960, fifteen members of Congress serving on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had toured nato bases to investigate how American nuclear weapons were being deployed. They found that the weapons—some of them about a hundred times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—were routinely guarded, transported, and handled by foreign military personnel. American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
The Kennedy Administration soon decided to put locking devices inside nato’s nuclear weapons. The coded electromechanical switches, known as “permissive action links” (pals), would be placed on the arming lines. The weapons would be inoperable without the proper code—and that code would be shared with nato allies only when the White House was prepared to fight the Soviets. The American military didn’t like the idea of these coded switches, fearing that mechanical devices installed to improve weapon safety would diminish weapon reliability. A top-secret State Department memo summarized the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961: “all is well with the atomic stockpile program and there is no need for any changes.”
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05:23 in Film, General Commentary, history | Permalink | Comments (0)