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Sunday, June 21st, 2015

Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?

Author:     Nina Burleigh
Source:     Rollingstone
Publication Date:     June 18, 2015
 Link: Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?
Stephan:   I doubt that many Americans, maybe even most Americans, know that although the Cold War with the USSR (remember that term) ended over two decades ago the U.S. Nuclear Triad, as it is known, still exists and is manned around the clock. Airplanes filled with hydrogen bombs still fly, ballistic missile submarines still cruise the world ocean at depth, and in deep holes in the ground ballistic missiles still stand poised for Armageddon. Here is the story of the Missileers, the Air Force moles, who operate in those deep holes.
Captain Blake Sellers believes he was punished after a "whistleblower rundown." Credit: Chip Kalback

Captain Blake Sellers believes he was punished after a “whistleblower rundown.”
Credit: Chip Kalback

For two and a half years, Air Force Capt. Blake Sellers donned a green U.S. Air Force flight suit, and motored across barren Wyoming grassland in sun, rain, sleet or blizzard, for 24-hour shifts, 60 feet below ground, in a fluorescent-lit buried capsule. Sellers was one of the roughly 600 officers, known as missileers, who are responsible for launching America’s 450 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each ICBM in the arsenal is capable of rocketing to the other side of the planet in 30 minutes or less and incinerating 65 square miles. Missileers are the human beings who have agreed to render whole cities — like Moscow, Tehran or Pyongyang, but really anywhere there is civilization— into, in the jargon of the base, smokin’ holes. Air Force Academy graduates like Sellers tend to dream of flying jets. In a corps full of eagles, […]

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