Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

In my day, never was longer.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Consistently wrong since 2002

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Republicans in disarray!

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sunday Evening Open Thread: Happy ‘Whew, We’re Still Here’ Day…

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Happy ‘Whew, We’re Still Here’ Day…

by | 46 Comments

This post is in: 

Raise your hand, fellow boomers, if this was the stuff of your childhood nightmares…

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  4. 4.

    raven

    @WaterGirl: Pick this one up

    Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safet

     

    On the frequency of these mistakes

    I was able to obtain thousands of pages through the Freedom of Information Act to write the book that revealed these details, and also to do interviews with people who designed the weapons, people who handled them routinely, who told me these stories. It’s quite extraordinary how much was suppressed.

    If you look at the Pentagon’s official list of how many nuclear weapons accidents, serious accidents, we have — what they call “broken arrows” — the list contains 32 accidents. But I was able to obtain a document through the Freedom of Information Act that said just between the years 1950 and 1968, there were more than 1,000 accidents involving nuclear weapons. And many of the serious accidents I found don’t even appear on the Pentagon’s list. So I’m sure there were many more that I was unable to uncover that occurred.

  6. 6.

    VOR

    There are multiple missing nuclear warheads. There is a H-bomb buried in the ocean sediment off Savannah, GA (Tybee Island incident). Nuclear torpedoes from the sinking of the USS Scorpion. The Soviet Golf submarine (K-129) the CIA partially raised in Project Azorian supposedly had nuclear torpedoes.

  8. 8.

    Cermet

    Didn’t seem that long ago when he died; I noted both his death and reason for his fame in a BJ post that day.

  9. 9.

    MazeDancer

    Still can’t believe CBS is broadcasting Big Brother instead of the Tony Awards.

    If you are getting the Paramount free trial to watch, don’t forget to cancel during the show. You still get the 7 free days.

  11. 11.

    frosty

    @raven: I read that book a couple of years ago. Incredible, scary close calls. Not to mention the environmental damage from the missile propellants.

  12. 12.

    prostratedragon

    Thank you, Col. Petrov. I always have thought that we haven’t blundered into The BIg One due to well-placed sanity on both sides.

  15. 15.

    Mike in NC

    A really dumb guy once asked, “What’s the point of having nuclear weapons if you’re not willing to use them?”

  18. 18.

    dr. bloor

    @WaterGirl:  In this context, ignorance is not necessarily “bliss,” but reppressing an ongoing awareness of the tightrope our species is walking does keep you from going stark raving insane.

  20. 20.

    lowtechcyclist

    As a Boomer growing up just outside the Beltway, my classmates and I figured that if there was a nuclear war, we’d be vaporized before we knew anything was going on, and largely stopped worrying about it.

  21. 21.

    Cermet

    The worse part of the Scorpion (Nuclear Attack Sub), was it was sunk by its own Torpedo; while the Navy unofficially acknowledges they heard the whole incident so they know the details – through an accident a torpedo was activated (the propellant ignited) threatening to incinerate the crew, so the Captain launched the torpedo, turned the sub 180, and ran like hell hoping to get out of range when the torpedo went active (search mode and armed.) Obviously, they failed. That is the story I read about that disaster.

  22. 22.

    mrmoshpotato

    :)

    Review: "Let me tell you I was bitterly disappointed to learn that this book is, in fact, an instructional guide to the profitable husbandry of ducks as a craft. There is not one sliver of insight about holding ducks accountable for their crimes against humanity, Earth or God." pic.twitter.com/MtU200dbdg— Schroder (@outspanned) September 21, 2021

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    @lowtechcyclist: As a Boomer growing up just outside the Beltway, my classmates and I figured that if there was a nuclear war, we’d be vaporized before we knew anything was going on, and largely stopped worrying about it.

    In 1962 or so, a classmate asked our second-grade teacher why we weren’t doing the ‘duck & cover’ drills they’d seen on tv.  Sister John Edwards replied that, since we were living in the Bronx, our first notice of a nuclear attack by the Godless communists would be a flash of light as we were vaporized.  Therefore, our best & only practical preparation for such an event was to keep our souls in a state of sinlessness at all times, just in case.

    For some reason, I found this insufficiently comforting, when it came to theories of nuclear deterrence.

  25. 25.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    I spent most of 1983 – 1985 worried about nuclear war. Especially after reagan’s hot mic moment about bombing the russians.

  28. 28.

    WaterGirl

    @MazeDancer: On principle, I will not sign up for their service in order to get something that should be on TV. Even if it doesn’t cost me money, I think that’s a bad direction to go in and I don’t want to support it.

  29. 29.

    zhena gogolia

    @Another Scott: I think that’s one of Willy Loman’s sons.

    Staying out of the thread above so I don’t get nervous about not being able to get a booster. Like the vaccine, it will happen when it happens. BJ is like “keeping up with the Joneses.”

  31. 31.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia: The way I see it, waiting a bit for the Moderna booster just means they will know a bit more when we are getting it.  I have heard that it will likely be just a few more weeks.

    Plus Moderna antibodies last longer than Pfizer, so we are okay.  Just be careful. :-)

  32. 32.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl: I had Pfizer, but my doctor and the local Stop & Shop and Walgreen’s won’t give me a booster yet. They say they’re “waiting on guidance from the state,” but someone here on BJ who’s in the same state said they already got it. It’s annoying.

    But we’re getting the flu shot next week, so I’d have to wait anyway.

    ETA: Plus hard to be careful when you are teaching without any distancing (masks and vaccines, though, and we get tested every week, that’s all that’s keeping me from panicking).

  34. 34.

    AxelFoley

    @lowtechcyclist:

    As a Boomer growing up just outside the Beltway, my classmates and I figured that if there was a nuclear war, we’d be vaporized before we knew anything was going on, and largely stopped worrying about it. 

    Did you learn to love the bomb, too? ?

  35. 35.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @zhena gogolia: I’m staying away because reading about side effects is a bummer. And, the oh no, I didn’t get any so did it take?

    Knowing about and anticipating side effects from drugs and vaccines is good practice but for some, it has a deterrent effect.

  36. 36.

    Hungry Joe

    I begged my father to build a fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He brought home a five-gallon Arrowhead water bottle and called it good. I was not comforted.

  39. 39.

    Geminid

    @VOR: Wikipedia’s article on theTybee Island incident reminded me a little of the movie Rashoman. There was definitely a collision between an F-86 and a B-47 around 2am on February 5, 1958. It also seems certain that the bomber’s crew jettisoned a hydrogen bomb over Wassaw Sound in order to enable a smoother emergency landing. But was the bomb a complete, operational weapon? The Air Force found paperwork showing that the bomb contained a 150 pound practice piece of lead instead of a plutonium trigger. Then, in 1966, an Assistant Secretary of Defence testified to Congress that this thermonuclear bomb was in fact a complete weapon. So the Air Force went back into it’s records and fortunately found documentation showing that the bomb could not have been complete, that B-47s were not authorized to carry live versions of this particular bomb until June of 1958, when safer plutonium triggers were introduced.

    Irregardless (as we say) of whether the bomb was a complete one, a concerted effort was made to locate it. Crack Navy divers scoured the Sound, and soggy GIs tromped around nearby salt marshes. After a month, though, the search was abruptly called off when another B-47 accidently dropped it’s hydrogen bomb near Florence, South Carolina.

    In 2004, a retired Air Force colonel and his friend trolled a Geiger counter around Wassaw Sound, and found unusual radioactivity. They even narrowed the bomb’s location to an area the size of a football field, or so they thought. But it was subsequently determined that there was only naturally occurring radiation from a deposit of monazite.

  40. 40.

    Anne Laurie

    @zhena gogolia: Oh, I knew she was right (I checked with my dad, who was just getting me started on my career as an sf fan).  I just didn’t think it was fair to be presented with that kind of ontological challenge before I even made my first communion!

  43. 43.

    RaflW

    I’m among the oldest of the Xers, and I remember well worrying about nuclear war. My best friend, who is a 1966 baby, wanted to start an anti-bomb club at my elementary school in Tulsa, OK. I don’t think it would have been well received, but he was clearly on the precociously worried side.

  45. 45.

    cs

    I’m gen X. From ages 11-14, that was my dominant fear. Reagan was not good for my mental health. All the scares, all the tension. Then the run of nuclear war movies. Being a masochist, I watched every single one.

    1983 was an especially tense year. We didn’t know about Petrov or Able Archer at the time, but we could feel it.

    Didn’t help that I was stuck in an evangelical church which considered the end times right around the corner. Regularly pushing end-of-the-world stuff in our heads. But they didn’t worry too much about it. They just knew God would rapture them before the bombs went off.

  46. 46.

    Procopius

    I’ve been increasingly worried since John Bolton became well known during the Bush administration. I’ve read, and believe, stories that many people in the State Department accept his beliefs as realistic. My concern was multiplied many-fold when anonymous people were suggesting, after we failed to follow up on our promises to PRNK and they resumed testing missiles, that we could drop a “tactical” nuke on their missile range. The argument was that they would just shrug off the “bloody nose,” which was all it would amount to. If that story was true, and I believe it was, we have a number of raging lunatics in our foreign policy establishment, which I think is still true.

Comments are closed.