Doomsday
Dear god in heaven, I thought we were done with this. A taste of the article-
In the course of talking to Minuteman commanders down in their underground launch capsules, I'd glimpsed what they might be called upon to do. They had the ability to launch from their underground pods up to 50 missiles able to kill 200,000 or 300,000 people each. You do the math.
They certainly had, and it showed beneath their black-humored jokes about coming above ground after a nuclear war and finding "only huge mutant bunny rabbits alive."
They were, thank God, not automatons. As Blair points out, their training system was designed to turn them into automatic button pushers, but the ones I spoke to retained a sharp sense of skeptical individuality. About the gravity of their "mission": killing that many people. And about the sketchy mechanics of it.
One crew member even disclosed to me a flaw in the "command and control" "permissive action" system that was supposed to prevent a madman missile commander from launching his "birds" and starting an apocalyptic nuclear war all by himself. The flaw: the system's susceptibility to the "spoon and string" improvisation.
So much focus has been placed—in film, fiction, and nonfiction—on our supposedly "failsafe" barrier to a lone-madman launch. We'd been told that to launch a missile, two keys must be inserted simultaneously into their slots by two separate launch officers, and that the slots for the keys were located at a sufficient distance from each other that one madman couldn't, say, shoot the other crewman and then use both his arms to twist both the keys simultaneously.
But the missile crewmen I talked to told me they'd figured out a way to defeat that impediment with a spoon and a string. Not that they were planning to do it, but that they knew someone could do it.
You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key over."
Shades of the nightmares of my childhood. Like we don't have enough on our plates. You couldn't pay me enough to be President in these times.
via Insty- thanks a pantload, pal...