Nobody does it for the money. Everyone does it for the bennies.
This is probably the least risky OTR trucking job ever since you have so many people making sure everything goes right and you don't have dispatch pushing you to do insane shifts that stretch the law.
Government workers I know seem to primarily credit reasonable hours (e.g., government coders don't get 100+ hour weeks; they go home at 5) and decent management (i.e., actual professional management, not screaming morons), but certainly stability and benefits too.
Every government dev I know who isn't a manager will strongly disagree with the "professional management" take. People generally don't become managers of government dev shops because they're great at managing people. They become managers because they're what's left after everyone else has gone on to do other things.
The counterpoints are people so uninspired and risk averse that it is the same as brain drain, and a subset of them are the people that began with a “serving the public” ideal and accidentally accumulated too many obligations by the time they figured out they wanted to live in a nicer neighborhood or send their children to a good college
The good talent are people that took a plea deal for non prosecution that included public service
"The expose painted a dismal picture of an overworked and underpaid organization where over a third of the personnel would put in more than 900 hours of overtime each year, equal to more than 35 extra days on the job. Couriers and agents spend most of that time on the road on long, boring drives unable to stop for protracted periods or even leave their vehicles in many circumstances. If they get pulled over by local law enforcement for some reason, the truck drivers aren't even allowed to speak to the police without the security force commander being present during the conversation.
Underscoring these issues, in 2010, the Department of Energy's Inspector General cataloged 16 alcohol-related incidents within OST in the preceding three years, including an incident of public intoxication where a courier was arrested and another where two employees ended up in police custody after getting into a drunken bar brawl. The report uncovered New Mexico court records showing the office's top executive had gotten a DUI after police came across him parked on a sidewalk apparently drinking in the car with a blood alcohol level of 0.15 percent."
As a non-American living in the US the way people talk about tangible public-sector benefits (or lack thereof...) led me to think otherwise. The only significant "benefit" people do talk about is job-security, I guess because people are hard to replace if they're being underpaid...
I would be shocked if higher levels of gov't job positions don't start to include minimum requirements of X years in job, education levels, etc just as any private sector job would.
I'd bet they have pretty low personal risk. Where would the risk come from? I could see being close to radioactive materials as a risk - though hopefully there is sufficient shielding to negate that. I don't see much risk from people attacking you to take the nukes. I feel like that doesn't happen very often. Maybe some risk from lots of vehicle miles traveled.
It seems like an awesome job for someone with the right set of preferences. Spend half your time training, working out, going to the range. Half your time on long road trips. Huge responsibility, but extremely low chance you'll ever need to actually do much. Kind of like being a cop who never has to arrest or deal with people.
The documentary Command and Control [0] included a small part about the recovery and transport of a warhead after an accident in which they missile it was mounted on exploded.
Hate to burst your bubble but we don’t actually live in a movie. I think.
That being said, the quoted line kind of raises the question: how do we know?
I suppose given the use of the word “feel” the GP doesn’t actually know, but that’s not really my point anyway. My point is rather – if there in fact were incidents involving these nuclear material couriers, would it make the news or remain secret as a matter of national security?
Burst all you want, but it doesn't mean my comment wasn't true. You can want this conversation to only go one direction (real life), but it's the internet and conversations can diverge. The fact that it has been involved in plots is still relevant. Some people might actually find it interesting even if it steers the convo in a manner you don't approve.
A: I wonder how often event X occurs? I imagine it's not very often.
B: It happens in movies a lot.
To me, as a native English speaker, B is clearly implying (with their "technically true" statement) the statement "Event X happens a lot in fiction, therefore I infer that Event X happens a lot in real life". Statements are read in the context of the preceding conversation.
I dunno, I feel like I'm living in a future designed by folks who looked at Robocop, Starship Troopers, and a few other bits of dystopian sci-fi and instead of treating it as a warning decided that it would make a swell instruction manual.
Hmm... maybe its my german heritage, but i don't see Starship Troopers as THAT dystopian:
Every politican has skin in the game (mandatory military service for gaining the right to vote or be voted for)
No racism or sexism or other discrimination, at least there are no traces for that in either the movie nor the novel.
If you don't want to join the military: No problem, you don't have any major disadvantages (besides no political participation), see the wealthy family of the protagonist.
Science seems to flourish
Ehm... sorry for the digression... what were we talking about?
Well, the book by Heinlein certainly wasn't meant to be dystopian, so there are sane elements in it.
But the movie was a bit different - maybe you watched the german version? That was a bit softer - the teacher didn't made jokes about the anhilation of Hiroshima there.
It was a deeply militarized society. Brutal. Top down. But yes, at least the politicians had to be part of that, too.
(but in reality ... I think you can be in the military and be far away from any danger, like Bush was a fighter pilot, but not deployed at Vietnam.)
Interesting... i think i have to do a rewatch of the movie (this time in english), yes, i have watched the german version, which was "over-the-top", but not THAT "over-the-top"...
Ok, I have to admit I did not read the full book, just the beginning, but do not remember this. But I was told it was not meant to be dystopian. On the other hand, Heinlein did had some extreme views, though, so I am not sure, what the message of the book actually is.
I think 1984 was used more as a manual, than a warning, despite so many people throw the name around, despite never having read it.
And I always kind of assumed, that Bush watched Swordfish (where the bad guys are only bad, so they can fight terrorism, so are the "good guys") and would have gone on a war on terror, even if 911 would not have happened.
By "happen", most of us mean "happen in reality", not "happen in fiction".
Although, it might be a bit relevant. You feel cooler when you tell people what you do if it's fictionally cool, even if in real life it's not all that great.
From having watched lots of dash-cam videos recently, I would guess traffic accidents are the riskiest things they regularly deal with.
If the truck is still operating afterwards, I expect they don't stop - they let another vehicle that is full of federal agents from the convoy deal with it.
an aside but can we please stop with using "accident" as the default term to describe mayhem involving motor vehicles? This simply dismisses the many risk factors as being simply inevitable even though there are more than likely preventable causes to address.
Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident.
You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions.
In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars.
So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation.
In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken."
Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today.
The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.
You don’t have to, but I am, and I’m encouraging others to as well. It’s not a crusade, it’s calling something what it is. Car crashes aren’t “accidents”. Oppsie we just had a fender bender where 3 people died. It was just an accident ya know?
It’s marketing and branding to downplay one of the greatest sources of premature death, wasted money, and negative externalities that exists. That way we can keep buying cars for no good reason and commute while we sit at home and isolate ourselves from our fellow Americans when we aren’t driving.
Responding to the person your responding to with “I don’t like it!1!1!” when they provided, ya know, some reasoning, is kind of a poor response. What’s a good reason to call them accidents instead of wrecks besides “this is what I’m used to”?
There's a difference between a crash where the outcome was not deliberate vs say a deliberate attack on a convoy by ramming cars at it.
Accident implies it's not premeditated or deliberate, which, i'd wager, is the case of the vast majority of road incidents. That doesn't absolve drivers of guilt if they were in the wrong or doing something wrong at the time. But it does mean it wasn't deliberate.
Edit: You also forget that things like wildlife, mechanical failures and other things outside the control of a driver can be the cause of car crashes as well.
> Accident implies it's not premeditated or deliberate, which, i'd wager, is the case of the vast majority of road incidents. That doesn't absolve drivers of guilt if they were in the wrong or doing something wrong at the time. But it does mean it wasn't deliberate.
The vast majority of collisions are caused by driver recklessness. (Yes, a few are caused by mechanical issues etc. as you say - but driver recklessness (e.g. speeding) is the biggest factor). Calling it an "accident" does kind of diminish their culpability.
> Calling it an "accident" does kind of diminish their culpability.
Nothing about “accident” implies lack of culpability. By your and other’s logic, essentially nothing can be an accident as ultimately almost everything is cause and effect. Your dropping the milk on the floor wasn’t an “accident”, it was the effect of you not paying attention to the task of carrying the milk carton and being reckless about it (as an example).
> Nothing about “accident” implies lack of culpability. By your and other’s logic, essentially nothing can be an accident as ultimately almost everything is cause and effect. Your dropping the milk on the floor wasn’t an “accident”, it was the effect of you not paying attention to the task of carrying the milk carton and being reckless about it (as an example).
If you were exercising reasonable caution when carrying the milk, it was probably an accident. If you were being reckless, then it wasn't.
The fact that drivers are such an overwhelmingly disproportionate cause of premature death suggests that they do not generally exercise the kind of reasonable caution that we'd expect decent people to use in everyday life.
For this to be true I think you have to be using a basically circular definition of reckless driving, like "if it was possible for conditions ahead of you to change faster than you could brake, then you should have been going slower."
In reality drivers rely on models and predictions of other road users' behavior, and are committed by inertia to a course which requires those predictions to be true. We can tolerate more or less uncertainty, bigger or smaller margins, but a speed so slow that you can be sure of stopping in time for the most unlikely development right in front of you, is also a speed which is pretty much useless for transportation. The need to take this risk in order to go about your life is built into the whole system of urban planning and not something for which a particular driver is blameworthy. A driver becomes blameworthy to the extent that their tolerances were unusually tight for the situation. But even loose tolerances are exceeded some of the time.
> For this to be true I think you have to be using a basically circular definition of reckless driving, like "if it was possible for conditions ahead of you to change faster than you could brake, then you should have been going slower."
I'm mainly reasoning back from the fact that drivers are causing so many premature deaths, yes. "If you're killing this many people then you must be being reckless", but I think that's sound logic? But also if we look at things like e.g. compliance with relevant laws, that seems to suggest that drivers are reckless as a matter of course - drivers flout speed limits all the time, to the point that they will often try to argue that this crime is somehow a non-crime because everyone does it.
Isn’t driving at a speed and following distance that you can safely stop if you need to basic driving technique? In the country where I live insurance won’t pay out or will only pay a small amount for read-ending someone.
If you go through an intersection where you have a stop sign and cross traffic has a 45mph+ highway, without consideration for that cross traffic, it's probably going to hit you. They are relying on you to enter only when the way is clear.
One reason dashcams are so popular is people like to exploit the insurance presumption of guilt towards the rear-ender by getting in front someone and then slamming the brakes. Video which shows the scammer acting unreasonably to put themselves in the way can turn the tables.
Because if all crashes were labelled 'car violence' it may prime people to think that any innocent driver who crashed their car and caused damage elsewhere due to mechanical failure, an animal crossing the road at night, black ice or a pothole is guilty of negligence.
In that world there may even be someone on HN asking everyone to change the term to 'car accident' to prevent these innocent drivers being unfairly characterized as causing intentional or negligent harm.
Car wrecks and car crashes, at least in my mind, don’t have anything to do with culpability. Just like plane crash doesn’t.
The issue I see is “car accident” tends to normalize the destruction caused by cars. It’s a public relations campaign. Oil and gas, and other industries could use the lesson it seems. Don’t call Deep Water Horizon a malfunction or problem. Just say hey it’s just an accident. Nobody intended anything bad so what’s the problem? Rest easy, go back to sleep. Just an accident...
Nobody cares that car wrecks are a leading cause of premature death amongst teenagers for example. It’s all just an accident.
They care when you change the narrative back to what it truly is. Unnecessary and premature deaths due to intentional design decisions and subsequent, avoidable but easy to predict car crashes.
It is estimated that millions of animals per year are killed by cars in the United States alone. Seems like it happens enough that people should be driving slower and watching for it.
I'm not sure what that should be called, but 'car accident' seems like it doesn't describe it very well.
From dictionary.com: "an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap"
A car crash absolutely fits the definition. You sound like you want the definition of "accident" to be something other than what it is.
Yes, people are careless driving. Yes, that causes problems (and even death) that should have been avoided. But that still fits the definition of accident.
What about when you drink and drive or speed, or drive too fast for conditions? How is that unintentional when the action you take is intentional?
Otherwise, you're seriously giving an escape hatch to say, drunk driving, because "Hey I was just carelessly driving. It was just an accident. I didn't intend to cause harm, damage, or loss when I drank all of that alcohol and accident my car into someone else. 'Whoops'"
Anyway, let's say these are all accidents. Ok. We can also still call them car crashes and wrecks and that would be more accurate because these terms don't assume intention but merely describe what has taken place.
Many news organizations are making this change - it’s not that person’s personal crusade, it’s an important part of improving road safety to stop treating crashes as inevitable.
>an aside but can we please stop with using "accident" as the default term to describe mayhem involving motor vehicles? This simply dismisses the many risk factors as being simply inevitable even though there are more than likely preventable causes to address.
the word accident by no means conveys inevitability to me.
ac·ci·dent
/ˈaksədənt/
noun: accident; plural noun: accidents
1. an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
So.. unless we're talking about intentional automotive manslaughter or some equivalent, I think 'accident' applies well to 'unintentional,unexpected,unfortunate incidents', which there tends to be quite a few of related to motor-vehicles.
What terms do you want to use? mayhem and murder? Those both describe motive that just isn't present in most cases of motor-vehicle accident.
* violence : behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. *
'violence' conveys yet another motive, an intent to hurt. Another no-go as far as suitable candidates, as far as i'm concerned. Automotive accidents do not usually come about as a result of a negative motive towards another human.
"accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash.
Intent is a funny thing to determine though, but the same article I linked above and provided an excerpt from also deals with how there is a "degree of intention", either from other road users, or from engineers and officials that are tasked with managing traffic and road safety.
---
Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in?
UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths.
Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%.
"The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk."
According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building."
Industrial accidents, aviation accidents and workplace accidents are much like vehicle accidents in that people spend a huge amount of time, money, and energy on figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it.
The term accident in this context is understood to mean exactly what happened, which is that the event wasn't immediately intended- not that nobody is at fault.
I’m not sure why intention matters in calling a car crash or wreck exactly that instead of an accident. When an airliner goes down we don’t call it an accident. Midair collision, plane crash, etc.
When planes flew into the WTC was that an aviation accident? Do you see how the terms used change this?
“Car accident” implies a normal state of behavior and softens and normalizes what is a pretty crazy thing to happen. Calling it a wreck or crash doesn’t imply any sort of culpability, yet denormalizes these interactions.
If someone willfully ignored ATC in a plane and crashed the plane would you call that an accident? No? Why do we not say the same when someone drives a car over the speed limit and crashes it? Why is that an accident but plane crashes aren’t?
If you take a step back it’s easy to see society has been modified to think of car crashes differently.
If you shoot someone accidentally, that might be a firearm accident. If you shoot someone intending to kill them, that might be murder.
The term accident doesn’t necessarily imply “normal”, but rather “no intent”.
9/11 would not qualify as an accident because the intent of the hijackers was to crash the plane.
You say car crashes are treated differently but your examples imply the opposite! That car crashes are treated identically to other mishaps which are classed as accidental or not by the intent of the actor(s).
Let me ask you this, if you are going over the speed limit or drunk driving and crash into someone else is that an accident or intentional?
And why is it that everyone here is defending using the term "accident" by suggesting that car crash or wreck is not a correct description?
In drunk driving for example, you intently operated the vehicle impaired and caused a crash. If you drive over the speed limit you are intently operating the vehicle recklessly. We do on occasion use the term vehicular homicide when describing these actions, but it depends on whether someone was hurt or not, even with the same action being taken (drunk/speeding/etc.).
My point of contention is that "accident" assumes no intent or reckless behavior. Crash and wreck just describe what happened.
There's a reason that accident was injected into our vocabulary. That reason is that we generally accept that accidents happen in society. We don't accept crashes or wrecks. If a lot of car crashes are happening and society doesn't accept them, you better figure out a way to re-categorize them.
>Let me ask you this, if you are going over the speed limit or drunk driving and crash into someone else is that an accident or intentional?
An accident. Accidents can occur from reckless or negligent behavior. That is not the same as intentionally hitting another car and the legal concept of “criminal negligence”[1] covers this exact distinction.
> Most crimes involve intentional conduct. For example, in some states, the offense of assault can be committed by the defendant intentionally using or attempting to use force against someone, as with a punch or kick…some crimes involve reckless or negligent, rather than intentional, conduct. The term "reckless" essentially describes a defendant's simultaneous understanding and disregard of a substantial risk of harm. An example is a defendant having previous DUI convictions and understanding that driving drunk can harm or kill people, but nevertheless getting behind the wheel while intoxicated and causing a fatal accident.
So in both a legal and common sense understanding of intentionality, it clearly is not.
> And why is it that everyone here is defending using the term "accident" by suggesting that car crash or wreck is not a correct description?
No one is saying crash or wreck are not also accurate. If you want to call it a crash, go right ahead, but you are objectively wrong to say that me calling it an accident is not a correct description.
> In drunk driving for example, you intently operated the vehicle impaired and caused a crash. If you drive over the speed limit you are intently operating the vehicle recklessly. We do on occasion use the term vehicular homicide when describing these actions...My point of contention is that "accident" assumes no intent or reckless behavior.
Once again, you are confusing intentional recklessness and intentional outcome. “Vehicular homicide, also known as vehicular manslaughter, is the reckless or negligent killing of another through the use of a vehicle.” [3] The resulting accident is still unintentional by both legal and common sense standards. The word “accident” does not assume no reckless behavior, and it does not assume that there were no intentional decisions that contributed to it.
In military aviation they're "mishaps" for precisely this reason. For things to go wrong somebody had to drop the ball, be it pilot error, ground crew, or maintenance deficiencies.
There's a mindset shift depending on how you view space allocation. Crash on a motorway because you spilled coffee on yourself? Ok, accident. Crash on a neighbourhood street where kids could be walking, cycling, playing, etc? Negligence, just as much as if you "accidentally" shot a kid while deer hunting at the playground.
But this is based on the idea that people have just as much right to be in the street as drivers do. Most people disagree with me on this, outside of urbanists and perhaps Dutch people.
Maybe an interesting intersection point is “systemic violence”
Violence is a confusing and disputed term, often bogged down by the visual of two sides, one striking, one struck.
Systemic violence is maybe more interesting here because it acknowledges that the system involves violence by design. A certain amount of violence is accepted because of a prevailing narrative. Here specifically one of fault and blame.
IE the driver wasn’t paying attention / the pedestrian was doing something silly
Systemic violence acknowledges that the design of road infrastructure can be made safer but we choose to be ok with a certain amount of violence.
Take hospital check lists as an example. By using check lists for procedures staff reduce the chance of mistakes.
The event is still a mistake but we chose to put more energy into preventing it.
A lot of traffic accidents are... accidents. People aren't necessarily driving recklessly just because the damage is serious (or minor). Sometimes you get sun blinded, your hand slips, you discover you're epileptic while driving, etc.
When people engage in reckless endangerment, there's a crime for that: reckless endangerment. When the driving was stupid, but not to the level of criminal, there's a lawsuit for that.
"Accident" also very nicely preserves the assumption of innocence until proven guilty.
Yes, of course, unless someone deliberately crashed, it was unintentional. That doesn't mean nothing wrong happened. Likely multiple preventable or fixable issues happened that led to said accident.
Governments know how to design roads to prevent crashes and slow down drivers in areas where there is speeding. Is a crash on a known unsafe road an accident?
That's the disagreement. There are many drivers on the road that I would assert, when their behavior does finally inevitably land them into a wreck, did so deliberately. Now, I am sure that if you ask them, they would claim that they did not "intend" to get into an accident, but the utterly reckless behavior with which some people choose to operate a ton of steel hurtling down the road at 60+ mph sings a very, very different tune.
(Now, I'd also accept just a simple "car wreck" or "collision", as suggested by a sibling, which doesn't assume that there was wrong doing, at least, unless the facts suggest otherwise.)
It's an accident if no one planned it and willed it deliberately.
But accident is a civil term, not a legal term. Legally there's a spectrum of culpability from driver innocence (the brakes failed, the lights failed, a bob cat fell on the windshield) to premeditated murder, with negligence and recklessness in between.
There may still be legal responsibility elsewhere. Did the brakes fail because the garage made a mistake?
Of course you can have an accident because you were reckless. That doesn't mean you wanted to kill someone. It means you were taking avoidable and unnecessary risks and didn't get away with it.
Because people gradually are shifting away from car-by-default and starting to notice how many people cars (or rather drivers) keep killing? (I started cycling to work about 4 years ago, around the time my city built some new cycle lanes, so of course I became a lot more conscious of how much reckless endangerment goes unpunished when it was happening to me). Because recent events have shown that we can make massive social changes to prevent deaths, so there's more hope that we could do the same for other major causes of death?
I know things in America are different, but as a lifelong pedestrian who owned a car for less than 2 years and walks all the time, I was endangered by reckless cyclists more often than by reckless drivers.
If an asshole shifts his ass from car to bike, he will start riding on the pavement in places that are absolutely unsuitable for that, or on hiking trails that are absolutely unsuitable for that. And I say "he", because it was 100 per cent men. (I am a man too, for the record.) Gals seem to be quite a bit careful.
> I know things in America are different, but as a lifelong pedestrian who owned a car for less than 2 years and walks all the time, I was endangered by reckless cyclists more often than by reckless drivers.
Bullshit. You notice reckless cyclists more because they're more unusual, that's all. The statistics for the rate at which pedestrians are killed or seriously injured show that it's overwhelmingly drivers who are putting you in danger.
I cycle almost exclusively. I don't think reckless cyclists are more unusual that reckless drivers. I'd guess the fraction of reckless cyclists is about the same as the fraction of reckless drivers. However since cyclists and pedestrians are often forced to share space, pedestrians notice the cyclists more often.
"However since cyclists and pedestrians are often forced to share space, pedestrians notice the cyclists more often."
That is it.
When you walk regularly, you find paths from A to B that minimize your contact with cars to a level crossing or two. (Might be different in the countryside or in cities whose walkability is poor). So your chance of getting hit by a car are fairly low and you only really need to pay attention when you cross the street. For the rest of the time, you can afford to daydream or wander in thoughts a bit.
Once people learn to ride their bikes on pavements, it means the need for constant vigilance.
Biking needs its own infrastructure, separate from both pedestrians and cars. The needs and speeds are just different.
No, I notice bicyclists more because when they do reckless things because I am an attentive driver who makes sure he is not endangering others.
Bicyclists often have this view that they are above traffic laws and break them:
>he will start riding on the pavement in places that are absolutely unsuitable for that, or on hiking trails that are absolutely unsuitable for that.
In my state, cars and bikes share the road and have to follow the same laws.
There is a stop sign at the bottom of a hill near my house, I have never seen a car drive through it, plenty of bike don't stop.
People in general are bad at driving and the potential for harm is much higher in a car than a bike due to the kinetic energy involved. Read about how complicated human visual perception is, how cognition changes at the slightest distraction, and how our 'clear' mental picture is often more interpolated than it is real. I mean, there are 6 million car crashes every year in the United States alone.
Which state is that? I don't think any state applies exactly the same rules to cyclists and motorists, and many states have a law that cyclists may treat stops as yields.
The thing is, where I live, as a pedestrian, I almost never share the same surface with cars. Only when I need to cross the street, which is, say, three times a mile. For the rest of the time, I am in relative safety of the pavement. (Cars running into pedestrians on pavements, though not impossible, is a fairly rare occurrence and I have never seen one in my almost 43 years of age.)
This is a major difference in the entire risk calculation.
How many collisions between bikes and pedestrians on pavements have you witnessed given that's your criteria for risk? Mine is 0, as a daily cyclist and pedestrian.
I might be a bit bitter because I am sitting right now in my office, about 25 meters from a fairly dangerous corner where I really need to peek out carefully lest I want to be smashed down. In order to get to the office I need to pass this place at least twice a day and during the last years I avoided at least ten accidents with either bikes or shared electric scooters already. Some of the riders seem to consider themselves immortal as they zap directly into a place where they cannot see.
> They are similar in the same way being clawed by a cat is similar to being mauled by a tiger.
Please do not downplay the risks of being hit by a 120 kg+ object moving at, say, 10-15 mph. It is similar to the risk that the cyclist himself faces if he suddenly falls of his bike, namely, brain damage from cracking your skull against the pavement. Cyclists wear biking helmets to protect themselves against this possibly fatal event. Sudden falls can be fairly dangerous, especially for older individuals. Maybe not a tiger, but a cougar. Definitely not a home cat.
Not everyone can dodge in time. Some people are absent minded (and I would say this is their right when walking on a pavement). Some are old and arthritic. Some are kids. Some are blind or deaf. They need to be reasonably safe on a pavement, which means not sharing it with another sort of traffic that moves much faster than them.
I am all for biking/cycling, but it really needs its own infrastructure. Most developed countries can afford it, it is not expensive to build a dedicated biking lane.
> Please do not downplay the risks of being hit by a 120 kg+ object moving at, say, 10-15 mph. It is similar to the risk that the cyclist himself faces if he suddenly falls of his bike, namely, brain damage from cracking your skull against the pavement.
Please do not imply this is remotely comparable to the risks of being hit by a car. It is not. In that context, downplaying the risks of being hit by a bicycle is absolutely correct.
> Cyclists wear biking helmets to protect themselves against this possibly fatal event.
Cyclists in countries with decent road laws, such as the Netherlands, do not generally wear helmets. Cyclists in some countries wear helmets, mainly to protect themselves from bad laws passed by ignorant non-cyclists.
It's misleading to imply that cyclists are (hypocritically) exposing pedestrians to a level of danger for which they would themselves want to wear a helmet. The level of danger of head injury that a cyclist or a nearby pedestrian is exposed to is below the level at which most people would feel a helmet was appropriate. (Notably, it's many times lower than the level that car drivers and passengers - people who do not normally feel a need to wear helmets - are exposed to).
I live in a city and I frabkly disagree. Most reckless cyclists on pavements will not be travelling at any speed, and are definitely a nuisance, but not dangerous. It's also categorically not unique to men.
Those assholes when driving are the people who ignore the no right on red junctions, undertake slow moving traffic, use the wrong lanes on roundabouts, park in blue badge spots, throw litter out the windows etc. They're going to be assholes no matter what their mode of transport is.
I have a feeling somebody somewhere is paying for it. Who that might be and what their real motives are, I have no idea. But it's well known that modern marketing companies will buy or create social media accounts and employ people to post their line around the web. I don't know whether the parent post is such a thing or not, but it would be foolish to assume that things like that don't happen on this board. But it's also funny how, if the issue is framed right and promoted in the right places, you'll get some people who are genuinely into it and post about it on their own.
The really weird part is, what are you to make of it if you genuinely like a position, but there is also a well-funded campaign to push it?
1. "Violence" is trendy. Words are violence, silence is violence, so some people start looking for other things that might be called violence.
2. Possibly the psychological need to overcome adversity. Someone living in a nice neighborhood, threatened neither by gangs nor by rogue cops, seeks surrogate problems to conquer. In a few weird cases, it turns out like this and Twitter will amplify it, because Twitter loves (even hostile) attention and engagament.
Well traffic violence is actually appropriate, or at least more so than what you mention, as anyone who has been involved in or witnessed a traffic accident can attest.
in the UK, the term RTA (meaning road traffic accident) was used by the police to describe a car crash in their reports. this has now largely been superseded by RTI or road traffic incident [0] in order to better convey the idea that these situations are often not simply blameless accidents, and there can be a wide variety of different reasons for their causes or precursors.
i have also seen RTC or road traffic collision used - however, this seems inaccurate when describing, say, a vehicle skidding or sliding out of control on the road but stopping without actually hitting anything, thus startling a pedestrian who then reacts by steppng backwards and falling off a bridge?
Of course, the UK still has Marine, Rail and Air Accident Investigation Branches, whose remit includes incidents caused by things like improper maintenance, falling asleep on watch, or drunkenness.
> I don't see much risk from people attacking you to take the nukes. I feel like that doesn't happen very often.
given that Russia didn't lose any nuke in the chaotic 199x (didn't lose or they were quickly recovered) I think there is no credible/feasible/capable interest/threat for the nukes.
Of course it's possible that some Russian nukes were stolen, and someone's been keeping them in a warehouse for the last 25 years, and we'd never know.
But I find it likely that if someone had stolen a nuke, they would have sold it, and the kind of people that would buy it would have used it by now.
I'm making two assumptions:
1. you don't steal a nuke unless you're going to sell it or use it
2. you don't buy a nuke unless you're going to use it (for blackmail or to blow something up)
I think there's one other possibility. It could be stolen to study and reverse engineer. You're probably looking at state actors instead of random third parties, but enemies of Russia would probably want to see the level of technology they're using. And states trying to develop their own nukes might be able to learn a lot from having a first hand example.
I'd be quite surprised is someone who lost/had stolen and then recovered a nuc would admit to this taking place. I really don't think we would know if this had happened.
The US government spent a lot of money upgrading Russian nuclear security and paying personnel in the 90's so precisely this would not happen. Same with the rocket scientists.
I have heard that one of the recent projects to redefine the kilogram independently of an artefact was essentially a job creation scheme for unemployed Russian nuclear scientists to stop them being hired by people with more nefarious intentions.
Source? I'd be somewhat surprised if these job creation projects are happening much anymore given that a lot of the 90's era scientists will have retired or emigrated by now. I think most emigrated.
It might have been a while ago- here [0] is a link to a press release from 2005 saying that the isotopic enrichment of silicon-28 for the Avogadro Project (to redefine the kilogram using a perfect sphere of isotopically pure single-crystal silicon-28) was done at two Russian institutions.
Here [1] is a 2004 press release from the International Science and Technology Center, whose first objective is to "Provide weapons scientists in the CIS the opportunity to redirect their talents to peaceful activities." Page 9 describes their involvement in the Avogadro Project.
Here [2] is the project description on the ISTC website.
> Spend half your time training, working out, going to the range.
That right there makes it pretty attractive. Lots of people do those things for fun. If that's half your "workload", it totally makes sense to do a job like this, especially if you're not a city person since that's a solid salary if your not in a high cost of living area.
Hrmmm, have any of these agents ever been assaulted in connection with their official role? I guess we wouldn't know but also I guess not. Seems not too bad for personal risk.
Huh?? That's just entry-level base pay specifically for the Albuquerque-Santa Fe-Las Vegas, NM locality with 3 additional levels of opportunity above that[1], and you'd be getting paid the entire time to train towards a CDL + small arms + tactics qualifications...not to say anything about additional unadvertised compensation and standard fare of benefits that accompany typical blue collar federal jobs.
I suspect the biggest general public barrier to entry here would be competing against a glut of qualified applicants with 5-/10-point veterans' preference, assuming time was taken to put notification hooks in place for immediate action on job postings that'll close almost as soon as they're announced.
The article says they recruit people with military and police experience. There’s a good chance this job is full of 40-50 year olds who retired early and need a way to keep busy.
I don't know the security, of course, but because of the value to some parties of a nuclear weapon or some of its components, I wonder how it could be adequately secured in a convoy on the open highway.
British Nuclear Fuels has posted some YouTube videos of how they move nuclear fuel by train. Manpads don't quite cut it:
"The flasks are very robust - they weigh around 50 tons and have walls 35cm thick. 16 bolts, each able to take a load of 150 tons without breaking, secure the lid. The flasks are forged out of two block of steel."
I'm not sure the kinetic and explosive energy of a manpad, but they have done tests with three locomotive engines smashing into a flask at 100mph, and the flask remaining intact.
And further: Even if you had the resources of a James Bond villain and by some miracle of luck managed to attack the convoy, extract the weapon, and scurry off with it, you still couldn't use it. Nuclear weapons are designed to turn into bricks under any scenario of misuse, and the mechanisms to ensure this are some of the most devious and elegant engineering artifacts in the history of the engineering profession. This article gives a brief overview of these mechanisms but of course it is not comprehensive.
AFAIK much of the security comes from the willingness to destroy the weapon in question rather then allow it to be stolen.
Rumor mill is that the trucks carrying the warheads are configured to be capable of destroying their own axles and flooding the trailer with a quick set concrete to make it extremely difficult to access. That's only keep it from moving easily though. Air force or air national guard keeps some fighters on alert nearby with orders to bomb the convoy if it does go south and security forces can't repel the attackers.
>Finally there is an inclinometer - if the trailer becomes off level by a certain degree, the entire inside of the trailer is filled with expanding, fast-hardening foam.
The axle thing is not a rumor, or at least it has been reported as fact in the past, although I can't seem to find the source now. Never heard about the concrete though.
The security is designed by DOE PHD's at the national labs who are working with essentially an unlimited budget. The full resources of federal police agencies and the US military are also available for use.
The only high risk areas are where you start, and where you finish, because those are known positions. Everything else can be variable....and nobody is any the wiser, because the only thing that's really different is that the trucks have zero DOT/MC numbers on the side and they have GSA plates on the truck/trailer....and I highly doubt that they stop at Weigh stations along the way. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyjQb3oJi80 -- this is a video of how the military transports warheads around: I'd assume many of the same types of transports are similar in nature between the NNSA and the DOD.
Back in the 1940s or 50s, they were trucking an atomic bomb casing (no nuclear material, just the case, but that was still highly classified) between Sandia and Holloman Air Force Base. This was in a standard army truck, not a semi. In downtown Albuquerque, they got in a collision, and the tailgate fell down, and the bomb casing fell out in the road.
I don't think it was their own guy who hit them, though...
My stepdad told me a story years ago about a nuke getting left on the tarmac when he was stationed in Korea. Apparently they thought it was a practice bomb but it was an actual live warhead. I don’t remember the details except “it was a big deal and we all got in a lot of trouble”.
There's a significant escort. Even if someone were to attack the convoy with a force big enough to overcome the escort, I'd expect the truck to be armored (and easily immobilized), and by the time they've cut through the armor to get to the loot, the air support will be on site...
The first thing they'd have to do is either trick the convoy and its screening vehicles into a roadblock and assault the convoy, or use IEDs to stop the convoy and assault what's left. A number of people have commented on how the semi has its own countermeasures, but it honestly would take an awful lot of effort to even get to the point that such a thing is necessary.
Wikipedia says all LEO or military authorized to assist the convoy are given a countersign. This is to prevent tricking into a roadblock like you suggest.
It also means that legitimate LEO who try to assist will be fired upon by the convoy. If that happens they are just supposed to take cover until the authorized ones show up and take over.
> Wikipedia says all LEO or military authorized to assist the convoy are given a countersign. This is to prevent tricking into a roadblock like you suggest.
I wasn't suggesting anything in particular, but I think the sort of roadblock you'd use to slow down a convoy like this would involve a staged accident to force a detour of the convoy to a less secure route. An awful lot needs to go wrong for that to even be possible, and at the end of the day there's still combat with heavily armed law enforcement needed to get near the cargo.
It seems pretty futile, since the end result of applying even an overwhelming (and somehow previously undetected) force to the convoy is probably going to be a ruined road, a ruined semi, and a difficult to open, boobytrapped vault on the road that weighs so much you'd need a crane to move it.
So, if this is such an obvious thing, why wouldn’t you think there are countermeasures for that? As people have said, the trucks have (or very likely have) axels that self-destruct. They also could have a trailer hitch that self-destructs if you attempt to disconnect it. The hitch could also be custom made to be too large/small/wrong shape for a traditional hitch. The lines that connect to the air brakes (that lock up without air pressure) could be custom made to not fit, or self-destruct, or both. The cab could have a kill switch that destroys or disables the engine. And of course, we don’t actually know which of these are actually used, and what additional security measures there are. So any bad actor would have to gain access to detailed security plans without it being discovered or attack blind and hope they have accounted for everything and can overcome known and unknown security.
Seems a bit more complicated than just unhooking the trailer and driving off.
They are extremely well secured. They don't travel alone; you may not notice that. They are surprisingly armored like a bank vault. And a report of attack can be responded to by any LEOs, and the military. Getting away with a weapon is as close to impossible as it gets.
We had one come in one afternoon, a bit late. We stay on standby to receive. They can't get the doors to open correctly. This is no small matter; they have to open just so. After us faffing off for a couple hours watching, they decided to drive down to Rocky Flats, and come back tomorrow. They aren't allowed to spend the night just anywhere; it has to be a secure installation.
Next day, they come back. The techs at Rocky Flats figured out their doors.
FYI, the US military has a strong policy against recognizing hostages.
It means if a theoretical attacker were to take the security forces hostage, there is no leverage gained for the attacker in that scenario. And yes, that means exactly what it sounds like.
If you remember the thread a couple months ago about DoD personnel putting sensitive information into online flashcard sites, a number of them had the specific location on base where the OST convoy would be directed to park during a Safe Haven operation (not that it wouldn't be hard to spot them from the air anyway). So I'm guessing that most any military base is a possible location.
I remember reading on Reddit quite some time ago that a federal LEO said their office could be used as a stopover as well, although I can't find the thread now.
> FYI, the US military has a strong policy against recognizing hostages.
As a former member of a US military unit specifically tasked with hostage rescue, if your implication is hostages are expendable, you are 100% pulling shit out of thin air, movies, or both.
No, not at all. Nuclear policy when I was serving was to use all available means to prevent nukes from being taken. In other words, our presence on the ground wouldn't prevent an air strike. F-16s were twelve minutes away, so it wasn't beyond the pale. And yes, that meant if we somehow became hostages, we might be expendable. I'm sure USAF would have mounted a rescue if practical, but priority was no nukes lost. None of this is out of my backside, rather out of the mouths of officers during training and serving.
I have a friend who works with the DoE and this squares with what I've heard. Nuclear/DoE tends to go above and beyond even other sensitive fields.
It would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that contingency plans prioritized preventing material from falling into the wrong hands over basically all forms of collateral damage. I'm sure the NMCs are well aware they'd be hellfire missile'd before letting a nuke slip away, if those were the only choices.
No, lol. But they've made it abundantly clear that when it comes to the Fed and anything involving nuke sec, personnel are basically dogmeat in any situation where the poop hits the fan. Anyone ex-mil or who runs in those circles knows this; it's hardly a secret.
Of course, you are expected to not let it get to that point. But re: the comment about hostages, yeah, Uncle Sam would not hesitate to disable a nuke or material, even if it meant casualties of NMCs held hostage.
Civilian casualties, no idea. That is the kind of fodder of actual classified conops. But in the metaphorical trolley problem between "N civilian casualties" and "nuke gets away", yeah my guess is N will be nonzero.
> I wonder how it could be adequately secured in a convoy on the open highway.
Another poster shared a youtube video of such a convoy. This consisted of the semi with the payload, surrounded by three pickups carrying Federal law enforcement and seven military light armored cars. Four of the military vehicles at the end of the convoy appeared to have unmanned fifty caliber guns on top.
They seem to be taking for granted that their adversaries will not have military attack aircraft or main battle tanks. They're pretty well equipped to traverse the continental United States?
US interceptors are extremely fast. It's likely that the planned route has alerted interceptors at nearby bases. In all likelihood there are shoulder mounted rockets in the guard vehicles too.
Seems pretty reasonable. If a would be attacker managed to get main battle tanks or military aircraft into the continental US and on the highways in order to hijack the convey, the military probably has bigger problems to worry about.
20 odd years ago I was travelling from SF to LA on I5 on the Wed evening before Thanksgiving .... there was a semi on fire 100 miles south of us and everything stopped for hours ....
Next to us was one of these trucks fore and aft of it was a big range-rovery thing (not a hummer but close to that class) both were beige/green with big HF antenna on the back .... as everyone got out of their cars to stretch and pee on the side of the road the guys in those vehicles got obviously antsy .....
Nukes are never transported by air. After some nasty crashes in the 50's and 60's, the DOE decided that air transport was a bad idea (the DOE owns all of the nuclear weapons).
Nope, PNAF does CONUS flights too. There’s even a famous flight not fifteen years ago where they accidentally flew six nukes unsecured and the plane sat on the tarmac for like 36hrs. If you search PNAF as I suggested, you can read a bunch of bulletins and operating procedure docs and learn more than I can say here on the topic.
We sometimes do move them by air, but rarely. We had an impressive string of accidents from carrying them in bomb position on bombers and fighters, dropping them in the ocean, various US states, other countries, etc., until about 1970 we dropped four on Franco's Spain. We took a while finding one of them, Franco threw us (US Nuclear Program) out, and we stopped transporting them bomb ready.
They're heavy, and when you transport them on the road, you can a) add more (heavy) impact protection b) work at lower speeds, reducing the risk of a severe accident. Might also be cheaper, and easier to secure (if you transport it by plane/helicopter and it goes down by accident or attack, securing the crash site would be a nightmare).
Okay, sorry, I guess this comment didn't help much. Also the formula is confusing 'F' denoting "force", rather than talking about kinetic energy.
In the transport of hazardous materials of any kind, if a mishap occurs and the shipping containers crash, the energy of the collision is going to go up as the square (second power) of the velocity. Air transport typical speeds are in general 2-4x as fast as ground... So ground transport could involve overall lower risk than air.
> When traveling, the tractor and trailer are typically escorted by three dark colored Chevrolet Suburbans, each containing four armed crew members. Additionally, all missions include heavily armed aerial support. The semi-tractor(STG) itself is heavily armored, and equipped with a Caterpillar diesel engine coupled to an automatic transmission. The cab-over tractor is a sleeper design, but instead of a bed, it has two seats containing additional armed support crew. The tractor also contains firing ports, run flat tires, and automatic sanders for slick roads.
> If a SGT comes under attack, unspecified security features in the vehicles give them, according to the NNSA, the capability to "surprise and delay even the most aggressive adversary". The full range of defensive components in SGTs is unknown, but according to some media reports the vehicles are equipped with autonomous weapons systems and other "high-tech surprises" that allow them to independently engage and repel attackers even if all human crew have been killed or disabled.
> but according to some media reports the vehicles are equipped with autonomous weapons systems and other "high-tech surprises" that allow them to independently engage and repel attackers even if all human crew have been killed or disabled
For some reason I'm imagining the scene from one of the F&F movies where the side panels of a bus pull up and a bunch of revolver cannons come out. In reality it's probably more something like ejectors for smoke screens, grenade launchers for concussion/flash grenades, stuff like that since the line says "independently engage and repel attackers" not "everything with a heat signature within X meters will be mowed down by autonomous gunfire".
There's YouTube videos of these things being escorted by 3 to 5 large suvs, armored, presumably filled with well-trained armed men. You would need probably at least a several platoon sized force to attempt to take one of these on the road.
This sounds good against external threat actors. How about an inside job? As in several individuals that know how to fast disable all security and have it fast load it in another truck. Then what?
Crew can't access payload without triggering defenses. (cant physically open, knock out gas if they manage to get in, inclination sensors triggering self destructs, etc)
Assuming they somehow are able, remote monitoring both in the trucks and outside. If something duspicious or it deviates it triggers response.
Assuming that's also bought, then you have local law enforcement along military, they can signal weird behavior and would be a lot of people to buy off. It would also mean lots of people live streaming this if they switch in populated area... triggering response.
Aasuming that's also bought, you have sattelite surveilance, normal surveilance and checkpoints.
If that's also bypassed then yeah...
Moving it is another matter, tritium detectors in most ports and cities... they'd ring alarm bells pretty fast.
Using it is another matter, so many kill switches you'd have to be the president or close by to actually use it... and you could directly in that case.
This page loads fine for me the first time I access it on any particular device. But if I reload it later, it blocks the content with a non-closable subscription popup.
One way to fix that is to tap the padlock icon next to the site URL and clear the site's cookies. Or you can open the link in an incognito/private browsing tab or window, or view it here: https://archive.is/8ipwc
For me in addition to that nuisance you described it also has an autoplaying video, connects (or at least attempts to connect) to 56 (!) domains, with 38 blocked by default uBO. The bloat on that site is just enormous.
I just imagine you could pull a Joe Dirt and duct tape yourself to it and create an incident if you were desperate. Although, these are real as opposed to a poop tanks.
Funny factoid, Pakistan purposefully carries its nukes in inconspicious white Isuzu vans, allegedly intentionally bought second hand to make them stand out even less.
First of all, that sounds like a great plot for one of those mindless-yet-entertaining summer movies. Something like "White House Down" on a road trip. With trucks.
Second, how comes that all these federal agencies in the US demand "law enforcement experience"? Are you supposed to do a stint as some local Sheriff's deputy somewhere or go into a local police school (if that's a thing) first? Isn't that awfully inefficient? Shouldn't the federal government (as well as state governments) try to get the youngest, fittest, and brightest recruits?
"I'm not sure what's more disturbing -- the fact that you lost a nuclear weapon, or that it happens so often that there's a term for it." -- Broken Arrow
Honestly, you could just Google it… it’s not exactly a secret where the nukes and their various major subcomponents components live. Pantex, Y-12, LANL, etc.
The UK also has regular road convoys carrying nuclear warheads between the Atomic Weapons Establishments in Aldermaston and Burghfield and the Royal Navy Armaments Depot in Coulport.
These are a lot more obvious than the US ones (the vehicles are all marked, and they have police escorts which stop traffic at side roads). Probably also have a lot less of the James Bond kit.
While routine transportation of nuclear devices by air is a different ballgame than, say, Operation Chrome Dome, there isn't exactly a stellar record to look back to.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadFor the amount of training required for this job and personal risk, I’m shocked at the low salary band.
This is probably the least risky OTR trucking job ever since you have so many people making sure everything goes right and you don't have dispatch pushing you to do insane shifts that stretch the law.
The truck manufacturer has been out of business long enough now that seeing a surviving example is relatively rare.
Is that based on experience?
Yeah pretty much. Ask any government worker why they're still working for the government and they'll tell you something about benefits and stability.
Public sector is serious brain drain
The counterpoints are people so uninspired and risk averse that it is the same as brain drain, and a subset of them are the people that began with a “serving the public” ideal and accidentally accumulated too many obligations by the time they figured out they wanted to live in a nicer neighborhood or send their children to a good college
The good talent are people that took a plea deal for non prosecution that included public service
Wait, wat? This is a thing? Did you mean "community service" instead of "public service"? Or do you mean people like Frank Abagnale?
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14253/the-us-moves-nuk...
"The expose painted a dismal picture of an overworked and underpaid organization where over a third of the personnel would put in more than 900 hours of overtime each year, equal to more than 35 extra days on the job. Couriers and agents spend most of that time on the road on long, boring drives unable to stop for protracted periods or even leave their vehicles in many circumstances. If they get pulled over by local law enforcement for some reason, the truck drivers aren't even allowed to speak to the police without the security force commander being present during the conversation.
Underscoring these issues, in 2010, the Department of Energy's Inspector General cataloged 16 alcohol-related incidents within OST in the preceding three years, including an incident of public intoxication where a courier was arrested and another where two employees ended up in police custody after getting into a drunken bar brawl. The report uncovered New Mexico court records showing the office's top executive had gotten a DUI after police came across him parked on a sidewalk apparently drinking in the car with a blood alcohol level of 0.15 percent."
Sounds a lot like gambling auditing TBH.
Or they provide benzodiazepines on the job now?
It seems like an awesome job for someone with the right set of preferences. Spend half your time training, working out, going to the range. Half your time on long road trips. Huge responsibility, but extremely low chance you'll ever need to actually do much. Kind of like being a cop who never has to arrest or deal with people.
It has been the plot of several movies/books/etc.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(film)
That being said, the quoted line kind of raises the question: how do we know?
I suppose given the use of the word “feel” the GP doesn’t actually know, but that’s not really my point anyway. My point is rather – if there in fact were incidents involving these nuclear material couriers, would it make the news or remain secret as a matter of national security?
Burst all you want, but it doesn't mean my comment wasn't true. You can want this conversation to only go one direction (real life), but it's the internet and conversations can diverge. The fact that it has been involved in plots is still relevant. Some people might actually find it interesting even if it steers the convo in a manner you don't approve.
To me, as a native English speaker, B is clearly implying (with their "technically true" statement) the statement "Event X happens a lot in fiction, therefore I infer that Event X happens a lot in real life". Statements are read in the context of the preceding conversation.
I dunno, I feel like I'm living in a future designed by folks who looked at Robocop, Starship Troopers, and a few other bits of dystopian sci-fi and instead of treating it as a warning decided that it would make a swell instruction manual.
Every politican has skin in the game (mandatory military service for gaining the right to vote or be voted for)
No racism or sexism or other discrimination, at least there are no traces for that in either the movie nor the novel.
If you don't want to join the military: No problem, you don't have any major disadvantages (besides no political participation), see the wealthy family of the protagonist.
Science seems to flourish
Ehm... sorry for the digression... what were we talking about?
But the movie was a bit different - maybe you watched the german version? That was a bit softer - the teacher didn't made jokes about the anhilation of Hiroshima there.
It was a deeply militarized society. Brutal. Top down. But yes, at least the politicians had to be part of that, too. (but in reality ... I think you can be in the military and be far away from any danger, like Bush was a fighter pilot, but not deployed at Vietnam.)
It literally starts out by re-contexualising the ex-millitary putsch attempts in Weimar Germany as a Good Thing.
And I always kind of assumed, that Bush watched Swordfish (where the bad guys are only bad, so they can fight terrorism, so are the "good guys") and would have gone on a war on terror, even if 911 would not have happened.
Although, it might be a bit relevant. You feel cooler when you tell people what you do if it's fictionally cool, even if in real life it's not all that great.
If the truck is still operating afterwards, I expect they don't stop - they let another vehicle that is full of federal agents from the convoy deal with it.
---
Excerpt of "'Car Accident' Or 'Traffic Violence'? The Way We Talk About Crashes Is Evolving", Fonseca, 2020 (https://laist.com/news/car-crash-accident-traffic-violence-l...):
Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident.
You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions.
In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars.
So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation.
In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken."
Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today.
The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.
No. Even if everything here you say is true, no. We're not going to change the usage because you think it's wrong and are on a crusade to change it.
It’s marketing and branding to downplay one of the greatest sources of premature death, wasted money, and negative externalities that exists. That way we can keep buying cars for no good reason and commute while we sit at home and isolate ourselves from our fellow Americans when we aren’t driving.
Responding to the person your responding to with “I don’t like it!1!1!” when they provided, ya know, some reasoning, is kind of a poor response. What’s a good reason to call them accidents instead of wrecks besides “this is what I’m used to”?
I’m open minded.
Accident implies it's not premeditated or deliberate, which, i'd wager, is the case of the vast majority of road incidents. That doesn't absolve drivers of guilt if they were in the wrong or doing something wrong at the time. But it does mean it wasn't deliberate.
Edit: You also forget that things like wildlife, mechanical failures and other things outside the control of a driver can be the cause of car crashes as well.
The vast majority of collisions are caused by driver recklessness. (Yes, a few are caused by mechanical issues etc. as you say - but driver recklessness (e.g. speeding) is the biggest factor). Calling it an "accident" does kind of diminish their culpability.
Nothing about “accident” implies lack of culpability. By your and other’s logic, essentially nothing can be an accident as ultimately almost everything is cause and effect. Your dropping the milk on the floor wasn’t an “accident”, it was the effect of you not paying attention to the task of carrying the milk carton and being reckless about it (as an example).
If you were exercising reasonable caution when carrying the milk, it was probably an accident. If you were being reckless, then it wasn't.
The fact that drivers are such an overwhelmingly disproportionate cause of premature death suggests that they do not generally exercise the kind of reasonable caution that we'd expect decent people to use in everyday life.
In reality drivers rely on models and predictions of other road users' behavior, and are committed by inertia to a course which requires those predictions to be true. We can tolerate more or less uncertainty, bigger or smaller margins, but a speed so slow that you can be sure of stopping in time for the most unlikely development right in front of you, is also a speed which is pretty much useless for transportation. The need to take this risk in order to go about your life is built into the whole system of urban planning and not something for which a particular driver is blameworthy. A driver becomes blameworthy to the extent that their tolerances were unusually tight for the situation. But even loose tolerances are exceeded some of the time.
I'm mainly reasoning back from the fact that drivers are causing so many premature deaths, yes. "If you're killing this many people then you must be being reckless", but I think that's sound logic? But also if we look at things like e.g. compliance with relevant laws, that seems to suggest that drivers are reckless as a matter of course - drivers flout speed limits all the time, to the point that they will often try to argue that this crime is somehow a non-crime because everyone does it.
One reason dashcams are so popular is people like to exploit the insurance presumption of guilt towards the rear-ender by getting in front someone and then slamming the brakes. Video which shows the scammer acting unreasonably to put themselves in the way can turn the tables.
In that world there may even be someone on HN asking everyone to change the term to 'car accident' to prevent these innocent drivers being unfairly characterized as causing intentional or negligent harm.
The issue I see is “car accident” tends to normalize the destruction caused by cars. It’s a public relations campaign. Oil and gas, and other industries could use the lesson it seems. Don’t call Deep Water Horizon a malfunction or problem. Just say hey it’s just an accident. Nobody intended anything bad so what’s the problem? Rest easy, go back to sleep. Just an accident...
Nobody cares that car wrecks are a leading cause of premature death amongst teenagers for example. It’s all just an accident.
They care when you change the narrative back to what it truly is. Unnecessary and premature deaths due to intentional design decisions and subsequent, avoidable but easy to predict car crashes.
I'm not sure what that should be called, but 'car accident' seems like it doesn't describe it very well.
Source: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08034/...
A car crash absolutely fits the definition. You sound like you want the definition of "accident" to be something other than what it is.
Yes, people are careless driving. Yes, that causes problems (and even death) that should have been avoided. But that still fits the definition of accident.
Otherwise, you're seriously giving an escape hatch to say, drunk driving, because "Hey I was just carelessly driving. It was just an accident. I didn't intend to cause harm, damage, or loss when I drank all of that alcohol and accident my car into someone else. 'Whoops'"
Anyway, let's say these are all accidents. Ok. We can also still call them car crashes and wrecks and that would be more accurate because these terms don't assume intention but merely describe what has taken place.
the word accident by no means conveys inevitability to me.
ac·ci·dent /ˈaksədənt/ noun: accident; plural noun: accidents 1. an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
So.. unless we're talking about intentional automotive manslaughter or some equivalent, I think 'accident' applies well to 'unintentional,unexpected,unfortunate incidents', which there tends to be quite a few of related to motor-vehicles.
What terms do you want to use? mayhem and murder? Those both describe motive that just isn't present in most cases of motor-vehicle accident.
* violence : behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. *
'violence' conveys yet another motive, an intent to hurt. Another no-go as far as suitable candidates, as far as i'm concerned. Automotive accidents do not usually come about as a result of a negative motive towards another human.
They're accidental, in most cases.
Intent is a funny thing to determine though, but the same article I linked above and provided an excerpt from also deals with how there is a "degree of intention", either from other road users, or from engineers and officials that are tasked with managing traffic and road safety.
---
Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in?
UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths.
Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%.
"The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk."
According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building."
They aren't intending to do it - one might even call it an accident.
The term accident in this context is understood to mean exactly what happened, which is that the event wasn't immediately intended- not that nobody is at fault.
I’m not sure why intention matters in calling a car crash or wreck exactly that instead of an accident. When an airliner goes down we don’t call it an accident. Midair collision, plane crash, etc.
When planes flew into the WTC was that an aviation accident? Do you see how the terms used change this?
“Car accident” implies a normal state of behavior and softens and normalizes what is a pretty crazy thing to happen. Calling it a wreck or crash doesn’t imply any sort of culpability, yet denormalizes these interactions.
If someone willfully ignored ATC in a plane and crashed the plane would you call that an accident? No? Why do we not say the same when someone drives a car over the speed limit and crashes it? Why is that an accident but plane crashes aren’t?
If you take a step back it’s easy to see society has been modified to think of car crashes differently.
The term accident doesn’t necessarily imply “normal”, but rather “no intent”.
9/11 would not qualify as an accident because the intent of the hijackers was to crash the plane.
You say car crashes are treated differently but your examples imply the opposite! That car crashes are treated identically to other mishaps which are classed as accidental or not by the intent of the actor(s).
And why is it that everyone here is defending using the term "accident" by suggesting that car crash or wreck is not a correct description?
In drunk driving for example, you intently operated the vehicle impaired and caused a crash. If you drive over the speed limit you are intently operating the vehicle recklessly. We do on occasion use the term vehicular homicide when describing these actions, but it depends on whether someone was hurt or not, even with the same action being taken (drunk/speeding/etc.).
My point of contention is that "accident" assumes no intent or reckless behavior. Crash and wreck just describe what happened.
There's a reason that accident was injected into our vocabulary. That reason is that we generally accept that accidents happen in society. We don't accept crashes or wrecks. If a lot of car crashes are happening and society doesn't accept them, you better figure out a way to re-categorize them.
An accident. Accidents can occur from reckless or negligent behavior. That is not the same as intentionally hitting another car and the legal concept of “criminal negligence”[1] covers this exact distinction.
> Most crimes involve intentional conduct. For example, in some states, the offense of assault can be committed by the defendant intentionally using or attempting to use force against someone, as with a punch or kick…some crimes involve reckless or negligent, rather than intentional, conduct. The term "reckless" essentially describes a defendant's simultaneous understanding and disregard of a substantial risk of harm. An example is a defendant having previous DUI convictions and understanding that driving drunk can harm or kill people, but nevertheless getting behind the wheel while intoxicated and causing a fatal accident.
So in both a legal and common sense understanding of intentionality, it clearly is not.
> And why is it that everyone here is defending using the term "accident" by suggesting that car crash or wreck is not a correct description?
No one is saying crash or wreck are not also accurate. If you want to call it a crash, go right ahead, but you are objectively wrong to say that me calling it an accident is not a correct description.
> In drunk driving for example, you intently operated the vehicle impaired and caused a crash. If you drive over the speed limit you are intently operating the vehicle recklessly. We do on occasion use the term vehicular homicide when describing these actions...My point of contention is that "accident" assumes no intent or reckless behavior.
Once again, you are confusing intentional recklessness and intentional outcome. “Vehicular homicide, also known as vehicular manslaughter, is the reckless or negligent killing of another through the use of a vehicle.” [3] The resulting accident is still unintentional by both legal and common sense standards. The word “accident” does not assume no reckless behavior, and it does not assume that there were no intentional decisions that contributed to it.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-criminal-neglig...
[2] https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/vehicular-...
[3] https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/vehicular-...
But this is based on the idea that people have just as much right to be in the street as drivers do. Most people disagree with me on this, outside of urbanists and perhaps Dutch people.
Violence is a confusing and disputed term, often bogged down by the visual of two sides, one striking, one struck.
Systemic violence is maybe more interesting here because it acknowledges that the system involves violence by design. A certain amount of violence is accepted because of a prevailing narrative. Here specifically one of fault and blame.
IE the driver wasn’t paying attention / the pedestrian was doing something silly
Systemic violence acknowledges that the design of road infrastructure can be made safer but we choose to be ok with a certain amount of violence.
Take hospital check lists as an example. By using check lists for procedures staff reduce the chance of mistakes.
The event is still a mistake but we chose to put more energy into preventing it.
When people engage in reckless endangerment, there's a crime for that: reckless endangerment. When the driving was stupid, but not to the level of criminal, there's a lawsuit for that.
"Accident" also very nicely preserves the assumption of innocence until proven guilty.
That's the disagreement. There are many drivers on the road that I would assert, when their behavior does finally inevitably land them into a wreck, did so deliberately. Now, I am sure that if you ask them, they would claim that they did not "intend" to get into an accident, but the utterly reckless behavior with which some people choose to operate a ton of steel hurtling down the road at 60+ mph sings a very, very different tune.
(Now, I'd also accept just a simple "car wreck" or "collision", as suggested by a sibling, which doesn't assume that there was wrong doing, at least, unless the facts suggest otherwise.)
It's a result of negligence, impairment of intellectual functioning, or a number of things other than an accident.
The word crash covers such an incident far, far better. (Edit: Collision works as well, having read nearby comments).
For proof, watch any recent Dashcam Owners Australia monthly compilation. Most of these are not accidents.
But accident is a civil term, not a legal term. Legally there's a spectrum of culpability from driver innocence (the brakes failed, the lights failed, a bob cat fell on the windshield) to premeditated murder, with negligence and recklessness in between.
There may still be legal responsibility elsewhere. Did the brakes fail because the garage made a mistake?
Of course you can have an accident because you were reckless. That doesn't mean you wanted to kill someone. It means you were taking avoidable and unnecessary risks and didn't get away with it.
If an asshole shifts his ass from car to bike, he will start riding on the pavement in places that are absolutely unsuitable for that, or on hiking trails that are absolutely unsuitable for that. And I say "he", because it was 100 per cent men. (I am a man too, for the record.) Gals seem to be quite a bit careful.
Bullshit. You notice reckless cyclists more because they're more unusual, that's all. The statistics for the rate at which pedestrians are killed or seriously injured show that it's overwhelmingly drivers who are putting you in danger.
That is it.
When you walk regularly, you find paths from A to B that minimize your contact with cars to a level crossing or two. (Might be different in the countryside or in cities whose walkability is poor). So your chance of getting hit by a car are fairly low and you only really need to pay attention when you cross the street. For the rest of the time, you can afford to daydream or wander in thoughts a bit.
Once people learn to ride their bikes on pavements, it means the need for constant vigilance.
Biking needs its own infrastructure, separate from both pedestrians and cars. The needs and speeds are just different.
Bicyclists often have this view that they are above traffic laws and break them: >he will start riding on the pavement in places that are absolutely unsuitable for that, or on hiking trails that are absolutely unsuitable for that.
In my state, cars and bikes share the road and have to follow the same laws.
There is a stop sign at the bottom of a hill near my house, I have never seen a car drive through it, plenty of bike don't stop.
The thing is, where I live, as a pedestrian, I almost never share the same surface with cars. Only when I need to cross the street, which is, say, three times a mile. For the rest of the time, I am in relative safety of the pavement. (Cars running into pedestrians on pavements, though not impossible, is a fairly rare occurrence and I have never seen one in my almost 43 years of age.)
This is a major difference in the entire risk calculation.
They are similar in the same way being clawed by a cat is similar to being mauled by a tiger.
Please do not downplay the risks of being hit by a 120 kg+ object moving at, say, 10-15 mph. It is similar to the risk that the cyclist himself faces if he suddenly falls of his bike, namely, brain damage from cracking your skull against the pavement. Cyclists wear biking helmets to protect themselves against this possibly fatal event. Sudden falls can be fairly dangerous, especially for older individuals. Maybe not a tiger, but a cougar. Definitely not a home cat.
Not everyone can dodge in time. Some people are absent minded (and I would say this is their right when walking on a pavement). Some are old and arthritic. Some are kids. Some are blind or deaf. They need to be reasonably safe on a pavement, which means not sharing it with another sort of traffic that moves much faster than them.
I am all for biking/cycling, but it really needs its own infrastructure. Most developed countries can afford it, it is not expensive to build a dedicated biking lane.
Please do not imply this is remotely comparable to the risks of being hit by a car. It is not. In that context, downplaying the risks of being hit by a bicycle is absolutely correct.
> Cyclists wear biking helmets to protect themselves against this possibly fatal event.
Cyclists in countries with decent road laws, such as the Netherlands, do not generally wear helmets. Cyclists in some countries wear helmets, mainly to protect themselves from bad laws passed by ignorant non-cyclists.
The former reduces risk for the wearer, the latter increases risk for cyclists as a whole indirectly.
Those assholes when driving are the people who ignore the no right on red junctions, undertake slow moving traffic, use the wrong lanes on roundabouts, park in blue badge spots, throw litter out the windows etc. They're going to be assholes no matter what their mode of transport is.
The really weird part is, what are you to make of it if you genuinely like a position, but there is also a well-funded campaign to push it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
2. Possibly the psychological need to overcome adversity. Someone living in a nice neighborhood, threatened neither by gangs nor by rogue cops, seeks surrogate problems to conquer. In a few weird cases, it turns out like this and Twitter will amplify it, because Twitter loves (even hostile) attention and engagament.
This is a foolish statement.
The outcome of the overwhelming majority of traffic accident was 100% property damage and 0% violence.
Car on car and car on object fender benders where nobody is hurt outnumber accidents with injuries by an order of magnitude.
i have also seen RTC or road traffic collision used - however, this seems inaccurate when describing, say, a vehicle skidding or sliding out of control on the road but stopping without actually hitting anything, thus startling a pedestrian who then reacts by steppng backwards and falling off a bridge?
0. https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/research-and-learning/key-a...
given that Russia didn't lose any nuke in the chaotic 199x (didn't lose or they were quickly recovered) I think there is no credible/feasible/capable interest/threat for the nukes.
Serious question (in more ways than one): do we really know that to be true? How?
I'm making two assumptions:
1. you don't steal a nuke unless you're going to sell it or use it
2. you don't buy a nuke unless you're going to use it (for blackmail or to blow something up)
And (2) would have been easily noticed.
Here [1] is a 2004 press release from the International Science and Technology Center, whose first objective is to "Provide weapons scientists in the CIS the opportunity to redirect their talents to peaceful activities." Page 9 describes their involvement in the Avogadro Project.
Here [2] is the project description on the ISTC website.
[0]https://www.ptb.de/cms/en/presseaktuelles/journals-magazines...
[1]https://www.istc.int/upload/files/6yoyjz8txt44oc0g8cs8.pdf
[2]https://istc.ru/istc/sc.nsf/html/projects.htm?open&id=2630
That right there makes it pretty attractive. Lots of people do those things for fun. If that's half your "workload", it totally makes sense to do a job like this, especially if you're not a city person since that's a solid salary if your not in a high cost of living area.
I suspect the biggest general public barrier to entry here would be competing against a glut of qualified applicants with 5-/10-point veterans' preference, assuming time was taken to put notification hooks in place for immediate action on job postings that'll close almost as soon as they're announced.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/downloads/nnsas-demo-pay-system-...
This isn't the 18th century, anymore. A semi carrying stolen cargo can't just bushwack its way away with the loot.
Air superiority is still assumed.
"The flasks are very robust - they weigh around 50 tons and have walls 35cm thick. 16 bolts, each able to take a load of 150 tons without breaking, secure the lid. The flasks are forged out of two block of steel."
I'm not sure the kinetic and explosive energy of a manpad, but they have done tests with three locomotive engines smashing into a flask at 100mph, and the flask remaining intact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jzugX2NMnk
Edit: having wrote all this, I realize you may have meant that the defense crew have manpads...
That being said, I think the above is good knowledge.
Also, by this point, the conspiracy is so vast, you're not going to keep it under wraps.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link
Rumor mill is that the trucks carrying the warheads are configured to be capable of destroying their own axles and flooding the trailer with a quick set concrete to make it extremely difficult to access. That's only keep it from moving easily though. Air force or air national guard keeps some fighters on alert nearby with orders to bomb the convoy if it does go south and security forces can't repel the attackers.
Again, all rumor mill though.
Edit: Wikipedia as an article on the trucks used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguards_Transporter
The ultimate pinball anti-cheat switch.
Is there a Wikipedia article less likely to be factual?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyjQb3oJi80 -- this is a video of how the military transports warheads around: I'd assume many of the same types of transports are similar in nature between the NNSA and the DOD.
I don't think it was their own guy who hit them, though...
How do you know that?
It also means that legitimate LEO who try to assist will be fired upon by the convoy. If that happens they are just supposed to take cover until the authorized ones show up and take over.
I wasn't suggesting anything in particular, but I think the sort of roadblock you'd use to slow down a convoy like this would involve a staged accident to force a detour of the convoy to a less secure route. An awful lot needs to go wrong for that to even be possible, and at the end of the day there's still combat with heavily armed law enforcement needed to get near the cargo.
It seems pretty futile, since the end result of applying even an overwhelming (and somehow previously undetected) force to the convoy is probably going to be a ruined road, a ruined semi, and a difficult to open, boobytrapped vault on the road that weighs so much you'd need a crane to move it.
Seems a bit more complicated than just unhooking the trailer and driving off.
We had one come in one afternoon, a bit late. We stay on standby to receive. They can't get the doors to open correctly. This is no small matter; they have to open just so. After us faffing off for a couple hours watching, they decided to drive down to Rocky Flats, and come back tomorrow. They aren't allowed to spend the night just anywhere; it has to be a secure installation.
Next day, they come back. The techs at Rocky Flats figured out their doors.
FYI, the US military has a strong policy against recognizing hostages.
What does that mean?
I remember reading on Reddit quite some time ago that a federal LEO said their office could be used as a stopover as well, although I can't find the thread now.
As a former member of a US military unit specifically tasked with hostage rescue, if your implication is hostages are expendable, you are 100% pulling shit out of thin air, movies, or both.
It would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that contingency plans prioritized preventing material from falling into the wrong hands over basically all forms of collateral damage. I'm sure the NMCs are well aware they'd be hellfire missile'd before letting a nuke slip away, if those were the only choices.
Of course, you are expected to not let it get to that point. But re: the comment about hostages, yeah, Uncle Sam would not hesitate to disable a nuke or material, even if it meant casualties of NMCs held hostage.
Civilian casualties, no idea. That is the kind of fodder of actual classified conops. But in the metaphorical trolley problem between "N civilian casualties" and "nuke gets away", yeah my guess is N will be nonzero.
Another poster shared a youtube video of such a convoy. This consisted of the semi with the payload, surrounded by three pickups carrying Federal law enforcement and seven military light armored cars. Four of the military vehicles at the end of the convoy appeared to have unmanned fifty caliber guns on top.
They seem to be taking for granted that their adversaries will not have military attack aircraft or main battle tanks. They're pretty well equipped to traverse the continental United States?
Next to us was one of these trucks fore and aft of it was a big range-rovery thing (not a hummer but close to that class) both were beige/green with big HF antenna on the back .... as everyone got out of their cars to stretch and pee on the side of the road the guys in those vehicles got obviously antsy .....
Failure modes. Trucks crashing are, while more frequent, less energetic than planes. There's an elevated risk of capture, but that is more manageable.
This is definitively not true, just look up PNAF if you don’t believe me.
62nd Airlift Wing, Air Mobility Command, McChord Field.
C-17's.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_acc...
F = 1/2 * mass * velocity^2
In the transport of hazardous materials of any kind, if a mishap occurs and the shipping containers crash, the energy of the collision is going to go up as the square (second power) of the velocity. Air transport typical speeds are in general 2-4x as fast as ground... So ground transport could involve overall lower risk than air.
This is naïve hand-waving on my part.
> When traveling, the tractor and trailer are typically escorted by three dark colored Chevrolet Suburbans, each containing four armed crew members. Additionally, all missions include heavily armed aerial support. The semi-tractor(STG) itself is heavily armored, and equipped with a Caterpillar diesel engine coupled to an automatic transmission. The cab-over tractor is a sleeper design, but instead of a bed, it has two seats containing additional armed support crew. The tractor also contains firing ports, run flat tires, and automatic sanders for slick roads.
You're not going to accidentally hijack one.
> If a SGT comes under attack, unspecified security features in the vehicles give them, according to the NNSA, the capability to "surprise and delay even the most aggressive adversary". The full range of defensive components in SGTs is unknown, but according to some media reports the vehicles are equipped with autonomous weapons systems and other "high-tech surprises" that allow them to independently engage and repel attackers even if all human crew have been killed or disabled.
For some reason I'm imagining the scene from one of the F&F movies where the side panels of a bus pull up and a bunch of revolver cannons come out. In reality it's probably more something like ejectors for smoke screens, grenade launchers for concussion/flash grenades, stuff like that since the line says "independently engage and repel attackers" not "everything with a heat signature within X meters will be mowed down by autonomous gunfire".
Lets assume they do kill off all security personnel.
Truck disables itself, axels blown off, fills itself with quick setting cement and poisonous gas. It also actives autonomous weapons to defend itself.
Truck is also heavily armored so IEDs won't reach payload.
Then, 1 minute or less air support is on the scene and bombs it and everything close by.
You would need an army as OP said to withstand air attack and disable defenses and move the now disabled truck
Assuming they somehow are able, remote monitoring both in the trucks and outside. If something duspicious or it deviates it triggers response.
Assuming that's also bought, then you have local law enforcement along military, they can signal weird behavior and would be a lot of people to buy off. It would also mean lots of people live streaming this if they switch in populated area... triggering response.
Aasuming that's also bought, you have sattelite surveilance, normal surveilance and checkpoints.
If that's also bypassed then yeah...
Moving it is another matter, tritium detectors in most ports and cities... they'd ring alarm bells pretty fast.
Using it is another matter, so many kill switches you'd have to be the president or close by to actually use it... and you could directly in that case.
One way to fix that is to tap the padlock icon next to the site URL and clear the site's cookies. Or you can open the link in an incognito/private browsing tab or window, or view it here: https://archive.is/8ipwc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_fleet_%28military_vehicl...
https://newatlas.com/military/nuclear-weapon-transport-truck...
Second, how comes that all these federal agencies in the US demand "law enforcement experience"? Are you supposed to do a stint as some local Sheriff's deputy somewhere or go into a local police school (if that's a thing) first? Isn't that awfully inefficient? Shouldn't the federal government (as well as state governments) try to get the youngest, fittest, and brightest recruits?
I see lots of faces of people I can track and even a license plate. Maybe not that secretive.
If I wanted to find out where the weapons were I could identify everyone in that photo and track their whereabouts.
These are a lot more obvious than the US ones (the vehicles are all marked, and they have police escorts which stop traffic at side roads). Probably also have a lot less of the James Bond kit.
While routine transportation of nuclear devices by air is a different ballgame than, say, Operation Chrome Dome, there isn't exactly a stellar record to look back to.