In my state if your wide load is big enough you need a police escort. That means you drive 70-80mph because that's what the police do. Of course, the highest speed limit in this state is not that high.
Feels weird to talk about the "can neither confirm nor deny" stuff when the website for the Warren AFB and 90th Wing so plainly say that they have and operate ICBMs.
> These fuel haulers think they got a bomb in their back, while this guy had a nuclear warhead,
Transporting a nuclear warhead is probably safer. I'm sure there are tons of safeguards to prevent an accidental detonation, and with a military escort people are more likely to be drive carefully around you.
Do they transport warheads fully assembled, or with cores and high explosives separate? If the latter, would they send explosives in the same shipment as cores? If disassembled components are being shipped via ground, with cores separate from explosives, the worst that could happen would be a small conventional explosion with no risk of radioactive contamination.
I think the fuel elements of the missiles (or fueled cases) would be much more dangerous than the warheads. Warheads are designed with extreme precautions so they don’t go off when they are not supposed to, but Minutemen missiles are solid rockets and solid fuel is usually quite temperamental.
Ideally, yes. In practice there have been a number of nuclear devices which can arm accidentally, though (at least as far as anyone has so far admitted) they were generally early ones.
Also, of course, even assuming that it’s ‘safe’, spreading one over the landscape is extremely undesirable.
(Also if it was an actual missile as described, you _definitely_ do not want one of those solid fuel motors going up.)
I may be misremembering this, but the desire to move missiles around may be downstream of the START and New START arms limitation treaties.
These give the US and Russian governments what are supposed to be adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles, but of course make no requirement on the signatories to make it easy to locate the missiles at any given moment.
So there’s a strong strategic incentive to shuffle them around between treaty-mandated inspections.
> adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles
It should be noted that a missle designed with a removable component requiring 30 seconds of install time does not count as an active missle when not assembled.
Was driving down I-5 the night before Thanksgiving some time in the late 90s and found myself in a traffic jam (there was a truck on fire 100 miles ahead, Thanksgiving eve on I5 is always a nightmare) stuck next to one of these, after a while people were getting out of their cars to stretch their legs, take a piss etc - the pseudo soldiers accompanying the truck were getting very very antsy by all these people wandering around the nuke
I wonder how many useable nuclear weapons do the super powers have. I mean I get the whole story about readiness yada yada, but what are the chances that they have really ready to go all the heads they report?
Anyone with manufacturing/military experience knows that the maintenance of anything over the span of decades is a shitshow.
I wouldn’t be surprised if only a small fraction of what they report is immediately useable.
To a large extent, nuclear weapons rely on being a convincing bluff. As long as there is enough ambigiuity about whether they work or not, they will serve as a deterrent. See Israel, which doesn't even admit it has any bombs and Russia, whose weapons are probably in a far worse state of repair.
Once you get to the point where the missiles are actually being used, you have already lost.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadhttps://www.warren.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/
https://www.warren.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Artic...
https://missileer.watch/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/6macxc/casually_reare...
Transporting a nuclear warhead is probably safer. I'm sure there are tons of safeguards to prevent an accidental detonation, and with a military escort people are more likely to be drive carefully around you.
Also, of course, even assuming that it’s ‘safe’, spreading one over the landscape is extremely undesirable.
(Also if it was an actual missile as described, you _definitely_ do not want one of those solid fuel motors going up.)
These give the US and Russian governments what are supposed to be adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles, but of course make no requirement on the signatories to make it easy to locate the missiles at any given moment.
So there’s a strong strategic incentive to shuffle them around between treaty-mandated inspections.
ANUS TART
Maybe that was your point.
It should be noted that a missle designed with a removable component requiring 30 seconds of install time does not count as an active missle when not assembled.
"The Safeguards Transport program is so secretive that only three photographs of the unknown number of vehicles have been publicly released."
... here's quite a few hundred more (moving) photographs of them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8yLYLSzoIw
Anyone with manufacturing/military experience knows that the maintenance of anything over the span of decades is a shitshow.
I wouldn’t be surprised if only a small fraction of what they report is immediately useable.
Once you get to the point where the missiles are actually being used, you have already lost.