Friday Nite Videos -- August 1, 2014
Portside
America has over 4,800 nuclear weapons, and we don’t take terrific care of them. It’s terrifying, basically.
Examining actual weapons would be a breach of confidentiality: how they’re made and put together is secret, and the fewer people that know what’s inside a nuclear bomb, the better. Luckily, a group of scientists have devised a way to use math, and neutrons, to figure out if something’s actually a nuclear weapon, without learning anything about what’s inside it.
Since 2007, activists have risked arrests, imprisonment, heavy fines and massive police force to resist the desecration caused as mega-corporations like Samsung and Daelim to build a base to accommodate U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines for their missions throughout Asia. The base fits the regional needs of the U.S. for a maritime military outpost that would enable it to continue developing its Asia Pivot strategy.
When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see. From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered is in plain sight.
Last month newly released U.S. government documents shed additional light on the so-called NUMEC affair - the story that won't go away - the possibility that in the 1960s, Israel stole bomb-grade uranium from a US nuclear fuel-processing plant. Nearly 50 years have passed since the events in question. It is time to level with the public.
Coded switches to prevent the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons were finally added to the control systems of American missiles and bombers in the early 1970s. The Air Force was not pleased, and considered the new security measures to be an insult, a lack of confidence in personnel. Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
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