Posted on 12/16/2006 7:11:23 PM PST by LibWhacker
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If it was "decades old", chances are that it would have been a dirty bomb and not a nuclear explosion.
Still not good if true especially if you're one of the techs doing the dismantling.
Well, I certainly hope that's not true, or at the very least misinformation.
Nope, Pantex is the only one left. You can thank Bill Clinton for that.
Just for reference, the W-56 was the warhead carried by the Minuteman I and Minuteman II ICBMs.
Obviously the liner notes were not detailed enough.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
I suppose one could make the case that this is the worlds biggest handgrenade.
It's true alright,they in fact are the only facility doing this work at the present time.
"Pantex"... that's some woman-thing, right?
If they're shorthanded I'm sure they could find lots of willing applicants in the mideast. I bet they'll even work cheap.
I claim BS! You cannot detonate a nuclear weapon with a chain reaction explosion using any sort of mechanical force. You can blow it up with another nuke and it will not set off a nuclear explosion. You can burn it, you can blow it up, you can run over it with a train and it will not explode with other than he non-nuclear high explosive in the weapon.
Last Cold War-era W56 warhead dismantled
AFX
June 30, 2006
(For personal use only)
The Minuteman missile was a hallmark of America's defenses during the Cold War.
The Energy Department said Thursday it has completed dismantling the last W56 warhead that for 30 years, beginning in the early 1960s, was the deadly core of the Minuteman I, and later the updated Minuteman II long-range missile.
http://www.sgpproject.org/Personal%20Use%20Only/w566-30-06.htm
ping
I know these guys. They are an extreme left anti-military group that opposes all weapons (nuc and conventional) and all defense spending.
For example, they oppose the Osprey tiltrotor, and say we should buy more helicopters... but they oppose helicopters too. They'd let us use sticks and stones if we could do it without disturbing the environment.
They work closely with another misleadingly-named crank group, the "Center for Defense Information," which was a Soviet-controlled front organization during the 1980s. I don't know if external enemies run POGO, or just homegrown ones.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
"The organization said it was told by unidentified experts who were "knowledgeable about this event" that the accident, in which an unsafe amount of pressure was applied to the warhead, could have caused the device to detonate."
I am extremely skeptical about a decommissioned warhead going off in such circumstances. Arming codes with redundancies, last minute initiator settings, dial-in tritium boosters etc. Just doesn't seem likely that a nuke salvage and abatement team would find themselves in such a situation.
I agree... also there seems to be a security leak...
I agree... also there seems to be a security leak...
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