This photo shows an ASROC nuclear depth bomb going off after it was thrown on a ballistic trajectory mounted to a rocket motor launched from that destroyer. I commanded an
ASROC launcher, my ship's only nuclear capable and certified system, while serving as an officer aboard an U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer during the Viet Nam War. I was prompted to reflect upon that experience when I read
ukit's excellent and well
received diary today about a nuclear weapons mishap in North Carolina in 1961. Follow me out into the tall grass if you are interested in some of the (unclassified) story of that experience and a few ideas that it has shaped for me about nuclear weapons, disarmament and non-proliferation.
It always takes two people to launch a live nuclear warhead. In my case, that was me and the Captain. We were to do so, of course, only under elaborately authenticated orders. Only the Captain had the combination to the locker containing the arming fuses for the W44 warheads that we controlled. Only I could enable shipboard fire control systems to enable launch. All nuclear certified personnel were elaborately screened and monitored in what was, in my day, called the Personnel Reliability Program. To insure maximum safety, every step of every procedure involving the receipt, storage, movement and use of what were always called Special Weapons, never nuclear weapons, was meticulously documented. No one and nothing moved except step by step of each separate check, with every order repeated and verified. The ritual of special weapons was embodied in the Naval Technical Proficiency Inspection, an elaborate test of my entire department's performance of all of its nuclear weapons assignments. I assure you that woe betide the junior officer who loses the Old Man his ship's nuclear certification. The Captain would take it as an attack on his manhood.
All of this elaboration, of course, was a complete pretense. The program was full of vulnerabilities. It's a miracle that nothing horrible ever happened.
At the time we are talking about, America and her forces around the World were bristling with nuclear weapons, many of them ridiculously small. Some were designed to be shot by Naval guns or artillery. Others, like the W44 warhead we were certified for, were launched atop small rocket motors. According to Wikipedia:
The W44 had basic dimensions of 13.75 inches diameter and 25.3 inches length, a weight of 170 pounds, and a yield of 10 kilotons.
According to Samsonite, its Samsonite Hyperspace XLT 30" Spinner Luggage measures:
Dimensions: 33.26" x 21.26" x 16.53"
This is definitely a suitcase sized warhead. Were our weapons secure? As matters worked out, yes. Were we actually prepared to be attacked by someone wishing to steal those warheads? Not in my opinion. My personal instructions included strapping on a .45 and chasing the bad guys, though I had no anti-terrorism or counter-terrorism training and led a crew of techno-geeks trained to make war by pushing buttons. We and our weapons, if we had any on board, moved around the World docking here and there. Military policy generally is to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any location or on any particular platform at a particular point in time. My service on this particular vessel spanned North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, including the U.S.S.R. But, no one ever tried us and nothing bad ever happened to our nuclear weapons.
In the Personnel Responsibility Program (PRP), the Navy ran an elaborate and, perhaps, ineffective pretense lending a plausible patina of safety where less exists than meets the eye. That viewpoint involves a three part story.
First, there is me. If they knew me like I (and no one else) knew me, there is no way I get certified to possess nukes. Just sayin'.
Then, there is the Captain. Two of the three seagoing Captains under whom I served were raging alcoholics. As junior Ensign, I sometimes drew the "Captain Watch" in port, designated to keep the Old Man company and out of trouble and get him back to the ship. There were vehicular mishaps nonetheless as the old bastards expected me to drink with them. These officers seemed generally sober at sea where Secretary of the Navy Josephus P. Daniels banned alcohol consumption on Naval vessels in 1914, an order still in effect. Nevertheless, if officially observed, their condition would deny them command of nuclear systems under the PRP.
Actually, I obtained my nuclear weapons job because of the PRP. My predecessor in the ASROC billet on my ship had been shot or stabbed in the gut by his wife in a drunken fight. Bye bye PRP.
The third part of the story is me again. I did not like the weapon nor approve of the existence of most nuclear weapons. My objections in this instance are entirely professional military ones.
The navy gave me two classes of weapons to work with. Smart and dumb.
The smart weapons were homing torpedoes. I could launch them with ASROC or put them into water directly over the side from tubes on the deck. These weapons carried a warhead of military grade high explosives capable of producing a massive overpressure at very short ranges, i.e. contact. They could be programmed to perform a variety of different sonar searches and search trajectories. The objective in launching them was to place them to maximum advantage in searching for, finding, chasing and catching a submarine target, then blowing up.
The dumb weapon was the nuclear depth charge. It could only be launched from ASROC, thankfully, on a ballistic trajectory that, at its maximum range, was way too close to suit me. At that point, the NDC enters the water and sinks straight down. Along the way the sea water arms the weapon and at a predetermined but still classified depth, it explodes with the aforesaid 10 kilotons of TNT equivalent force. Hence the enormous gout of water seen in the photo above. The destroyer in the photo is me, if you will. That white skirt that you see under the gout is a force line of the overpressure wave that is beginnign to spread and is headed for that destroyer. They snapped this picture just after the bomb went off.
The NDC wasn't just literally dumb, it was tactically dumb as well. a submarine hull is designed to react and respond to pressure changes without compromise of watertight integrity. A destroyer hull is not. We had to place the bomb pretty close to the target to take it out because the target could withstand a indirect hit. Yet, we could not throw that sumbitch far enough for my satisfaction.
Tactically, if we have good tracking and know where the target is, let's put a couple of torpedoes in the water and let them do their thing. If we don't have good tracking, the NDC is stupid because it has to go off pretty close to the target to have any effect.
I spent endless hours working in combat drills and simulations and never saw a tactical situation where I thought a NDC the weapon of choice. Yet, even in drills, I dared not argue against launch orders, lest I'd risk disqualification from my job. But I privately rehearsed arguments I might use in real time if a genuine tactical situation ever came up.
Nuclear mines, artillery shells, mortars, demolition charges and depth charges have largely disappeared from the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the overall number of warheads has declined greatly. That is a good thing. Endless movies portray how dangerous small nuclear warheads could be.
Strategic nuclear weapons are even dumber. They are expensive proportionate to their firepower, which is to say horrendously so. They are useless. One index of this? Nuclear weapons have been around long enough to draw Social Security, but not used since August 1945. There have been terrible mishaps with nuclear weapons. Besides the story from North Carolina in 1961, our bombers have lost H bombs in the Mediterranean, silo explosions have thrown warheads into a field and other calamities have ensued from our dimwitted insistence of keeping nuclear weapons in the national arsenal.
Nuclear readiness detracts from the capacity for overall military readiness. My division performed at a high level while I was there, but a disproportionate amount of our time was consumed by nuclear weapons related busywork, leaving less time to train and maintain for our conventional, yet more useful systems. A disproportionate amount of recognition of our performance came from success with nuclear weapons related assignments, drills, tests and duties, with less attention to our performance in connection with conventional systems.
As seen from the discussion of small warheads, above, reduction of the national nuclear arsenal goes hand in hand with nonproliferation. America could unilaterally disarm to a very low level and suffer no loss of national defense interests.
Much of the MIC is as useless as our nuclear weapons programs have proven to be. The Pentagon and Defense Department must be reformed and nuclear weapons are a great place to start.
Defund the MIC. Defund the Pentagon. Defund nuclear weapons.