in History, International Situations 485 Words

Where’d You Lose It?

My Sunday begins as I sit on the porch…early morning cool weather nipping at my nose….a cup of Colombian coffee…..it is a great day…..but not before a large plate of SOS….had to be in the military to appreciate the stuff…..

Plus I am leaving politics behind for a day….calm the mind…if you will….

Have you  noticed that whenever you tell someone that you lost something their first reaction is…”where did you lose it?”  Why do we ask such stupid questions?  Even better is the statement….”I found it in the last place I looked”  Do I need to explain the sheer dumbness of the statement?

Now the movies…..there is always a spy movie or TV show that has a nuke bomb missing and some maniacal twat has control of it….but in real life the nukes are well protected and losing one is very unlikely, right?

Time to tie the two random thoughts together……..

Think again!

Canadian waters have yielded their second strange case of the week: The CBC reports that the Royal Canadian Navy is on its way to investigate a possible “lost nuke” believed to have been dumped off the coast of British Columbia before an American B-36 bomber crashed in 1950. Diver Sean Smyrichinsky tells the Vancouver Sun that he was searching for sea cucumbers recently when he spotted a bizarre object underwater that resembled a giant metal bagel cut in half, with bolts bigger than basketballs. He says he told his buddies he might have spotted a UFO—and when he told some fishermen about the sighting a few days later, “some old-timer said ‘Oh, you might have found that bomb.'”

The bomb the “old-timer” was referring to was the Mark IV bomb missing since the Feb. 13, 1950 crash in the area of the US bomber, which was returning to a base in Alaska after a mission that included a simulated nuclear bombing of San Francisco, the Guardian reports.The bomb was packed with TNT and weighed almost 11,000 pounds, though records indicate that its core was packed with lead, not plutonium, so there is little risk of a nuclear accident, a Canadian military spokesman says. “Nonetheless, we do want to be sure and we do want to investigate it further,” he says, adding that experts will determine whether the object should be retrieved or left where it is. (Earlier this week, the Canadian military investigated a strange noise coming from the Arctic sea floor.)

The nuke program is not as “secure” as we might think….there have been stories of massive drug use among those tapped at launching them and then there was the oops moment a couple years ago when bombs were sent to places that were not on their routing list…..

Maybe we should look at re-vamping the program before we start making more of these destructive weapons….whata ya think?

14 thoughts on “Where’d You Lose It?”

  3. Much the same as we have lost the teachings of “Civics” courses in our schools, there is now the problem of neeeding to teach a mentality that fits the contemporary nuclear paradigm. The thinking surrounding our nuclear weapons and programs is archaic stemming way back from the 1940s and 50s. We need to upgrade everything that is taught about the weapons themselves, their safe handling and disposal, their impact and effectiveness, the psychology behind actually using them, the care and maintenance of safely working with and around them — it all has to be updated and refreshed so that none of the stupid mistakes surrounding them could result in accidents and injuries to personnel working on them or an accidental or unintentional launch of any of them. Like the Space Program, the whole Nuclear Program has to be modernized and brought up to date.

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  4. I tried to think of an appropriate comment, but, was unable to do so. This news, while not unexpected, demonstrates an even deeper degree of ‘stupid’ in our culture than even I had imagined…. I suppose things like this are what prompted Albert Einstein, who pretty much laid the groundwork for making atomic bombs, to say, “If I had known, I would have been a plumber.”…..

    gigoid, the dubious

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  6. Nukes were a bad idea in the 1950’s and 60’s, they still are now. I’m thankful that we, as a planetary society, have only used them on each other twice.

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