Truck crash that closed I-90 Friday night was carrying 16 2,000-pound missiles - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/semitruck-crash-that-closed-i-90-friday-night-was-carrying-16-2000-pound-missiles/?utm_content=buffera25d1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=owned_buffer_tw_m Fairchild Air Force Base assisted emergency personnel by sending three explosive ordnance disposal technicians to the scene, although the semitruck involved did not have a direct relationship with the base. The driver, Mark W. Dearinger, 47, of Chickasha, Oklahoma, was cited for inattentive driving. He was not injured in the crash.

drove into a hazmat containment area It's a little on the nose that it went through a hazardous materials area...

the article is incredibly confusing especially as to how one casually drives off the highway and then into an embankment

truckers are prone to falling asleep at the wheel

Honestly the missile aspect isn't as concerning as it seems. Yes, still concerning, but I'm going to bet that since they're US-manufactured missiles being casually transported in 2019 they're probably as dangerous as a bunch of tin dicks provided you don't set off another missile in the same cabin as them.

Considering the US has accidentally dropped an armed nuclear device from an aircraft onto its own soil before, this is nothing.

There has been worse. A nuclear silo in the eighties suffered a critical fuel fire and explosion, and the entire rocket and its several stages fired off, causing the entire silo to be destroyed, fling the silo door several meters away, and flung the nuclear warhead into the yard outside the silo's gate. Guess what happened to the nuke? Absolutely nothing. Big ole' boy just landed like a giant robot butt-plug, thudding to the earth completely undetonated and without any fissile material leakage whatsoever.

I also seem to remember John Oliver saying that the code to launch all nukes was just lots of 0's at one point in time.

Nah, there were cases and times when the final unlock code for nuke cases or security systems would be simple shit like 1111 or all zeroes but we're talking the final physical step of security, actually arming the nuke itself required a lot of other processes that you couldn't do accidentally or without alarming the greater defense network. Besides, even if you managed it, the launched nuke would be detected the globe over. There were locks for nuke storage here that used simple bike lock style locks as a fail-safe measure. Ironically this meant they were secure as fuck, since anyone who's ever had a bike will attest to the fact those keys seem to fall into a parallel universe the second you take your eyes of them.

Ah, I gotcha. This is why I love FP - there's always somebody with bountiful knowledge on something obscure with which I can soak my brain.

My dates are probably off but if you asked me I'd say the golden age for a Rogue Launch would be between 1945 and 1951, but good luck encountering a nuke in actual service that's not about to be dropped on some desert for that shit. Even by 1963 the idea of a rogue launch was so unlikely as to be fantastical, and even before that it was implausible, if not impossible. Dr. Strangelove was written as a satirical farce rather than a sincere work partially because Kubrick found out the book it was based on (Red Alert) was so fucking unfeasible. No rogue general nor even a communications breakdown on that level could cause a nuke to be loosed, and even if some assjockey like Ripper decided to fire off a nuke at Moscow all he'd do is launch a big metal cock into the Russian soil -- possibly taking up the conventional explosive in the process but failing to cause an actual nuclear detonation. Either that or his ass would be turned to fragments by air defense long before he even saw the Kremlin.

It doesn't sound like he drove off the highway though, more like into a construction zone of some kind.

There's also a bomber that crashed that was carrying a megaton class thermonuke in the 60s. The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash, it was. The plane was carrying two 4 megaton thermonukes at the time. One of them was found standing upright as the parachute got caught in a tree, but the other one hit the ground at approx 700mph, and went about 20ft underground. It almost detonated too. A single low voltage switch failed, which prevented it from arming. But if it did, it would've detonated at the full 4 megaton yield. The bomb's fusion secondary was never found, either. The fusion fuel isn't a problem, but the secondary contains a few pounds of uranium or plutonium, which to this day is still in the ground. They recovered the rest of the bomb though. There's another bomber that crashed off the east coast, and I think the bomb was never recovered, but I'm not sure and it's too late in the day for me to bother looking it up.

You mean the South Carolina bomb right? And if so, we actually didn't recover one, and the fuse of another. :v

This is the Lock-picking Lawyer and today I'm going to show you how to access the UK's missile defense system in 3 seconds...

if you've ever driven for 12 hours straight its pretty easy to see how.