Nuclear Readiness

After the Cold War, Strategic Air Command was disbanded. The resulting STRATCOM reorganized the checklists used to direct nuclear assets (tankers and bombers) to be applicable to a wider series of options when carrying out nuclear war orders. The result was that the checklists became more difficult to follow, and crews routinely began making mistakes. In an actual situation, this would result in crews not carrying out the desired order or carrying out an incorrect response. This could have disastrous consequences. A workaround followed. To continue passing their Nuclear Operational Readiness Inspections, and make it seem like units would do the right thing, squadrons and wings made efforts at obtaining test questions from units who recently passed their inspections. So, the situation, as it existed when I retired from the USAF, was that crews were routinely unable to accurately execute a nuclear war order and this situation not being detectable by command authorities resulting in the US not able to correctly respond to a nuclear tasking. This struck me as a gigantic problem. I wrote my Senator twice and never received a reply. To my knowledge, the problem exists to this day. The checklists need to be rewritten and tested to ensure that the US will be able to accurately execute a nuclear war order in the future.

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That’s kinda a huge problem. What the heck?
nobody cares about that???

If I’m understanding what this is about I think it’s really important so it’s kind of stayed on my mind.

If I could make a suggestion…? I’ve not been on this site very long so I’m not certain about this but I’m not seeing any tags on your post? I just found there’s a whole page of possible tags that goes much further down than the box will scroll, like “White House”, united states department of defense, etc. If I’m correct, I think you could edit and add several tag and this might help bring more attention to this issue. Couldn’t hurt anyways. :slightly_smiling_face:

(Or maybe you’ve tagged it as much as they’ll allow and I don’t know my way around enough to see it. If so, I’m sorry )

Thank you Sugarling! I am also new to the site, so it took me a little while to figure out how to better transmit my message. I appreciate your inputs. You are right. This is a crucial problem that needs immediate attention. I rewrote the post to have more impact and tagged the DoD and the White House and hope that someone will reach out.

Allen

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I forgot to mention…The new post is under “Peace” and is entitled “Failure to Execute Nuclear Orders.”

Allen

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