I thought writing about gadgets was tough! Apparently I have nothing to worry about, and neither do you, unless you’re like Wesley Baptiste, who’s training to disarm old nuclear warheads for a living. Don’t drop that wrench.
Part of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty — a pact between the US and Russia, acknowledging we no longer need to blow each other to radioactive bits — old nukes are being put to rest. That means taking apart some very, very dangerous pieces of hardware. [Flickr]
Graham
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:21 AMI’d think the likelyhood of a nuke detonating by accident is pretty slim. But maybe they should be wearing helmets just in case ;)
noone
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:29 AMOr sunscreen
Wana
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 9:32 AMLead suits you mean.
sun
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 3:01 PMNo, he means Sunscreen
Chaoticlusts
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 10:31 AMThe agreement tends to be more along the lines of ‘we don’t actually need these massive ones to destroy entire states, it’d be much more useful if we have these tiny ones we can precision strike facilities with’ :P
At least based on the fact that there’s plenty of research going into developing new tactical nuclear weapons regardless of non-proliferation treaties under the loophole of them not being ‘new’ nukes just re-purposing old ones ^_^ Still can’t complain about a shift in ideology from destroying countries too taking out specific targets in countries, certainly better than nothing :)
Not having an arsenal sitting around large enough to irradiate the planet a few times over is a nice side effect of that change :P (Though a morbid part of me would love to see if we could push a 1GT bomb…the USSR essentially made a 100MT one :P)
But yeah don’t envy the poor buggers doing that job, can’t imagine the amount of radiation you’d get exposed too would be fun >__<)