Stuck in Detention with a Handful of Nukes

I’ve got this great idea for a movie. It’s about the people responsible for launching nuclear missiles in America, and how their daily lives are some Beckett-esque hellscape of waiting for something that will never arrive, forced to be on alert for no reason, and trapped taking an endless series of certification exams that are as pointless as they are punitive. So pointless, in fact, that these poor souls don’t even bother to study for them. They just pass the answers back and forth among themselves. They have the most important security job in the country, but their days are an infinite vista of mind-numbing bureaucracy and ennui. Can’t you see it? The pendulum swing between the anxiety of potential nuclear war and sheer and utter boredom? There’s some comedic potential there, some farce about government to be made. It’s practically Soderberghian.

That isn’t a movie, of course. It’s the real-life experience of the folks in charge of our nation’s nuclear arsenal, and in particular the ones at Malmstrom Air Force Base out in Montana. Malmstrom is a nice name, isn’t it? Sounds sort of like maelstrom, but more boring. Indeed, as the New York Times reports, these missileers (And isn’t that adorable, too? Like musketeers, but wildly more dangerous) are faced with a monthly proficiency test on which anything lower than a 90 is a failing grade, and the penalties for failure are extreme. So they did what anyone would do, and they cheated. Everyone cheated. People got promoted, insisted they hated cheating, and looked the other way about cheating. Now, quite a few people have been fired, and ol’ Chuck Hagel went out to the base to reassure the troops that their work is still important, still needed. He’s the first Pentagon chief to visit since 1982, by the way. If I were a missileer (Oh, to be a missileer!), I would feel so reassured about the importance of my task, wouldn’t you?

There’s the rub, isn’t it? We all know we’re never going to fire those missiles. Russia, or China, or whatever other big nuke possessing country we don’t get along with, is never going to initiate nuclear war. For all our hawkishness, we’re not going to do it either. Really, the only people interested in nuclear weapons are shady terrorist types, and as we’ve discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s awfully hard to pinpoint how to strike back at a diffuse group of rebels who hate us. Well, at least our missiles are safe from that kind of thing. Right?

In the past year, a general who oversaw nuclear weapons was dismissed for drunken antics during an official trip to Moscow, 17 officers assigned to stand watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles were removed for violating safety codes and having bad attitudes, and missileers with nuclear launch authority were caught napping with the blast door open — a violation of security regulations meant to prevent terrorists or other intruders from entering the underground command post and compromising secret launch codes.

Sure, yeah. Let’s just take a quick nap with those doors open. Oh, did you want a bomb? Just stroll right on in. Maybe we’ll throw some quizzes at you to stop you on the way out, but don’t worry, we don’t know the answers either.

What point can there possibly be to monthly written exams? Do they really think the missileers are going to forget how to do their jobs every month? I wish they weren’t napping on the job, but I can’t really blame them too much, since they’re caught in one of my recurring stress dreams.

Maybe, and here’s a crazy idea, we could get rid of some of those bombs. Can we convert them to nuclear energy? Is that a thing? We need some new energy sources anyway, though we don’t seem to want to do anything concrete about that.

At the very least, maybe we can accept that these people’s jobs are no longer the vital, world-changing roles they used to be, and try to make them slightly more tolerable. Otherwise, I don’t think this will be the last time we are literally caught napping on an issue of nuclear security.