if older weapons were used during an airborne alert, their nuclear cores would have to be placed, before takeoff, into an “in-flight insertion” mechanism. It held the core about a foot outside the sphere of explosives, while the plane was en route to the target—and then pushed the core all the way inside the sphere, using a motor-driven screw, when the bomb was about to be dropped. The contraption made the weapon safer to transport, but not much. Once the core was placed into this mechanism, according to a Sandia report, “nuclear safety is not ‘absolute,’ it is nonexistent.” The odds of a
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Somewhere, someone noted on his self-evaluation that he reduced the likelihood of a nuclear explosion in the event of a crash by over 80%.
Besides, it's not like these things crash often, is it? Surely, we wouldn't have crashes on a regular basis right? Oh, wait, that's probably at least once per chapter for the rest of the book.
