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He often worked on the blast doors and knew a few tricks to open them that weren’t in the book.
Stan Spray
Stan Spray has one of the worst names I have ever seen. I'm not sure if it is a niche porn star name, or a brand of deodorant.
Members of the Disaster Response Force were among the first to leave the scene of the disaster.
This is, technically, a response.
The blast wave inflated Hanson’s uniform like a balloon, lifted him off his feet, tossed him down the road, and sent enormous steel beams flying past him.
It was Hukle, sitting in the bed of the pickup, with his RFHCO suit pulled down to his knees.
Devlin could not believe the strength of Colonel Morris. The two were about the same size, and yet Morris was running while carrying him.
The man was forty-two years old. Devlin couldn’t stop looking at his face.
He was fifty-seven, an old man by Air Force standards,
He would be ancient by software engineer standards.
A large object by the side of the road was loudly hissing; if it was the propane tank, it could explode at any moment.
And if it was a house cat, it might scratch them!
Everyone piled into the vehicles, drove off, and returned to the entry control point. Livingston and Kennedy had been left for dead.
Ominous foreshadowing? Is this about to suddenly and unexpectedly become a horror novel, with Livingston and Kennedy fused together into some horrific monster, who Crees throng the back woods, feeding off goats and sheep, and hunting each member of the Disaster Response Team one by one?
There aren't enough books that blend fiction and nonfiction.
MANY OF THE SECURITY POLICE officers and most of the Disaster Response Force were now in the parking lot of the Sharpe-Payne grocery store in Damascus. It seemed like a good place to regroup.
Also, it was open 24 hours, and there was a sale on canned beans. Colonel Jones's wife had left him with a shopping list of stuff to pick up on his way home.
Hukle was put on a stretcher next to the ambulance, and Devlin was examined while lying in the back of the truck. Dr. Mueller thought the injuries didn’t look too serious. But the diagnosis didn’t satisfy Childers or the members of PTS Team B. They took the station wagon and the PTS truck, departed for the hospital in Conway, about twenty-five miles to the south—and, amid the confusion, left Hukle on the stretcher beside the ambulance.
I hope he doesn't die or anything -- I would feel awkwardly guilty about laughing at this if he dies, even though all these events are older than I am.
The refusal to admit these injured young airmen, at four in the morning, about half an hour away from another hospital, seemed in keeping with the spirit of the entire night.
A FEW HOURS EARLIER, at about one in the morning, after escorting a flatbed truck with light-all units to Launch Complex 374-7, Jimmy Roberts and Don Green had asked if there was anything else they could do to help.
Ooh, a flashback! This will doubtless cause us to see all the events that just happened in a new and exciting light.
At about three o’clock, Roberts and Green were on a road about half a mile southwest of the silo. The sky lit up. “Man, ain’t that pretty,” Roberts said, not realizing what had just happened.
I am really hoping this is the last we hear of Roberts and Green. I don't want them dead or anything, I just want their entire contribution to the story to be passing out gas masks, instructing people on how to use them, and then making a (in retrospect) wildly stupid and uninformed comment that is now memorialized forever.
Despite the disturbing, early-morning sight of two men in battle fatigues and gas masks standing at the front door, most of the homeowners were grateful for the warning. But one man opened the door, pointed a handgun at them, and said, “I’m not going to leave.” They didn’t argue with him.
I done got rights! You all gov'ment people ain't got no jury's-diction here!
Green turned the pickup truck around and floored it, driving all out, pedal to the metal. About a minute later, the pickup died right in the middle of Highway 65. It had run out of gas.
Roberts spotted a Cadillac parked in the driveway of a nearby home, ran over to it, broke one of the windows with a rock, and started to hot-wire the car. Green was impressed, but not surprised, that Roberts knew how to do that.
As they neared the complex, a large cylindrical object appeared in the road. Well, damn, there’s the warhead, Green thought. He carefully drove around
The light-all unit was attached to a Dodge Power Wagon, and Green had an idea: I’ll drive this big pickup right through that fence.
Why does Schlossinger write these two as if they are complete doofuses?
Green found a small hole in the fence, entered the complex on foot, and started calling for Livingston and Roberts. Nobody replied. It was hard to see anything, with all the smoke and dust. The lenses of his gas mask fogged up. He kept tripping over debris and falling down. He worried that something terrible had happened, that Roberts had fallen into a hole and gotten badly hurt. Green shouted for Livingston and Roberts and realized that he was lost.
don’t leave me,” Livingston said. Roberts picked him up again and put him on his back.
I do hope he Roberts put Livingston on his own back (Roberts' own back that is), rather than just rolling the injured man onto his back like a helpless turtle.
I also hope Livingston was not a turtle.
Students were no longer exposed to nerve gas and then told to inject themselves with atropine—an exercise to build confidence that the antidote would work during a chemical attack.
A young woman came to see Livingston as well, telling one doctor that she was his wife, another that she was his sister.
Terrifyingly, she never lied. It was Arkansas after all.
ARNOLD HAD BEEN fast asleep when the phone rang at about half past three in the morning. The caller told him to report to the base: his EOD unit was heading into the field. The call came at a bad time.
But, as Optimus Prime said, fate does not call us at the time of our choosing. Neither does nature.
But an Air Force investigation later found a different cause: maintenance crews had been goofing around with the load carts, out of sheer boredom, and using them to lift B-52 bombers off the ground.
EOD technicians sat on nuclear weapons, casually leaned against them, used them as tables during lunch breaks.
When Matthew Arnold heard about the decision to do nothing until the weapon was X-rayed, he thought it was ridiculous. It was bullshit. It meant his unit would have to sit around in Arkansas for at least another day or two.
A fate worse than being vaporized. When you're vaporized, it's over in an instant, and there is no time to regret anything. Two days in Arkansas, though? That would stick with you, and with your family, and descendants for a half dozen generations.
IN THE PARKING LOT of the hospital at Little Rock Air Force Base, Al Childers was told to take off his clothes.
A line of naked men stood in front of Childers, preparing for a rudimentary form of decontamination. They were sprayed with cold water from a garden hose
Near the entrance to the complex, the road was blocked by debris. Childers and his escorts entered on foot.
Rent boys, mostly.
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, David Livingston died at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock.
Perhaps I should check to see what snarky comments I have made about him. Other than the turtle bit.
Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. “It’s the dirt that does it,” Jones explained. “Everyone’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.”
And, if burying yourself alive doesn't save you from being killed, at least you will be buried.
Written by Jonathan Schell and later published as a book, The Fate of the Earth revived the notion that nuclear weapons confronted the world with a stark, existential choice: life or death.
Well, to be entirely accurate, there are lots of ways we can kill ourselves that don't involve nuclear weapons.
People never think about all the grad students trying to make Rosemary flavored chicken with gene therapy, or considering how to make a new base pair for DNA. And then there's global warming. Or massive pandemic spread nearly instantly with air travel. Lots of ways to kill ourselves.
I hear that the CEO of Amazon is building a drone army, and experimenting with missile technology.
Later that year the astronomer Carl Sagan conjured an even worse environmental disaster: nuclear winter. The vast amount of soot produced by burning cities would circle the earth after a nuclear exchange, block the sun, and precipitate a new ice age.
This might be exactly what we need to survive global warming!
I had a car once that had a leaky water pump. It put out the fire caused by the electrical short before it got to the leaky fuel line.
During the third week of October, two million people in Europe joined protests against the introduction of Pershing II missiles—and a team of Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and U.S. Marines led an invasion of Grenada, a small island in the Caribbean. The invasion had ostensibly been launched to protect the lives of American citizens and restore order amid the aftermath of a military coup. It also achieved another goal: the overthrow of a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. Nineteen American soldiers, twenty-five Cubans, and forty-five Grenadians were killed in the fighting. The
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So sad. We are forever trying to rid ourselves of the taint of Vietnam.
worst probable consequence of continuous degradation . . . is spontaneous ignition of the propellant in a way similar to a normally initiated burn,” an Air Force nuclear safety journal warned. “Naturally, this would be a catastrophe.” The journal advised its readers to “follow procedures and give the weapons a little extra care and respect.”
Reagan had a sunny, cheerful disposition, but watching The Day After left even him feeling depressed.
Gorbachev was held hostage, and the communications lines to his dacha were shut down by the KGB. His military aides, carrying the nuclear codes and the Soviet equivalent of a “football,” were staying at a guesthouse nearby. Their equipment stopped functioning—and the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union lost control of its nuclear weapons.
After studying a wide range of “trivial events in nontrivial systems,” Perrow concluded that human error wasn’t responsible for these accidents. The real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems, and it was impossible to solve: “Our ability to organize does not match the inherent hazards of some of our organized activities.” What appeared to be the rare exception, an anomaly, a one-in-a-million accident, was actually to be expected. It was normal.
To this day, the classification decisions at the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have an arbitrary, often Kafkaesque quality. Cold War documents that were declassified in the 1990s were later reclassified—making it illegal to possess them, even though the federal government once released them.
And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, the system was kept secret from the United States.
In 2003 half of the Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections—despite the three-day advance warning.
For a day and a half, nobody in the Air Force realized that half a dozen thermonuclear weapons were missing.
The challenges that the United States has faced in the management of its arsenal should give pause to every other nation that seeks to obtain nuclear weapons. This technology was invented and perfected in the United States. I have no doubt that America’s nuclear weapons are among the safest, most advanced, most secure against unauthorized use that have ever been built.
