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... needing much more advance notice and planning Without disagreeing with your point ... The Army being the Army - while the weapons were issued, the troops

by bdunbar 15y ago

... needing much more advance notice and planning Without disagreeing with your point ... The Army being the Army - while the weapons were issued, the troops trained on the system with dummy warheads, I suspect that issuing live atomic warheads to the troops would have required just as much confusion, hurly-burly, and wacky improvisation as getting a wing of airplanes aloft. Or more? The Air Force does fly airplanes around all the time. One suspects the guys in charge of atomic warheads did not actually issue their toys to the battle groups very often.

mikeash 15y ago
It's a complex subject, certainly. One additional subtlety that's worth considering is that, while they may not have had warheads on the border all the time (although things were more lax in the 60s), war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose, potentially days or weeks in advance of war breaking out. Whereas with airplanes, you can't launch your bombers days before you expect the enemy to cross the border. However, probably the more pertinent point was that, even if the warheads would have been troubled by administrative confusion as you propose, they probably looked much more effective to the guys in charge of procuring items like this, where such problems often get abstracted away or simply forgotten about.
- bdunbar 15y ago
  war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose I have recalled where I first heard about the Davy Crockett a - from Hackworth's memoir 'About Face'. Looked it up in google books to verify. Per Hackworth, while the Crockett platoon leader in his battlegroup did not know where to obtain live rounds, they would have been procured in about two hours. (pg 413). This seems like an amazingly short time to issue anything, even with Russian tanks coming over the border. But perhaps they expected to move a little faster in West Germany in the 60s.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    I wonder if "did not know where to obtain live rounds" might have been a convenient fiction to placate people, like how the launch codes on ICBMs were set to 00000000 for decades so there wouldn't be any chance of them getting in the way of nuking the Russkies. Something like, "The live rounds for your weapons are definitely NOT housed in room 404 of the local armory, wink wink nudge nudge."
    - bdunbar 15y ago
      To me, re-reading that chapter, it's clear that the neither the platoon leader nor his immediate chain of command knew how to obtain atomic warheads at the time. Years later, the author met a key responsible for implementing the weapon who assured him of the two-hour metric. Of course ... the author is biased, it's a memoir, and at time a very selective one. Take it with a grain of salt. Hackworth was a lot of things but one thing he was above all else was very opinionated and sure of himself.

by bdunbar 15y ago

mikeash 15y ago

It's a complex subject, certainly. One additional subtlety that's worth considering is that, while they may not have had warheads on the border all the time (although things were more lax in the 60s), war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose, potentially days or weeks in advance of war breaking out. Whereas with airplanes, you can't launch your bombers days before you expect the enemy to cross the border. However, probably the more pertinent point was that, even if the warheads would have been troubled by administrative confusion as you propose, they probably looked much more effective to the guys in charge of procuring items like this, where such problems often get abstracted away or simply forgotten about.

bdunbar 15y ago
war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose I have recalled where I first heard about the Davy Crockett a - from Hackworth's memoir 'About Face'. Looked it up in google books to verify. Per Hackworth, while the Crockett platoon leader in his battlegroup did not know where to obtain live rounds, they would have been procured in about two hours. (pg 413). This seems like an amazingly short time to issue anything, even with Russian tanks coming over the border. But perhaps they expected to move a little faster in West Germany in the 60s.
- mikeash 15y ago
  I wonder if "did not know where to obtain live rounds" might have been a convenient fiction to placate people, like how the launch codes on ICBMs were set to 00000000 for decades so there wouldn't be any chance of them getting in the way of nuking the Russkies. Something like, "The live rounds for your weapons are definitely NOT housed in room 404 of the local armory, wink wink nudge nudge."
  - bdunbar 15y ago
    To me, re-reading that chapter, it's clear that the neither the platoon leader nor his immediate chain of command knew how to obtain atomic warheads at the time. Years later, the author met a key responsible for implementing the weapon who assured him of the two-hour metric. Of course ... the author is biased, it's a memoir, and at time a very selective one. Take it with a grain of salt. Hackworth was a lot of things but one thing he was above all else was very opinionated and sure of himself.