a warm feeling of helplessness

I love to read about military incompetence. It warms me from the cock up. If I had kids, I’d sleep well in my bed just knowing that a crack team of armed, moronic, dangerous, bumbling idiots was safeguarding the future security of all of the world’s stupidest nations.

Great to hear that crew at the Minot airbase in North Dakota slept like the dead while in charge of:

1. The control centre containing launch keys of ballistic missiles

and also,

2. Boxes containing the codes required for launching a nuclear attack.

Who the fuck are these people, and why are they safeguarding anything? We all want to go to sleep at work, and sometimes maybe we’re even lucky enough to do it, but most jobs don’t involve high-grade nuclear weapons. What kind of training programme were these fools given? Was basic health and safety even covered?

This is the same airbase that last year flew a B-52 across America without realising that there were six air-launched nuclear missiles on board. Considering we have to remove our shoes to even get on board a plane, or buy special small toothpastes to avoid an x-ray buggering, one can’t help but wonder how – in these turbulent times, all significance teetering on the edge of a hate-fuelled apocalypse – an aircraft can leave a high security US Airforce base and fly a military jet containing nuclear missiles up, up and away without being noticed. By the pilots, by their superiors, by hangar staff, by anyone. How does this happen? Were they waving it off with handkerchiefs like a departing ship in a black and white film? Had it slipped their minds?

These are nuclear weapons – don’t we have some protocols in place? Little things, maybe, like don’t fall asleep while guarding the codes that could launch the burning destruction of a chunk of world; or don’t unknowingly take a cargo full of nuclear missiles from a military airbase out on flights over America. I’m sure something clear and simple like that might make everyone feel a whole lot better. Common sense, call it, or some base survival instinct to not have our eyes melt from our sockets.

The very fact of nuclear weapons, on a fundamental level, makes most sensible people feel the occasional pang of paranoid discomfort. Add to that the kind of thugs and clowns lumbering around to keep a (closed) eye on them and that soon starts turning into a distinct sense of taut uneasiness. Furthermore and thricely, Bush is the kind of brainless trigger happy pervert who would agree to anything if the question was phrased in more than two syllables, nodding his head like a brainless defective doll.

It would be funny if it wasn’t serious. The military can’t even keep their eyes (literal and metaphorical) open for long enough to check the cargo of an airborne deathship in a world run by maniacs. Do we feel safe? Are we supposed to? Why can these mistakes happen?

Asleep, perhaps. Mass narcolepsy strikes US military in simultaneous danger nap. Must be Iran.

Minot airbase: unjustifiable idiots.