In choosing the military techs who can fire nukes are the very devout screened out?

Great Debates
41

I read Big Red by Douglas C. Waller a few years ago. It’s about a post-Cold War cruise aboard the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Nebraska. Officers and crew with access to nuclear weapons are still carefully screened, and those who indicate even the slightest personal, moral or religious objection to the use of nuclear weapons are steered into other Navy career tracks. The Navy wants to be sure that those who might someday have to use nuclear weapons will be willing to do so When Things Get Very Bad. Repeated drills have the effect, over time, of making missile launches seem almost routine, so that (hopefully) the crew will virtually be on autopilot if an actual launch order ever came in. (For a good fictional example of this, see The Last Ship by William Brinkley, about a Navy destroyer launching nuclear-tipped Tomahawks against the USSR in the late 1980s - a flawed but very interesting postapocalyptic novel).

Waller also said that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, SSBN captains have discretion to break radio silence and contact HQ for additional confirmation if a launch order comes out of the blue, with no period of international tension or indication of growing hostilities preceding it, and are actually encouraged to do so. Before 1989, captains had no such disretion.

42

Maybe it does, but it’s not actually part of the oath or affirmation. It’s something many people, but not all, add to it.

43

Yes, it is.

You can opt to omit it, and lots of people do, but it is official.

44

I’ve known many military people, active and vets, and none of them struck me as being motivated to do ANY sort of violence without dire need. The thought patterns that one might have, given the actual ability to take millions of lives at once, are bound to be somewhat different from everyday experience.

My old roomie was a Navy pilot. HE claimed that a drill as described at the beginning of “War Games” really HAD been conducted, and that it resulted in over a third of missile crews refusing to launch, and that furthermore, the Soviets had done the same thing with the same results.

Dunno how much credence I’d put into this sort of hedgerow gossip, but it seems plausible.