Not a Matter of IF but When Unless we change things NOW

We all know what this is but did you know how many times we could have experienced this first hand due the foibles of man vs tech of unimagined power and destruction. I know I didn't, until now.

That incident, which led to an anti-­nuclear movement in Britain, where the plane was bound, is one of many stories Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation,” tells in “Command and Control.” During the cold war, nuclear bombs fell out of the sky, burned up in plane ­crashes and were lost at sea. In the incident Schlosser describes in greatest detail, “the Damascus accident” of Sept. 18, 1980, the warhead from a Titan II missile was ejected after a series of mishaps that began when a repairman dropped a socket wrench and pierced a fuel tank. Tactical nuclear weapons scattered across Europe had minimal security; misplaced tools and failed repairs triggered serious accidents; inadequate safety procedures and poor oversight led to dozens of close brushes with nuclear explosions. People have died in these accidents, sometimes as a result of their own carelessness or bad luck, but often while doing their best to protect the rest of us from an accidental nuclear blast.

In Command and Control, Eric Schlosser blows the doors off of secrecy regarding just how precarious our situation truly is, particularly in Pakistan, the country of love and peace situated next door to India and Afghanistan, which happens to have nukes, lots of them and we know nada on how intelligently the Pakistanis are dealing with this monstrous tech.

The biggest concern right now, by far, is Pakistan. One of the things that just came out through some of Snowden's revelations is how little we know about how Pakistan is managing its nuclear arsenal. They're rapidly building all kinds of nuclear weapons. If you have 150 weapons and you only lose one of them, you're still taking care of more than 99 percent of them perfectly – but you can't afford to lose one. Again, one weapon equals one city. 

While reading Schlosser's incredible book, the reality of us chickens living in an aleatory universe, where probabilities rule and how sh*t happpens...always, strikes home. Because of this fact, yours truly thinks it's just a matter of time when the unimaginable becomes reality unless we abolish nuclear weapons because it's not a matter of if but when regarding the quantum universe, forever inhabited by Fortuna, the ever present fickle goddess of fortune & fate. 

Read this, it's the right thing to do.

Addendum: Back in 1961...

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons - the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city - putting millions of lives at risk.

Click here to see the actual document in question.