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Yes, You Can Pass a Nuclear Missile Driving on Interstate 80 Through Wyoming(cowboystatedaily.com)

52 points by Bender 2 days ago | 28 comments

I may be misremembering this, but the desire to move missiles around may be downstream of the START and New START arms limitation treaties.

These give the US and Russian governments what are supposed to be adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles, but of course make no requirement on the signatories to make it easy to locate all the missiles at any given moment.

So there’s a strong strategic incentive to shuffle them around between treaty-mandated inspections.

[–] tristanj 10 hours ago

START and New START have both expired. New START effectively ended in 2023 after Russia stopped complying due to US materiel support for Ukraine. It formally expired earlier this year.

Regardless, the treaties are strategically irrelevant since China is a non-signatory and it has refused to sign on to a joint arms control agreement.

[–] vkou 17 minutes ago

Isn't China's nuclear arsenal a tiny fraction of that of Russia and the US?

Why is its non-involvement relevant, but the non-involvement of Israel, Pakistan, India isn't?

[–] twoodfin 9 hours ago

Sure, but the legal techniques of subterfuge developed under those treaties were designed to be effective against satellite and other intelligence in combination with treaty inspections. That those inspections have at least temporarily stopped is no reason to stop playing three-card monte with the missiles. These are big missiles, on which decades of information was collected by Russia, treaty-directed and otherwise.

[–] kryogen1c 9 hours ago

> adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles

It should be noted that a missle designed with a removable component requiring 30 seconds of install time does not count as an active missle when not assembled.

[–] bunabhucan 8 hours ago

There are 400 missiles in 400 silos and 50 kept in a warm status. I think the "moving around" is servicing them, replacing the tritium and so on.

[–] jakeydus 9 hours ago

A new start? Hmm, how to fit that on a license plate… ANUSTART?

[–] srean 9 hours ago

Well, it can also tokenizes as

ANUS TART

Maybe that was your point.

It is a good idea to screen urls for alternative parses and tokenizations. For example

http://therapistfinder.com

For my day job I had written such a tokenizer, so I do this almost automatically.

[–] Taniwha 6 hours ago

Was driving down I-5 the night before Thanksgiving some time in the late 90s and found myself in a traffic jam (there was a truck on fire 100 miles ahead, Thanksgiving eve on I5 is always a nightmare) stuck next to one of these, after a while people were getting out of their cars to stretch their legs, take a piss etc - the pseudo soldiers accompanying the truck were getting very very antsy by all these people wandering around the nuke

[–] icegreentea2 11 hours ago

Feels weird to talk about the "can neither confirm nor deny" stuff when the website for the Warren AFB and 90th Wing so plainly say that they have and operate ICBMs.

https://www.warren.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/

https://www.warren.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Artic...

[–] eddyg 1 hour ago

Speaking of Warren, worth mentioning this site⁽¹⁾ by an ex-missileer at F.E. Warren.

https://missileer.watch/

[–] dist-epoch 10 hours ago

Maybe it's something like some of the missiles have no warhead on them, and you don't know which ones.

[–] derektank 10 hours ago

That, plus young security forces airmen and missile officers that just don’t want to accidentally say something they’re not supposed to. CYA is the most common source of over classification.

[–] stockresearcher 2 days ago

They drive significantly under the speed limit; of course everyone passes them.

[–] Avshalom 11 hours ago

Yeah, you definitely shouldn't follow behind them for a long distances.

[–] Peanuts99 10 hours ago

Strangely in the UK, the vehicles carrying nuclear weapons are escorted by the nuclear police and they absolutely 'bomb' it past everyone.

[–] dist-epoch 10 hours ago

Until someone sits in front of them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srytx_01MW8

[–] cucumber3732842 6 hours ago

In my state if your wide load is big enough you need a police escort. That means you drive 70-80mph because that's what the police do. Of course, the highest speed limit in this state is not that high.

[–] _kb 8 hours ago

Video here from Malmstrom AFB where they show off the vehicles in more detail, including the inside of the transporter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5t1h4HSFWg.

[–] kotaKat 7 hours ago

And for the other section mentioned from the DOE Office of Secure Transportation:

"The Safeguards Transport program is so secretive that only three photographs of the unknown number of vehicles have been publicly released."

... here's quite a few hundred more (moving) photographs of them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8yLYLSzoIw

[–] ceejayoz 10 hours ago

If you follow too closely, you can rear-end one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/6macxc/casually_reare...

[–] 1123581321 5 hours ago

I was intrigued by the comment about the escort ramming local police off the road! Is there footage anywhere of this?

[–] rdtsc 1 minute ago

That has to be considered as a threat model scenario - cars pretending to be cops stopping it to pretend to check something.

[–] ahazred8ta 10 hours ago

https://www.dailymail.com/video/news/video-1226415/US-nuclea...

[–] thayne 10 hours ago

> These fuel haulers think they got a bomb in their back, while this guy had a nuclear warhead,

Transporting a nuclear warhead is probably safer. I'm sure there are tons of safeguards to prevent an accidental detonation, and with a military escort people are more likely to be drive carefully around you.

[–] beloch 9 hours ago

Do they transport warheads fully assembled, or with cores and high explosives separate? If the latter, would they send explosives in the same shipment as cores? If disassembled components are being shipped via ground, with cores separate from explosives, the worst that could happen would be a small conventional explosion with no risk of radioactive contamination.

[–] rbanffy 9 hours ago

I think the fuel elements of the missiles (or fueled cases) would be much more dangerous than the warheads. Warheads are designed with extreme precautions so they don’t go off when they are not supposed to, but Minutemen missiles are solid rockets and solid fuel is usually quite temperamental.

[–] rsynnott 9 hours ago

Ideally, yes. In practice there have been a number of nuclear devices which can arm accidentally, though (at least as far as anyone has so far admitted) they were generally early ones.

Also, of course, even assuming that it’s ‘safe’, spreading one over the landscape is extremely undesirable.

(Also if it was an actual missile as described, you _definitely_ do not want one of those solid fuel motors going up.)

[–] amelius 9 hours ago

This is the nerd equivalent of OMG I saw Britney Spears at Costco.

[–] metalman 2 days ago

They could sell bumper stickers. "This car passed a Nuklear ICBM"

[–] CamperBob2 10 hours ago

That'll get 'em outta the left lane