The United States has 5,244 nuclear weapons,
and a whole bunch of different ways to move them. Some can be fired from the ground, others
from submarines. Some can be dropped from planes, and others are just collecting dust. But all
of these systems for moving nuclear weapons are systems for deploying them; as in, that’s how
we move them from here, in Montana, to here, where the bad people are—but what about when we
need to transport nuclear weapons without blowing them up? Well, it turns out that moving a warhead
from one part of the United States to another is, like, a whole thing, so… you know
the drill: we’ll explain the thing, and then we’ll tell you to go buy something, and
then about 2% of you will buy it, and then I will give my writer Ben some money to go buy more
croissants, which he needs to live. Here we go. Nuclear warheads in the United States live
here: in the 450-or-so missile silos in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and North Dakota,
with a few spread out in other states. But, throughout their lives, these warheads also
sometimes need to be here, here, here, here, here, here, or here. And at this point, you
probably have the same question that I did when I started writing this video: “Why, exactly, are we
moving nuclear warheads in the first place? It’s not like we’re using them. This must only happen,
like, every few decades.” And you’d be right, if you just replaced “every few decades” with
“several times a week,” which I guess means that you weren’t very right at all. The US Department
of Energy moves warheads all the time, and it is precisely because we aren’t doing anything with
them that they have to be moved so often; you see, the delicious plutonium center of every nuclear
warhead has an expiration date—a point past which it won’t detonate reliably—and the problem is…
we don’t really know when that expiration date is. So instead of rolling the dice on World War 3,
the Department of Energy has started the process of recycling and replacing the plutonium in each
of these warheads, and that means bringing them from their silos to one of these locations for
disassembly, reassembly, maintenance, or testing. But the question is: how do you get a warhead from
here to here—safely—multiple times a week? Surely, we don’t just… bring a nuclear bomb onto a public
interstate highway, and… no… we do do that, don’t we? Yes, in fact, here is a map of
the interstates that the Department of Energy uses to transport their warheads—but
it’s not quite that simple because bringing a nuclear bomb onto a public interstate
highway requires a carefully coordinated operation that is almost entirely classified,
except for the fact that this Department of Energy nuclear warhead transportation
training video ended up on YouTube somehow, and now I can tell you exactly how it works.
The warhead itself is first loaded into one of these. “I know about those,” you might
be saying. “That’s called a truck.” But oh, dear, simple viewer, you have once again been
fooled by the US Department of Energy Office of Secure Transportation, because that is no simple
truck, that is a US Safeguards Transporter, and this grainy picture is actually one of the only
verified photos of one in existence. While they’re designed to look like a typical 18-wheeler—with no
recognizable markings and an uniformed driver—they are anything but. The entire truck is bulletproof,
with 12-inch steel doors, invulnerable tires, and can sit directly in the middle of a fuel
fire for up to 60 minutes without the cargo taking any damage. The axles will explode if an
attacker tries to tow it, and the entire trailer will fill itself with rapidly-expanding foam if
the truck goes off-axis. It’s also equipped with various ways to kill you, the details of which the
Department of Energy still refuses to disclose, though independent journalists have found good
evidence for at least two: it can electrocute you to death, and, by reading through the DOE’s
contract with an Australian arms manufacturer from 2005, we’re pretty sure that it has a robotic
40-millimeter turret that is designed to, “distribute large quantities of ammunition
over a large area in an extremely short time frame.” So, no, it’s not really a truck.
But even with its fancy foams and turrets, this truck-looking-thing is only one part of
moving the warhead. Every safeguards transporter moves as part of a convoy, alongside two to three
other unmarked and armored emergency response vehicles—one of which acts as the convoy’s
command center—and aerial support, which can conduct surveillance, or, like every other part
of the convoy, kill you super dead. Each one of these vehicles is operated by armed OST agents,
which is a federal agency that you’re probably not familiar with, but all you really need to know
is that you probably shouldn’t try to steal one of their cars; every single one of these agents has Q
clearance—the highest level of clearance that the Department of Energy can issue—and they also have
the authority to directly enforce 28 federal laws, most of which allow them to, you guessed it,
kill you. These agents can also—in the event of an emergency—create what’s called a “National
Security Area,” which essentially allows them to put any non-federal land in the United States
under the control of the Department of Energy, regardless of who owns it. So these
agents—empowered to kill you and steal your house—escort the safeguards transporter
along a classified, predetermined route, which is monitored at all times by the Emergency
Control Center in Albuquerque; this center is responsible for contacting all of the local law
enforcement departments along the route to give them a sort of… vague message about a “special
mission” that they’re not allowed to know about and definitely shouldn’t mess with. In the
event that local police do encounter the convoy, tensions might be a little high, given that both
parties have guns and one of them has a nuclear bomb, so the Emergency Control Center can give
both parties what’s called a “sign-countersign,” where the police state a codeword and the OST
agents respond with another codeword. And all of these elements and procedures need to come
together flawlessly in order to get the cargo from point A to point B, so it’s a good thing
that our nuclear warheads are in the hands of an agency that truly does not mess around… unless
you consider “drinking on the job” messing around, or “threatening to kill each other” messing
around, or “being severely understaffed and not having the money for weapons training anymore”
messing around, but they sure don’t seem so, and I’m not in the business of disagreeing with people
who, again, can legally kill me and take my house. Anyway, it would seem that I have once again
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