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posted by on Saturday March 18 2017, @12:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-know-about-it-now dept.

The unmarked 18-wheelers ply the nation's interstates and two-lane highways, logging 3 million miles a year hauling the most lethal cargo there is: nuclear bombs.

The covert fleet, which shuttles warheads from missile silos, bomber bases and submarine docks to nuclear weapons labs across the country, is operated by the Office of Secure Transportation, a troubled agency within the U.S. Department of Energy so cloaked in secrecy that few people outside the government know it exists.

The $237-million-a-year agency operates a fleet of 42 tractor-trailers, staffed by highly armed couriers, many of them veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, responsible for making sure nuclear weapons and components pass through foggy mountain passes and urban traffic jams without incident.

The transportation office is about to become more crucial than ever as the U.S. embarks on a $1-trillion upgrade of the nuclear arsenal that will require thousands of additional warhead shipments over the next 15 years.

The increased workload will hit an agency already struggling with problems of forced overtime, high driver turnover, old trucks and poor worker morale — raising questions about its ability to keep nuclear shipments safe from attack in an era of more sophisticated terrorism.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:01AM

    by davester666 (155) on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:01AM (#481015)

    At least it will be a slow, painful death, due to some random poison in the air, water or dirt, because it is WAY cheaper for energy companies to just dump their waste wherever they happen to be rather than trucking it somewhere to be contained/treated in a semi-responsible way. And who cares about the little people, they don't have enough money to decisively prove that the illness they have is because company X dumped poison Y in their water, or vented it in the air, or dumped it in the ground before selling it to said little people.

    Clearly, the free market will solve this problem by enabling the rich people to move far away from where this happens.

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