Comments on: Please Do Not Smoke Next to the H-bomb

By: Alex Wellerstein

Alex Wellerstein — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 14:29:52 +0000

Dear Gerard: Thank you!

By: gerard

gerard — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 11:46:43 +0000

this blog is fantastic. thanks very much for the lively commentary and the quirky historical stories. I’m thoroughly enjoying them all

Dr Gerard Hammond
Garvan instiutue medical research,
Sydney

An ex-theoretical physcial chemist

By: King of the Wild Frontier | Restricted Data

King of the Wild Frontier | Restricted Data — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:45:55 +0000

[...] the nuclear projectile onto the front. (Please don’t drop the nuke. And I think it may be redundant at this point to note that you are instructed not to smoke around the nuke. If you need assistance, please call [...]

By: Mike Lehman

Mike Lehman — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 05:15:09 +0000

Zero defects. The two-man rule. Extensive documentation and training, supplemented by work orders to update the casters on those pesky, swervy H-bombs we’re keeping out in the igloos.

All meant to inspire confidence that things will go boom when the president says so and not a second sooner.. The thing is, if you can’t get the caster wheel right, what about other yet to be discovered flaws and deficiencies. Of course, as far as the public was concerned, those things were safe, except for a few plane crashes, because it was all secret back then.

Somehow, as a guy who sometimes works on stuff, not getting that caster right the first time around is not going to inspire confidence in me about more sophisticated aspects of bomb design.

As for smoking and the bomb, those thing can kill you. Realistically, considering the number of Americans who smoked during that era and the relatively few restrictions on where they could do it, it made a lot of sense to say No Smoking with the bomb. Tobacco smoke is hard on electronic circuits, so cautions against smoking involved performance issues as much as concern about employee health. Otherwise, technicians would’ve been clamoring for bombs with built-in ashtrays so they could get their work done more efficiently.

Yes, the perceptions of risk have certainly shifted since then.