Nuclear weapons can be repurposed for nuclear energy. Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them. These weapons cannot be used ethically, they poison the soil, air, and water.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:

"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."

On the one hand, it sounds very stressful. On the other hand, if you screwed up, you wouldn't even notice because your brain would be obliterated before it would register.

The same article mentions what sounds like a worse job:

> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.

Ironically, compared to — say — landmines, nuclear weapons are very “safe” by design. Many things need to be triggered “just so” to blow one up even conventionally, let alone as a proper nuclear weapon.

For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power.

Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump.

Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.

It’s strange how the brain works. In terms of your personal survival if something goes wrong, there’s no difference between disarming a nuclear bomb and, say, a 500lb conventional bomb. But the nuke feels much scarier, at least when reading about it from the comfort of my home.

What saddens me is that I can't find hardly any information about this guy. John Charles Clark. Nuclear triggerman, and one very brave person. Very little written about him.

> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.

Yet somehow the story is about a hero that disarmed a bomb - not that he had tried to set off and test the effects on almost 1000 soldiers....

A cool customer in more ways than one....

> is the worst job in the world

Is it though? You either succeed, or nothing is ever your problem again.

Don't think that he didn't take every possible precaution:

>Clark averted his eyes and lowered the car’s sun visor in case the device did go off and its flash caught him by surprise.

Joseph Karneke, a ww2 navy clearance diver also did some bomb test related checks on dud/failed devices. It's at the end of his autobiography.

Here are a couple of related jobs that could be in a movie:

1. Disabling a terrorist weapon. When you find a mysterious box in NYC making ticking noises and emitting radiation, who you gonna call?

2. Forensics and attribution. When 1 fails how do you figure out what happened and who is responsible?

I’ll happily admit if I was asked to do this I’d run away screaming.

That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one?

They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent.

Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective

*see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!

I mean, if you succeed good job!, if you don't, that's not your job anymore

Not to be confused with Dr John Cooper Clarke, expert in disarming poetry.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hkH9BHS-ph4

It sounds pretty bad, but have you ever been stuck maintaining legacy enterprise software?

Non-controversial statement