nuclear-news

USA uses ‘asteroid’ threat as excuse to hoard nuclear weapons

US is Hoarding Nuclear Weapons for a Real ‘Armageddon’, Nature World News By Brian Stallard, 2 Oct 14 Government auditors were recently looking into why exactly the United States is falling behind in disarming itself of its old nuclear weapon surplus, and they stumbled upon an unusual excuse: asteroid defense.

According to a report detailing an audit of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) conducted earlier this year, US officials are hoarding some of its enriched uranium components – canned subassemblies (CSAs) – just in case they need to pull a real-world recreation of scenes straight out of the movieArmageddon.

NNSA officials told us that CSAs associated with a certain warhead indicated as excess in the 2012 Production and Planning Directive and being retained in an indeterminate state pending senior-level government evaluation of their use in planetary defense against earthbound asteroids,” the report reads.

And while the NNSA had initially scheduled these same “excess” CSAs to be dissembled by 2015, they have since been identified as an “irreplaceable national asset.”

If there’s anything Hollywood ever put on the silver screen that could actually happen, Armageddon certainly wouldn’t be on the top of the list. However, NASA has confirmed in past studies that if a dangerous asteroid were safely broken into smaller pieces, it could be rendered harmless, as these smaller bits would just burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. …….

critics of this nuclear defense idea are saying its fantastical and potentially just a facade.

Jay Melos, a planetary studies expert at Purdue University, recently told The Wall Street Journal that this all may just be “an excuse for keeping the nuclear arsenal together.”…http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/9298/20141002/hoarding-nuclear-weapons-real-armageddon.htm

October 6, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war