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Comment by United857 | Hacker News Reader

Why road transport at all instead of via military aircraft/helicopter instead, at least for the majority of the way?

We sometimes do move them by air, but rarely. We had an impressive string of accidents from carrying them in bomb position on bombers and fighters, dropping them in the ocean, various US states, other countries, etc., until about 1970 we dropped four on Franco's Spain. We took a while finding one of them, Franco threw us (US Nuclear Program) out, and we stopped transporting them bomb ready.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_acc...

> Why road transport at all instead of via by military aircraft/helicopter instead, at least for the majority of the way?

Failure modes. Trucks crashing are, while more frequent, less energetic than planes. There's an elevated risk of capture, but that is more manageable.

Nukes are never transported by air. After some nasty crashes in the 50's and 60's, the DOE decided that air transport was a bad idea (the DOE owns all of the nuclear weapons).

> Nukes are never transported by air.

This is definitively not true, just look up PNAF if you don’t believe me.

Yep.

62nd Airlift Wing, Air Mobility Command, McChord Field.

C-17's.

I'm thinking that is for overseas transport. CONUS is ground only.

Nope, PNAF does CONUS flights too. There’s even a famous flight not fifteen years ago where they accidentally flew six nukes unsecured and the plane sat on the tarmac for like 36hrs. If you search PNAF as I suggested, you can read a bunch of bulletins and operating procedure docs and learn more than I can say here on the topic.

They're heavy, and when you transport them on the road, you can a) add more (heavy) impact protection b) work at lower speeds, reducing the risk of a severe accident. Might also be cheaper, and easier to secure (if you transport it by plane/helicopter and it goes down by accident or attack, securing the crash site would be a nightmare).

Yep.

F = 1/2 * mass * velocity^2

Okay, sorry, I guess this comment didn't help much. Also the formula is confusing 'F' denoting "force", rather than talking about kinetic energy.

In the transport of hazardous materials of any kind, if a mishap occurs and the shipping containers crash, the energy of the collision is going to go up as the square (second power) of the velocity. Air transport typical speeds are in general 2-4x as fast as ground... So ground transport could involve overall lower risk than air.

This is naïve hand-waving on my part.

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