"A series of unfortunate events."
Hey, Nords. I'm a stone's throw from Subase Bangor. You probably heard about the recent incident in which they dropped a ladder through the nosecone of a nuke. Is there anything I should be doing to prepare for the next mishap? Maybe a set of bunny suits for the family?
Er, I probably trained some of those guys. Sorry.
From what I remember of the missile design, they couldn't have spread any radioactive contamination even if you'd followed that ladder with a claw hammer and a power drill. Most of the hoopla was concern over the awe-inspiring lack of common sense, procedure-following skills, & supervisory negligence that could have allowed such a lapse to occur in the first place. It takes months of idiocy for things to degrade to that cesspool of poor performance. IIRC the Navy captain lost his job, had to explain himself at admiral's mast, and is no longer on active duty. I'm sure he took half-a-dozen of his pointy-haired assistants with him.
With the number of handling evolutions and the inevitable sine wave of training & proficiency, to say nothing of overload & fatigue, this sort of thing happens a couple times a year. The good news is that systems analysts & human-factors engineers have finally realized that the less you can mess with it, the less you can mess it up. (The technical term is "sailor-proofing.") So the really nasty stuff is tightly packaged and surrounded by inert materials, while the procedures are so redundant & safety-conscious that even dropping a wrench is grounds for canceling the entire day's plans.
The Navy's stack of nuclear (both propulsion & explosives) required reading is about six feet high and contains some fascinating history. We used to train on the live stuff all the time with the inevitable regrettable incidents. I don't know if you remember the Palomares B-52 crash that dumped three hydrogen bombs in a tomato field.
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0803-08.htm Part of the settlement was an agreement to buy lots of tomato sauce from the affected parties, which is why Contadina is so cheap today. Other still-classified "oops" reports from the 1950s & 60s are even more hair-raising.
So in the last 20 years, a huge Navy bureaucracy has grown up around containment & minimizing the risk of spreading these materials. We rarely even carry the live stuff unless we're expected to use it. The engineering has greatly improved and the maintenance has dropped off almost to zero. 14 years ago I moved nuclear TOMAHAWKs seven times for torpedo-room maintenance & repairs, but today's maintenance guys would be fired for such poor planning. In 1991 all the attack subs offloaded them for good. I don't think the boomers even go out with a full load anymore because of the warhead-limits treaties.
A friend of ours is a GS-13 emergency planner who works 60-hour weeks year-round on training & exercises. His entire life revolves around procedures, contingencies, and responses. He's a good guy but he has absolutely no sense of humor around safety, and his bosses are even tighter. The practice is relentless, too-- you've probably seen at least one annual exercise with the guys in canary suits waving radiacs around your front yard. (If you haven't seen them, that's dandy-- it means your home is outside the "contamination zone".)
Even if the Navy has to do something and it goes badly, the incidents that occur today are four or five orders of magnitude (literally) less dangerous than the problems we had in the 1950s/60s. From the analyses I've seen, even a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl at Bangor would result in less exposure than you'd get on a plane flight to Hawaii or a couple of dental x-rays.
The problem with buying duct tape or gas masks is that the shock wave has passed and the radioactive plume is over your house before the word gets out. The price of living so close to a nuclear facility is the lack of response time. If you're aware that something is happening but it hasn't killed you or destroyed your property yet, then generally the best response is to stay indoors and call the radio station for a news update... I wouldn't be alarmed until a govt employee shows up at your door offering tablets to prevent the radioactive iodine fallout from accumulating in your thyroid!
Here's another comforting thought. The neighborhoods around Bangor have one of the highest concentrations of retired flag officers in the entire nation. These guys have plenty of inside info to decide for themselves where it's safe to live.
Considering the Navy's design, training, & supervision of various hazardous systems, I'd be more worried about the diesel fuel tanks or the missile rocket's solid-fuel storage. And their blast arc is inside the chain-link fence.
