Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
In 2016, ninety prominent American scientists sent a letter to President Obama. They urged the president to remove the four hundred and fifty U.S. land based nuclear missiles from this immediate launch status. As far as we know, Russia is the only other nuclear armed country in the world that keeps a significant number of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger launch status.
In 2016, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report on the dangers of having all these nuclear weapons ready to launch in minutes. They say that the risk of false alarms and accidents far overshadow any benefit of hair-trigger launch status. “The danger is that a system detects an incoming attack and it's not real, but the president makes the wrong decision and inadvertently starts a nuclear war."
The U.S. has almost accidentally launch nuclear missiles before. In November of 1979, the U.S. computers that monitor our remote sensing network reported that a major Soviet attack was underway. The U.S. military proceeded to prepare for a counter attack with nuclear bombers and ICBMs. However, within ten minutes, it was discovered that the alert was a false alarm. A technician at the computer center had accidentally loaded a tape intended for drills for nuclear attack training.
In 2010, the control center at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming lost contact with its fifty ICBMS that were on hair-trigger status. For over an hour, the technicians were not certain if the missiles with nuclear warheads would accidentally be launched. The operators regained their connection to the missiles. Eventually, the loss of connection was attributed to malfunction of a circuit board in one of the computers.
In January of this year, a state employee in Hawaii accidentally sent out an emergency alert that a missile was headed for Hawaii. Fortunately, Hawaiian technicians quickly realized that the alert was a false alarm and they canceled it. If they had not acted quickly, the U.S. might have launched missiles.
Each land based nuclear missile currently on hair-trigger alert has a simple on-off switch for use during maintenance. Critics of the current hair-trigger status say that all of the missiles could be switched off. It would be easy to switch them on in the event of a real attack but in the meantime, the risk of false alarms and accidental launched would be substantially reduced.
The most compelling argument against maintaining a nuclear arsenal on hair-trigger status that is its use would be suicide. It has been estimated that the detonation of only a few nuclear warheads would cause widespread death and destruction. The detonation of a hundred or more nuclear warheads would probably cause a nuclear winter and billions would starve. So discussion of tossing around a thousand or more nuclear warheads would mean the certain destruction of our global civilization and perhaps the extinction of the human race. This is madness.