Diary of an atomic bomb technician

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mike-kirby/diary

by timdierks • 12 years ago

181 68 12 years ago

lrb.co.uk

viraptor• 12 years ago

I love this article. Some people are surprised that I tried hard (and succeeded) to avoid army service (obligatory at the time), and that I'm not keen on people joining army by choice. It's hard to explain all the reasons clearly, but this post has the essence of it. The stupidity, the submission, the lack of responsibility, the disregard for life. The atomic bomb didn't even matter that much in this story.

junto• 12 years ago

I came here to say pretty much the same thing. Articles like this are why I love HN.

The post is also very well written. I'd enjoy reading more from this author.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

Virtual handshake. And a drink of your choice if you're ever near where I live (nl at the moment).

Luyt• 12 years ago

This article made me read up on Johnston Island, very interesting history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_Island

Also, http://www.travelbughawaii.com/Ioke.htm, about a few contractors which had to shelter during Hurricane Ioke in Johnston Island's only surviving building, the windowless concrete Joint Operations Center, in August 2006.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

That is a fantastic story about the hurricane - thank you !

PhasmaFelis4• 12 years ago

When my father finished high school in the middle of the Vietnam War, his choices were basically join up, get drafted, or hoof it to Canada. He wasn't prepared to abandon his home and family in the US forever, but he also wasn't interested in shooting anybody, and volunteers got more control over their assignments: he volunteered.

By what means I do not know, he arranged to make it through two entire wars, Vietnam and Gulf War 1, without ever being told to do anything but fix trucks in friendly territory. In the Gulf War, in Frankfurt, West Germany, he was the only one left behind when his entire motor pool unit deployed to Iraq. He did the whole unit's paperwork by himself for months, but he still came home to my mother and brother and me every evening.

He retired after twenty-one years, and now he's a senior sysadmin for a local ISP with a great massive beard and a peace sign on his bumper.

I'm going to send him the article. I think he'll enjoy it.

girvo2• 12 years ago

That's an awesome story and your dad sounds awesome :) made me think of Red vs Blue actually, "I signed up to the army as a conscientious objector!"

cobrausn• 12 years ago

They treat you like an idiot when you first get in because for all intents and purposes that's exactly what you are, and exactly what they have to work with - a kid who will be entrusted with quite a bit of power, and you have to learn to respect the chain of command and listen to orders to avoid costly (and potentially life-threatening) mistakes. I hear that as you gain responsibility and rank a lot of the stupid things about the military start to be less of your concern, but I never stuck around to find out.

Kenji• 12 years ago

Don't try to rationalize it. There are plenty of jobs that incorporate high responsibilities in dangerous environments. Most of them work perfectly fine without the disregard for humans, the submission and the stupidity. Respect has to go both ways, not only upwards in the chain of command.

nick_riviera3• 12 years ago

I admire your stance on this.

I too would do the same if drafted for national service. I'd rather sit in a prison than fight because someone told me to. I'd defend my country at the border but nothing more. If I don't have that choice I'd rather not fight.

In the UK, we have a nut job politician[1] who recently tried to bring national service back. There are several crackheads trying to roll this back in periodically sponsored by the likes of Help the Heroes, Clarkson, Daily Mail, The Sun and a rather moronic populous. It's all propaganda driven by the armed forces themselves and utterly sickening to watch service glorified like it is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Hollobone

chrisseaton5• 12 years ago

"I'd defend my country at the border but nothing more."

If you had been a young man during WW2 would you have fought beyond the UK's borders to liberate Europe from Germany?

krschultz2• 12 years ago

One of the 'advantages' of national service is that it spreads the cost of war more equitably to the country. For that reason I support it. I was of the right age to have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of my friends did. I actually considered joining at a couple points.

My parents were very much in favor of the wars. They also were 100% adamant that I could not join the military.

With national service, that choice doesn't really get to get made. I feel that over the last 10+ years, the wars were out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people because their kids weren't at risk. I feel like the questions would have been a lot harder on the gov't if we still had a draft going on.

Interestingly, the US armed services absolutely 100% do not want the draft. They get less oversight without a draft. The all volunteer force is higher quality and there are fewer issues with people going AWOL, and people are more likely to stick around so training costs are lower. I think the people that don't want a draft are those that could be drafted (totally understandable, I wouldn't actually want to go to a war myself), and those that like their wars without having to deal with the costs.

Nrsolis4• 12 years ago

What I find so disturbing about this article is that the kid enlisted in the military for no other purpose than to get food and shelter. Wow.

I enlisted in the Navy and I had a very clear objective: get some structure in my life and grow up, go to college maybe, and generally be of some use to society. I'm actually thankful to the Navy for giving me some very solid lessons early in life but I'm ashamed to admit I didn't see it then like I see it now. I was lucky to find the Navy.

I guess you are who you are. He was a street person. He should have stayed one.

NickNameNick• 12 years ago

He made a very reasonable request to add a simple safety measure to a system he was in part responsible for, and he was ignored by the very people who taught him to take that system seriously. How would you expect anyone to react?

sitkack2• 12 years ago

Why is his experience less enlightening than yours (in your view) ?

girvo2• 12 years ago

He should've stayed a street person? That's a horrible thing to say.

chrisseaton5• 12 years ago

"The stupidity, the submission, the lack of responsibility, the disregard for life."

This is absolutely nothing like my experience of life in the military (British Army). If you people think life in a modern western military is about stupidity, submission, lack of responsibility and disregard for your life you are so incredibly far off I don't even know how to start making you better informed.

My experience of military life was one of mutual respect, shared experience and delegated responsibility and at a level most civilians can't even understand.

You could have taken the squadrons and batteries I was in and put them anywhere in the world and asked them to do anything and we would have made it work no matter what. Try that with a group of civilians without the values the military has and see how far you get.

If you really think the military is like this, challenge your preconceptions and sign up to your country's reserves in your spare time for a year or two. See how far you get with stupidity, submission, lack of responsibility and disregard for people's lives.

mpyne4• 12 years ago

You were downvoted, but my experience (submarine fleet, USN) mirrored yours.

Likewise I wouldn't even know where to begin to describe it, so much of what I learned was tacit knowledge.

Though I wouldn't necessarily use the reserves as an example of what the active component is like, at least in the U.S. If you end up at a reserve unit that never deploys then you'd likely come away with a very different experience than going active duty (or active duty first and then falling back to reserves).

I'd also say that many people could gain a lot personally from what they'd learn with military service, but you have to have a compatible-enough personality. Most team-based constructs do not work nearly as well if the team doesn't have enough 'chemistry', and the military is no different (which is why we weed out recruits who 'fail to adapt').

dalke2• 12 years ago

I'll assume the parent poster is from the US, where conscription didn't end until 1975. In that case, the authors views are very much shaped by the Vietnam War. See https://libcom.org/history/1961-1973-gi-resistance-in-the-vi... for how the army then was quite different than your military experience:

For soldiers in the combat zone, insubordination became an important part of avoiding horrible injury or death. As early as mid-1969, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division flatly refused - on CBS TV - to advance down a dangerous trail. In the following 12 months the 1st Air Cavalry notched up 35 combat refusals. ... Soldiers went on “search and avoid” missions, intentionally skirting clashes with the Vietnamese, and often holding three-day-long pot parties instead of fighting.

A co-worker of mine, ex-Navy, said in the 1970s there were parts of the ship where officers wouldn't go alone, for fear of being attacked.

I think you can see how that experience leads to different views than yours in an all-volunteer, technology-focused military that isn't sending 10s of thousands to their death in an unpopular war.

scotty793• 12 years ago

You could have taken the squadrons and batteries I was in and put them anywhere in the world and asked them to do anything and we would have made it work no matter what.

That's not necessarily a good thing.

biehl• 12 years ago

The problem is not "how far YOU get with stupidity, submission, lack of responsibility and disregard for people's lives"

The problem is how far SOME OTHER people in the army get with stupidity, submission, lack of responsibility and disregard for people's lives.

mikeash8• 12 years ago

I find your last paragraph confusing. "If you think the military is awful, sign up!" Why would anyone ever do that?

gcb4• 12 years ago

you just confirmed what he said.

where do you think? you just follow the same desire to belong by being efficiently obedient. that's exactly what the post you're replying to said.

ironically, the short story starship troopers tried to highlight that same point, and it also is seen as enlistment propaganda because that whole thing is so effective in us humans that while you're reading it you fall prey.

isthismyend• 12 years ago

I volunteered for the service because I though it was 'cool'. Not just any cool, Marine Cool!. And I agree with everything that you just said. The majority of my fellow Marines/brothers were very uneducated (drop outs, barely passed their GEDs, their recruiters 'helped' them get in, etc). But as I got to know them they wanted to kill 'rag heads' and other bad guys. They just didn't care. They hoped they would get their orders and off they go. Some officers were younger than me. I'm not that smart of a guy (I question from time to time) but some of the orders these guys would give didn't make any sense, and I suspect it was for their own ego to prove something.

Anyways, my 4 year experience wasn't terrible but it did teach me a lot of what not to do and how not to behave. I just can't figure out why so many people want to kill. What in their lives happened that they one day wake up and want to kill. And by that I mean in every legal sense defined to be within the code of conduct. It's very easy to hide behind 'fighting for my country', 'fight for freedom' etc.

thisjepisje• 12 years ago

Throwing a dummy bomb at someone who thinks it is a real bomb. Lol.

trhway• 12 years ago

or throwing a [look a like of] high security key (strategic command communication in another country with big nukes) used punch card (which supposedly was just burned following strict procedure in the presence of 3 witnesses - birth of a king is witnessed less strictly :) into a toilet bowl of the commander - by his reaction he would prefer real bomb or even crocodile there than the card.

PhasmaFelis4• 12 years ago

"At night jack-rabbits electrocuted themselves against the security fences: distant pops and small blossoms of flame."

Yikes. I've never heard of a lethal electric fence before.

qbrass• 12 years ago

They're also used around maximum-security prisons.

Someone• 12 years ago

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_of_Death:

The name 'Wire of Death' is an English rendition of one of its popular Dutch names; Dodendraad which can be translated as either "Death wire" or "Wire of the dead". As the war continued and more and more victims fell to the electric fence it became known as simply De Draad meaning "The Wire". To the German authorities it was officially known as the Grenzhochspannungshindernis ("High Voltage Frontier Barrier")

rrggrr• 12 years ago

Portrayed by the author as taciturn and evangelical, Lt Com. Karlsven, a farm boy who joined the Navy, went on to become a teacher and pastor working with children. The rear admiral, identity unknown to the readers, commanded four months prior to the Cuban missile blockade, the height of the cold war, and a time when the nation's military credibly believed nuclear war was imminent. Kirby's beautifully written accounting of his own internal struggles with identity, faith and authority is a delight to read for its prose. But, still arrogant as he thought he only once was, the author finds fault with everything except himself. Karlsven deserves better than Kirby's depiction ( http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/47643008/ )

bellerocky• 12 years ago

still arrogant as he thought he only once was, the author finds fault with everything except himself

He did find fault in himself. He clearly described himself in a flawed disposition while he was working brainlessly on weapons of mass destruction.

aragot• 12 years ago

That's the best part of the article to me. He had the ethics to ask for a discharge. He said he was close to detonating the heads.

Rationally speaking, if he had detonated a head and thus blown the warehouse (and possibly a part of New Mexico?), he might had weakened the US nuclear inventory and caused the domination of the USSR.

Tech1• 12 years ago

Prior Army EOD (7.5 years) (ATO for you Brits) and HN participant reporting in.

VilleSalonen• 12 years ago

If you're interested in reading a more extensive account of history of nuclear weapons in USA, I highly recommend Eric Schlosser's Command and Control: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/command-control...

laxatives• 12 years ago

I'm guessing its probably not possible to take a look at that training footage of the radiated guy in his last moments, right?

matthewmcg• 12 years ago

It was probably Harry Daghlian. I could not find any footage of him on YouTube.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_K._Daghlian,_Jr.

Diary of an atomic bomb technician

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