Half of US Nuclear Missile Wing Implicated In Cheating 313
mdsolar writes "Just over half of the 183 nuclear missile launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana have been implicated in a widening exam cheating scandal, the Air Force said on Thursday, acknowledging it had 'systemic' problem within its ranks. The cheating was discovered during an investigation into illegal drug possession among airmen, when test answers were found in a text message on one missile launch officer's cell phone. The Air Force initially said 34 officers either knew about the cheating or cheated themselves. But Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday that the total number of implicated officers had grown to 92, all of them at Malmstrom, one of three nuclear missile wings overseeing America's 450 inter-continental missiles, or ICBMs."
What are the questions? (Score:5, Interesting)
What are the questions for this exam? Why do they need to cheat?
Re:No real surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on their tasks but from been surrounded with known issues like on other parts of the Russian mil:
I would guess very creative and never a slow day.
List of Russian military accidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
"A nuclear submarine had its electricity cut by an electricity company at a naval base due to unpaid bills. The submarine's cooling system ceased to function and the reactor "came close to meltdown""
Re:What are the questions? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so sure. Recent modelling to update the 'nuclear winter' theory has not only shown that the theory is most likely valid, but actually far worse than the model that the Soviets and US came up with in the 1980s. Our current best modelling shows that even a hypothetical regional exchange with as few as 50 Nagasaki-sized weapons on each side between India and Pakistan would cause a "nuclear autumn" bad enough to cause famine in many countries, and a growing season shortened by 60 days the first year after this hypothetical war.
An exchange using the remaining weapons of the former Soviet Union and the United States - well, nuclear winter is a misnomer. Nuclear six month long night is a better description. Daytime lighting conditions in the aftermath of such an exchange would reach no more than that of a moonlit night. Continental temperatures would fall very low, and if this hypothetical war were to happen in the growing season, that's all of your food gone. Water would be hard to get as it would be frozen over. Coastal areas would be milder, but be lashed by constant violent storms due to the temperature difference to the extremely cold inland temperatures. Since the soot would be lofted to the stratosphere, there is no mechanism that will rapidly bring it down and the climatic effects would last long enough that the decade after the war would be a truly miserable experience, and most likely fatal. Those who managed to survive this would then have to deal with a world with no ozone layer and no manufacturing industry to make sunblock. Growing crops would be extremely difficult in those conditions.
Re:What are the questions? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, the 90's were a great time to retire. Right now, we've got retired colonels living in their cars. Yup, I've got a top secret clearance and I'm only martingally employable because my career field has been gutted both on the military aside and the contracting side, and with a masters in math, well, walmart won't touch me, and teaching at a community college pays less than minimum wage. But don't worry; you're paying for it through the VA.
The problem in the missile corps is not the folks who were reasonably reponding to an unreasonable set of expectations. The problem is that the military's senior leadership is, as a whole and as a set of individuals, the most sniveling politicians ever to wear a uniform. They're cowardly, gutless, and competent only at backstabbing and surviving in a beauracracy. It's time to fire them all and start over; we can't do worse.
Re:What are the questions? (Score:2, Interesting)
Our current best modelling shows that even a hypothetical regional exchange with as few as 50 Nagasaki-sized weapons on each side between India and Pakistan would cause a "nuclear autumn" bad enough to cause famine in many countries, and a growing season shortened by 60 days the first year after this hypothetical war.
The Tsar Bomba test had a yield (50 Mt) more than 2,000 times as powerful as the bomb used at Nagasaki (21 kt), and failed to produce the effects you say would be caused by a mere 50 such bombs. I'm willing to consider that multiple small detonations might have a greater effect than a single large detonation of the same total yield - but still, I'm going to need some references before I believe what you've claimed here.