CNN reports that “workers at a nuclear weapons plant in Texas improperly secured broken pieces of a highly explosive component by taping them together, which could have caused a ‘violent reaction.’” The incident started when “workers taking apart a W62 warhead accidentally drilled into its radioactive core,” and then decided to fix it themselves by taping it.
Federal investigators listed a series of violations regarding this incident, including a very curious statement: “No experts who developed the taping procedure were present to supervise and watch for any potential problems.” Huh? This implies that the established repair procedure for a broken nuclear warhead is apparently to tape it together rather than, oh, I don’t know, use something else besides duct tape from a hardware store to repair a highly explosive nuclear weapon. IANANP, just a lowly aeromechanical engineer, but I’m pretty sure I could come up with something better than that. Not that I’d even want to fool with something like that. What a bunch of morons…
