crucial

commentary: the new york press is a bit sketchy for accuracy, and tend to do a lot of hit and run reporting.

From the New York Press:

Whose Need to Know?

By Paul Krassner

My source--I'll call him "Ethan"--is dead, and now, having kept our
agreement, I'm finally free to write about this horror story.

Ethan had read about a recent decontamination drill that was
conducted in Denver. They had multi-hundred-thousand-dollar geodesic
tent which fit over a transit train and was filled with mock victims
and decontamination personnel. The article went on at length about
the abomination of "dirty bombs"--the impetus for this drill--and
what sort of filthy terrorist would use such a horrible weapon.

It reminded Ethan of the time he was in the Marine Corps, when he
was stationed on a big aircraft carrier. "Jarheads" were placed on
these ships for the exclusive purpose of guarding the nukes. That,
and administration.

His job was to interview Marines in order to gather information
about their status, with mundane questions such as, "Do you want to
continue your dental and medical coverage for your dependents this
year?" and "Do you want to take your accumulated leave or cash it in?"

In spite of the innocuous nature of his work, it often took him
below decks to the weapons holds where the security personnel were.
That required a Top Secret clearance.

"While that sounds super-secure," he told me, "it's really not. You
have ENTNAC clearance at the very bottom, for anyone who will deal
with any weapons bigger than an M-16. Then you have Secret, which
covers most artillery, and for me covered my having access to
everyone's SSN's, home addresses, medical records, disciplinary
records, etc. Then you have Top Secret, which you need to be around
anything nuclear.

"Then you have about ten dozen higher levels of security clearance.
So, Top Secret is relatively bottom of the barrel stuff. Nonetheless,
the NIS (Naval Investigative Service) does go to your home town and
spend some time asking folks about you. And when the investigation is
done, prior to issuing the clearance, you are sworn not to disclose
any of the information that the clearance exposes you to...ever in
life."

Since he was in Administration, his work took place above decks. His
office was right down the hall from the Admiral's office. He also had
the benefit of having quarters right next to the officers'
staterooms. Although his was called a "duty barracks" and was not in
fact a stateroom, it was the same thing minus the mahagony. Meaning
he didn't have to sleep in steerage with the rest of the Jarheads.

He was also right down the hall from the Officers Club, for field
grade and down. He had met an officer there who was "a cool guy" who
regularly invited him to the Officers Club to play cards, smoke
cigars and engage in conversation. This officer would be on duty for
three days and off duty for three days, completely disappearing. It
turned out that he was the Officer in Charge of the nuke weapons'
holds.

One day, Ethan had to get some information from the officer about a
TAD (Temporary Additional Duty) request that he'd put in for. Ethan
was leaving the ship to go ashore and would not see him again, so he
wanted to make sure to get his request right because he knew that his
friend really wanted to stay. While the officer was in the hold, he
was not, under any circumstances, allowed to leave. Ethan couldn't
reach him on the phone, so he went below.

"I'd been in most of the holds to talk to other Marines," he told
me, "but I'd never been to the one where this officer worked. I went
through several guarded vault type doors and finally arrived at a
duty station where, for the fifth or sixth time, I was required to
show my Top Secret clearance credentials and enter the day's pass
code onto a small computer console. When I was cleared, I stated my
business and was given a radiation suit--bit space-suit lookin'
thing."

He asked the Duty NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer), "What the hell's
this?" He'd been around nukes before, but was never required to wear
a suit. The Duty NCO replied only that the officer "is in with the
jackets."

"The what?"

"Need to know." This meant that his station orders forbade him to
discuss any details of his post.

Ethan suited up and walked into a triple door sally-port, where he
progressed through each airlock via ten-inch thick lead-lined doors.
Past the last door, he stepped into a massive room/warehouse, about
60 feet wide by 100 feet length, with a 20-foot ceiling--huge for
battleship storage room standards. From the floor to the ceiling,
thousands upon thousands of what looked like missiles were stored. It
was weird, because he'd never seen missiles stored in such a way
where they were on top of one another.

The officer came around a row of missles and Ethan asked him the
question he had for him about his TAD request, and then asked him,
"What the hell kind of missiles are these?"

"Those aren't missiles, they're cobalt jackets."

"What are they for?"

"Well, this is 'need to know,' so keep your mouth shut, but they are
designed to slide on over most of our conventional ordinance. They're
made out of radioactive cobalt, and when the bomb they're wrapped
around detonates, they contaminate everything in the blast zone and
quite a bit beyond."

"So they turn regular ordinance into nukes?"

"No, not exactly. The cobalt doesn't detonate itself. It just
scatters everywhere."

"Well, what? Does the radiation kill people?"

"Not immediately. Cobalt jackets will not likely ever be used.
They're for a situation where the U.S. Government is crumbling during
a time of war, and foreign takeover is imminent. We won't capitulate.
We basically have a scorched earth policy. If we are going to lose,
we arm everything with cobalt--and I mean everything, we have jackets
at nearly every missle magazine in the world, on land or at sea--and
contaminate the world. If we can't have it, nobody can."

Wow, huh?

"Just another example," Ethan told me, "of what treacherous
creatures our leadership is made of."

I e-mailed the above--labeling the Subject line, "Yikes!"--to
no-nukes activist Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War
and co-author of The Superpower of Peace, available from
freepress.org. I asked him to comment in a couple of hundred words.

"Yikes is right," he responded. "This nightmare has now essentially
come true with the use of depleted uranium on anti-tank and other
shells in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The military rationale is
that the super-hard depleted uranium helps shells penetrate tanks and
other hard structures. But the long-term effect is that the uranium
vaporizes upon explosion and contaminates everything for hundreds of
yards, if not miles.

"Thus there are now whole regions that are heavily radioactive.
Reports are pouring in from all three countries about soaring cancer
rates, infant death rates and more. The mysterious 'Gulf War
Syndrome' may have been caused by radiation exposure suffered by U.S.
troops. So, though 'off the books,' the last three major U.S. attacks
have in fact been nuclear in nature.

"Sorry...not 200 words...I tried, but they mutated...."

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Paul Krassner is the author of Murder At the Conspiracy Convention
and Other American Absurdities; see http://paulkrassner.com for George
Carlin's introduction.