In Case We Should Lose Our Grip

I'm quoting a Paul Krassner article which was printed on Zen Bastard:

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.

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 looking' 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 missiles 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 missile 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 free press.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."

Originally published in the New York Press

Paul Krassner is the author of Murder At the Conspiracy Convention and Other American Absurdities; paulkrassner.com

Do you think this is true? Do we have plans to shell the world with "dirty-bombs" if the government falls? Are we also going to fire our nukes to the last nuke if that occurs?

Bode Bliss

Link:
disinfotainmenttoday.com...:whoseneedtoknow?

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This does not sound at all likely.

Aside from the insanity of the whole idea, I don't think it is possible.

Most of our missiles are (I believe) fired from some kind of tube. You can't just put on an external jacket without interfering with it's functionality and flight characteristics.
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This story appears to not hold up under scrutiny for several reasons;

1) top secret clearance is relatively low in the grand scheme of Government work. Congressional Aides have top secret clearance for document review. The clearance needed for this would be many notches above.
2) 60 foot by 100 foot room is tiny. my office is bigger than that. The room required for what is being described here would be in the several hundred thousand square foot range; several hundred feet by several hundred feet
3) how are these supposed to be transported? when are they supposed to be mounted to artillery or means of delivery? If the US is crumbling, then the transportation systems are crumbling as well.

This is a made up story, meant to generate fright and elevate the person telling it. Its nonsense.

I Found this that could have an alternate senario for missle jackets:

A "salted" nuclear weapon is reminiscent of fission-fusion-fission weapons, but instead of a fissionable jacket around the secondary stage fusion fuel, a non-fissionable blanket of a specially chosen salting isotope is used (cobalt-59 in the case of the cobalt bomb). This blanket captures the escaping fusion neutrons to breed a radioactive isotope that maximizes the fallout hazard from the weapon rather than generating additional explosive force (and dangerous fission fallout) from fast fission of U-238.
Variable fallout effects can be obtained by using different salting isotopes. Gold has been proposed for short-term fallout (days), tantalum and zinc for fallout of intermediate duration (months), and cobalt for long term contamination (years). To be useful for salting, the parent isotopes must be abundant in the natural element, and the neutron-bred radioactive product must be a strong emitter of penetrating gamma rays.

The rest of the article,,,,,

It could be there were cobalt 59 or even cobalt 60 jackets on that battleship.

Bode

This is getting less farfetched as I research further:

Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in November 1952, and in July 1953 ended the Korean War. Up until the day of the signing of the Panmunjon Truce Accords on July 27, President Eisenhower kept on threatening both the North
Koreans and their Chinese allies with laying a radioactive cobalt belt over the narrow neck of North Korea that would shield South Korea from any new attack from the North. But former General Eisenhower undoubtedly knew that the cobalt belt was militarily useless since American planes had already flattened every city and town in North Korea.


What do you think now , huh?

Here's another link that looks like they not only have it , but MacArthur , Ridgeway, and Eisenhower were willing to use it.

spread behind us - from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea - a belt of radioactive cobalt . .

Bode