- The threat of nuclear annihilation is discussed, highlighting the lack of concern in today's society compared to the past.
- Issues with the maintenance and security of nuclear warheads in the United States are raised, including broken doors, outdated computers, and low proficiency ratings.
- Examples of irresponsible behavior by high-ranking military officers overseeing nuclear weapons are given, including drunkenness and gambling with counterfeit poker chips.
- Near-disasters involving nuclear bombs in the past are mentioned, emphasizing the potential catastrophic consequences of mishaps.

- The current system for managing nuclear weapons is flawed and dangerous.
- There have been instances of mishaps and negligence in handling nuclear weapons.
- Reduction of nuclear weapons has slowed down, with only a small decrease in recent years.
- The cost of maintaining and rebuilding nuclear weapons is unnecessary and wasteful.
- Political interests and lack of public concern are major obstacles to reducing nuclear weapons.
- People need to care more about the dangers of nuclear weapons and take action to reduce their stockpile.

America has over 4,800 nuclear weapons, and we don’t take terrific care of them.
It’s terrifying, basically.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Our main story tonight is the threat of nuclear annihilation.

It's probably been a while since you thought about it, but there was a time when people lived in almost constant fear.

Children used to be shown this in schools.

Sundays, holidays, vacation time, we must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes.

I'll say this, for the 1950s, they had the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism.

The death blast is coming, but we'll survive it if we all get under this picnic blanket.

Now, by the 1980s, attitudes had changed.

The TV movie The Day After had a slightly different tone.

-♪♪♪♪ -♪♪♪♪ The worst thing is, Danny would have been fine if he just had a picnic blanket with him.

The strange thing is, all of that seems so dated.

Nowadays, we spend less time worrying about nuclear annihilation than we do worrying about whether we accidentally hit reply all on an office email.

But maybe we should be worrying about nuclear warheads a bit more.

And not the ones in North Korea, Iran, or Russia, but the ones we have here at home.

America has around 4,800 nuclear warheads, which is more than enough, not just to destroy Earth, but to provide Fourth of July fireworks for Martians.

Some of our most powerful weapons are intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, which is both an acronym and what you would say if you saw 1 coming at you.

That's a little joke for all you gastroenterologists out there.

They are currently in silos in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota.

How well are we taking care of these things?

Take this enormous outer door designed to protect the corridor leading to the capsule.

They can't close it because of a broken part, so it's propped open with a crowbar and marked with a danger tag.

To be honest, repairs like that are less appropriate in a nuclear silo than they are in a divorced dad's condo.

Why does the fridge open with string, Daddy?

And for the record, for the record, It's not just their hardware that needs updating, it's their software, too.

This, for example, is 1 of the computers that would receive a launch order from the president.

It uses floppy disks, the really old, big ones.

Those things barely look powerful enough to run Oregon Trail.

-♪♪♪♪ Much less earth-ending weaponry.

People who work there must watch war games and go, 1 day, 1 day, we'll get to play with that stuff.

Look, fingers crossed things are a little better in North Dakota.

17 Air Force officers are being relieved of their duties controlling nuclear missiles.

An inspection in March tested the group's missile launch proficiency.

They were rated as marginal, the equivalent of earning a D grade, barely passing.

I do really think when it comes to safeguarding the deadliest objects ever known to mankind.

We should really insist on something more in a solid B plus, C minus range.

The good news, their officers have not had degrades.

Air Force nuclear launch officers have been stripped of their certification.

4 months ago, a launch officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana allegedly texted the answers to a monthly proficiency test to other officers at the base.

You should not be able to answer, how do you prevent the launch of a Minuteman III with emojis.

But okay, okay, look, let's not overreact.

How are the people in North Dakota and Montana working in the field?

Picture this, 4 Air Force officers who hold the launch keys to nuclear missiles, leaving open the blast door that's supposed to prevent terrorists from entering the capsule.

This while another slept inside, which is allowed only if the door is closed.

In another case, it was discovered by someone delivering food.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS And once again, America is saved from destruction by the heroes in Meal Team 6.

And in case you think it's just low-level, unmotivated officers who are dropping the ball here, let's meet 2 of the top people who've been in charge of our most powerful missiles.

He was relieved of command last October for spectacular reasons.

According to an Air Force Inspector General's report, on a recent trip to Russia, Air Force General Michael Kerry was often intoxicated, rude, and spent a

He often interrupted presentations, He often interrupted translators with annoying comments when he gave toasts, and that really irritated the Russians.

The man overseeing our ICBMs was too drunk for the Russians.

-♪ AUDIENCE LAUGHING AND CLAPPING And CNN barely skimmed the surface of this story.

The Inspector General's report reads like Ron Burgundy goes to Russia.

Apparently, General Kerry at 1 point tried to fist bump a confused Russian tour guide, then dragged his staff to a restaurant called La Cantina because he, and I quote, really wanted to see this Beatles cover band.

-...prompting 1 staffer to observe, I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go in Russia, but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there." And even once he was there, it wasn't over, because he, again, I quote, was really intent on singing with the band, and he said, -"Go ask them if I can play guitar." -$25,000.

Which led to the immortal sentence, I told the general that basically, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Take a moment to consider the run of poor decisions that are required before you're being told you can't play guitar with a Beatles cover band when you're drunk at a Mexican restaurant in Russia.

-♪♪♪♪ -♪♪♪♪ Just add all that up together, and then consider this man had access to our deadliest nuclear warheads.

And in case that doesn't scare you enough, until recently, 1 of the men overseeing all the people we've met so far was Vice Admiral Tim Giardina.

The president relieved him of his command last year for an even weirder reason.

Admiral Timothy Giardina's undoing began with a local criminal investigation in Iowa, where he was spotted on surveillance cameras using counterfeit poker chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs.

I'm sorry, but a vice admiral has to have the mental fortitude to fool an Iowa pit boss.

And also, this means, let's recap, that within the last 12 months, we were in a situation where in the event of us launching a nuclear strike, the president's command would theoretically have gone through a man gambling with fake poker chips, who would have then tried to call a drunk guy wrestling with a Russian George Harrison.

-...who would have then needed to send someone with a bag full of burritos to wake up an officer and tell him to go grab an LP-sized floppy disk and begin the solemn process of ending the world as we know it.

If you're thinking, well, it looks like we were lucky nothing terrible has happened, we're actually even luckier than you think.

Over the years, America has had some pretty terrifying almost-geddons.

B-52 bomber jet broke in half during a flight and lost its load.

Over the city of Goldsboro, North Carolina.

1 was nearly armed, set to explode, but miraculously, either did.

You dropped an armed nuclear bomb on your own country.

And it is frankly amazing that you don't talk about that more often.

There is genuinely a weirdly restrained sign marking the event, calling it a nuclear mishap, when it clearly should really say, holy...

You have no idea what nearly happened here.

You're probably thinking, okay, all right, we nearly blew up 1 of the Carolinas, but that's basically why we have 2.

But in that case, how about that 1 time we risked blowing up Arkansas?

And the socket fell about 70 feet, pierced the missile, caused a fuel leak, and then there was a huge explosion.

Just think about the system we have designed.

In the rock, paper, scissors logic, socket beats nuclear missile.

And if that feels too much like ancient history to you, here is something from as recently as 2007.

6 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were loaded onto a B-52 by mistake, blown across the country, and left unguarded on the tarmac.

And that must have been a hell of a moment when they realized, hey guys, those things that have been out there for a day and a half, there is no way that those are nuclear.

At this point, we have too many nuclear weapons to take care of them properly.

Since 1988, we got rid of more than 18,000 warheads.

But recently, things have slowed down a lot.

President Obama has reduced our arsenal by just 309, which is crazy.

At a time of budgetary cutbacks, we are spending $355 billion over the next decade on something we don't need.

Take it from someone who actually knows something about this.

The 1 thing I convinced myself of after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless.

Nuclear weapons are basically like Americans' T-Rex arms.

They're essentially useless and you are plenty scary enough without them.

When you have $4,800 of something you don't need, you are a fucking hoarder at that point.

Sure, each 1 might have made sense when you got it, but it all happened so gradually, you didn't really notice that things had gotten out of hand.

And now you have too many of these agents of chaos and destruction, and 1 of these days, 1 of them might kill you.

The problem is, there are 2 key things stopping us from reducing our nuclear weapons.

The first is politics, because there are lawmakers from both parties who have missile silos in their states.

And they will fight any attempt to close them, no matter how much sense that makes.

And they'll fight it with ironclad logic like this.

We know that maintaining our current silos is the best interest, and in the best interest, of taxpayers, because rebuilding them would be very expensive.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Okay, let me get that straight.

You are spending money on something you don't need in the hopes that you'll be saving money on the off chance 1 day you eventually do...

That's like saying, I have to hold on to my storage facility full of Aquaman action figures on the off chance that my future wife really likes them.

And the House was discussing a bill that guaranteed that silos would be kept open until at least 2021.

He was trying to attach an amendment removing the end date altogether, essentially meaning no matter what the Pentagon wanted, the silos would have to be kept open forever.

On this vote, the yeas are 222, the nays are 196, The amendment is adopted.

Now, the Senate could still make big changes to that bill, but for that to happen, people would need to care.

And that brings us to the main reason why so little is being done to reduce our number of nuclear warheads.

Deep down, people just don't give enough of a shit anymore.

In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of people pushed for disarmament in Central Park.

But in May of this year, This is what a House hearing on nuclear security looked like.

We should point out probably 1 of the few hearings in which actually the attendance of the subcommittee compares very favorably with the attendance in the audience.

Because the public has not tuned into these issues as they should.

A hearing on the most dangerous things on Earth had attendance rivaling that of a weekday open mic poetry slam.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And the problem is, no 1 honestly believes that we're going to destroy ourselves, despite the fact that that has nearly happened multiple times.

But shouldn't we, at the very least, be reducing our stockpile down to a number where we can look after them properly with enough qualified people, none of whom are going to cheat on a test, leave a door open, or vomit a half-eaten chimichanga onto a Slavic Ringo.

-♪♪♪♪ All I'm saying is, if humanity is going to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon, let's make sure that it's at least intentional.

President riding a missile with a middle finger held to the sky.

Screaming humanity's last words, -"Fuck you, world!

America is shutting this shit down!" --laughter and applause- Please!

Let's just not have our last words be, Oops!


Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Our main story tonight is the threat of nuclear annihilation. It's probably been a while since you thought about it, but there was a time when people lived in almost constant fear. Children used to be shown this in schools.

Speaker 1: Sundays, holidays, vacation time, we must be ready every day, all the time, to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes. Duck and cover! -...cover... -...cover...

Speaker 0: I'll say this, for the 1950s, they had the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism. The death blast is coming, but we'll survive it if we all get under this picnic blanket. Now, by the 1980s, attitudes had changed. The TV movie The Day After had a slightly different tone. See if you can spot it.

-♪♪♪♪

Speaker 2: Danny! Oh, yeah!

Speaker 0: -♪♪♪♪ -♪♪♪♪ The worst thing is, Danny would have been fine if he just had a picnic blanket with him. What were you thinking, you little fool? The strange thing is, all of that seems so dated. Nowadays, we spend less time worrying about nuclear annihilation than we do worrying about whether we accidentally hit reply all on an office email. Oh, shit, did I send that to Dave?

I said his face looks like a ferret. -... But maybe we should be worrying about nuclear warheads a bit more. And not the ones in North Korea, Iran, or Russia, but the ones we have here at home. America has around 4,800 nuclear warheads, which is more than enough, not just to destroy Earth, but to provide Fourth of July fireworks for Martians.

Some of our most powerful weapons are intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, which is both an acronym and what you would say if you saw 1 coming at you. That's a little joke for all you gastroenterologists out there. They are currently in silos in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. Let's start with Wyoming. How well are we taking care of these things?

Speaker 3: Take this enormous outer door designed to protect the corridor leading to the capsule. They can't close it because of a broken part, so it's propped open with a crowbar and marked with a danger tag.

Speaker 0: Okay. To be honest, repairs like that are less appropriate in a nuclear silo than they are in a divorced dad's condo. Why does the fridge open with string, Daddy? And... And for the record, for the record, It's not just their hardware that needs updating, it's their software, too.

Speaker 3: The equipment is ancient. This, for example, is 1 of the computers that would receive a launch order from the president. It uses floppy disks, the really old, big ones.

Speaker 0: Holy shit! Those things barely look powerful enough to run Oregon Trail. -♪♪♪♪ Much less earth-ending weaponry. People who work there must watch war games and go, 1 day, 1 day, we'll get to play with that stuff. Look, fingers crossed things are a little better in North Dakota.

Speaker 3: 17 Air Force officers are being relieved of their duties controlling nuclear missiles.

Speaker 4: An inspection in March tested the group's missile launch proficiency. They were rated as marginal, the equivalent of earning a D grade, barely passing.

Speaker 0: That's not great. I do really think when it comes to safeguarding the deadliest objects ever known to mankind. We should really insist on something more in a solid B plus, C minus range. Okay, finally, let's look at Montana. The good news, their officers have not had degrades.

The bad news is why.

Speaker 4: Thirty-four U.S. Air Force nuclear launch officers have been stripped of their certification.

Speaker 1: 4 months ago, a launch officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana allegedly texted the answers to a monthly proficiency test to other officers at the base.

Speaker 0: They texted the answers. Those answers should not be textable. You should not be able to answer, how do you prevent the launch of a Minuteman III with emojis. It has to be more complicated than that. But okay, okay, look, let's not overreact.

You know, not everyone is good at tests. How are the people in North Dakota and Montana working in the field?

Speaker 5: Picture this, 4 Air Force officers who hold the launch keys to nuclear missiles, leaving open the blast door that's supposed to prevent terrorists from entering the capsule. This while another slept inside, which is allowed only if the door is closed. And who discovered this? In 1 case, it was a maintenance team. In another case, it was discovered by someone delivering food.

Speaker 0: AUDIENCE LAUGHS And once again, America is saved from destruction by the heroes in Meal Team 6. And in case you think it's just low-level, unmotivated officers who are dropping the ball here, let's meet 2 of the top people who've been in charge of our most powerful missiles. First up, Major General Michael Carey. He was relieved of command last October for spectacular reasons.

Speaker 6: According to an Air Force Inspector General's report, on a recent trip to Russia, Air Force General Michael Kerry was often intoxicated, rude, and spent a

Speaker 4: lot of time with foreign women. He often interrupted presentations, He often interrupted translators with annoying comments when he gave toasts, and that really irritated the Russians.

Speaker 0: Just... Just think about that. The man overseeing our ICBMs was too drunk for the Russians. -♪ For the Russians. -♪ AUDIENCE LAUGHING AND CLAPPING And CNN barely skimmed the surface of this story.

The Inspector General's report reads like Ron Burgundy goes to Russia. Apparently, General Kerry at 1 point tried to fist bump a confused Russian tour guide, then dragged his staff to a restaurant called La Cantina because he, and I quote, really wanted to see this Beatles cover band. -...prompting 1 staffer to observe, I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go in Russia, but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there." And even once he was there, it wasn't over, because he, again, I quote, was really intent on singing with the band, and he said, -"Go ask them if I can play guitar." -$25,000. -$25,000. Which led to the immortal sentence, I told the general that basically, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Take a moment to consider the run of poor decisions that are required before you're being told you can't play guitar with a Beatles cover band when you're drunk at a Mexican restaurant in Russia. -♪♪♪♪ -♪♪♪♪ Just add all that up together, and then consider this man had access to our deadliest nuclear warheads. And in case that doesn't scare you enough, until recently, 1 of the men overseeing all the people we've met so far was Vice Admiral Tim Giardina. The president relieved him of his command last year for an even weirder reason.

Speaker 7: Admiral Timothy Giardina's undoing began with a local criminal investigation in Iowa, where he was spotted on surveillance cameras using counterfeit poker chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs.

Speaker 0: Okay, okay. I'm sorry, but a vice admiral has to have the mental fortitude to fool an Iowa pit boss. You have to. You have to. And also, this means, let's recap, that within the last 12 months, we were in a situation where in the event of us launching a nuclear strike, the president's command would theoretically have gone through a man gambling with fake poker chips, who would have then tried to call a drunk guy wrestling with a Russian George Harrison.

-...who would have then needed to send someone with a bag full of burritos to wake up an officer and tell him to go grab an LP-sized floppy disk and begin the solemn process of ending the world as we know it. Just... -...just... -...just... -...just...

-...just... And if... If you're thinking, well, it looks like we were lucky nothing terrible has happened, we're actually even luckier than you think. Over the years, America has had some pretty terrifying almost-geddons.

Speaker 8: The Goldsboro incident of 1961. That's when a U.S. B-52 bomber jet broke in half during a flight and lost its load. 2 nuclear bombs. Where was it flying at the time?

Over the city of Goldsboro, North Carolina. Both bombs plummeted to the ground. 1 was nearly armed, set to explode, but miraculously, either did.

Speaker 0: Yeah. You dropped an armed nuclear bomb on your own country. And it is frankly amazing that you don't talk about that more often. There is genuinely a weirdly restrained sign marking the event, calling it a nuclear mishap, when it clearly should really say, holy... You have no idea what nearly happened here.

-...and... I know. -...I know. I know you're... You're probably thinking, okay, all right, we nearly blew up 1 of the Carolinas, but that's basically why we have 2.

But in that case, how about that 1 time we risked blowing up Arkansas?

Speaker 9: Someone dropped a socket in the silo. And the socket fell about 70 feet, pierced the missile, caused a fuel leak, and then there was a huge explosion.

Speaker 0: Just think about the system we have designed. In the rock, paper, scissors logic, socket beats nuclear missile. And if that feels too much like ancient history to you, here is something from as recently as 2007.

Speaker 3: 6 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were loaded onto a B-52 by mistake, blown across the country, and left unguarded on the tarmac. No 1 noticed for 36 hours. AUDIENCE GASPS

Speaker 0: And that must have been a hell of a moment when they realized, hey guys, those things that have been out there for a day and a half, there is no way that those are nuclear. Shit! -...it seems clear. -...it seems clear. At this point, we have too many nuclear weapons to take care of them properly.

So, why aren't we reducing them? Well, we were, to be fair. Since 1988, we got rid of more than 18,000 warheads. But recently, things have slowed down a lot. President Obama has reduced our arsenal by just 309, which is crazy.

At a time of budgetary cutbacks, we are spending $355 billion over the next decade on something we don't need. And don't take that from me. Take it from someone who actually knows something about this.

Speaker 10: The 1 thing I convinced myself of after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Nuclear weapons are basically like Americans' T-Rex arms. They're essentially useless and you are plenty scary enough without them. -... Without them.

-... When you have... When you have $4,800 of something you don't need, you are a fucking hoarder at that point. It's like... It's like having $4,800 cats.

Sure, each 1 might have made sense when you got it, but it all happened so gradually, you didn't really notice that things had gotten out of hand. And now you have too many of these agents of chaos and destruction, and 1 of these days, 1 of them might kill you. The problem is, there are 2 key things stopping us from reducing our nuclear weapons. The first is politics, because there are lawmakers from both parties who have missile silos in their states. And they will fight any attempt to close them, no matter how much sense that makes.

And they'll fight it with ironclad logic like this.

Speaker 11: We know that maintaining our current silos is the best interest, and in the best interest, of taxpayers, because rebuilding them would be very expensive.

Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ Okay, let me get that straight. You are spending money on something you don't need in the hopes that you'll be saving money on the off chance 1 day you eventually do... What exactly are you saying there? That's desperate. That's like saying, I have to hold on to my storage facility full of Aquaman action figures on the off chance that my future wife really likes them.

She will not. She will not. She will not want those things. You don't need them. That...

The man there, that's Steve Daines. And the House was discussing a bill that guaranteed that silos would be kept open until at least 2021. He was trying to attach an amendment removing the end date altogether, essentially meaning no matter what the Pentagon wanted, the silos would have to be kept open forever. It was clearly a ridiculous amendment. Let's now watch it pass.

Speaker 1: On this vote, the yeas are 222, the nays are 196, The amendment is adopted.

Speaker 0: That is some weapons-grade bullshit. Now, the Senate could still make big changes to that bill, but for that to happen, people would need to care. And that brings us to the main reason why so little is being done to reduce our number of nuclear warheads. Deep down, people just don't give enough of a shit anymore. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of people pushed for disarmament in Central Park.

But in May of this year, This is what a House hearing on nuclear security looked like.

Speaker 2: We should point out probably 1 of the few hearings in which actually the attendance of the subcommittee compares very favorably with the attendance in the audience. Because the public has not tuned into these issues as they should.

Speaker 0: That's right. A hearing on the most dangerous things on Earth had attendance rivaling that of a weekday open mic poetry slam. -♪ ♪ -♪ And the problem is, no 1 honestly believes that we're going to destroy ourselves, despite the fact that that has nearly happened multiple times. But shouldn't we, at the very least, be reducing our stockpile down to a number where we can look after them properly with enough qualified people, none of whom are going to cheat on a test, leave a door open, or vomit a half-eaten chimichanga onto a Slavic Ringo. -♪♪♪♪ All I'm saying is, if humanity is going to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon, let's make sure that it's at least intentional.

Let's have it be a U.S. President riding a missile with a middle finger held to the sky. Screaming humanity's last words, -"Fuck you, world! America is shutting this shit down!" --laughter and applause- Please! Let's just not have our last words be, Oops!

Oh, shit.

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Nuclear Weapons: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)