How the US Transports Its Nuclear Weapons

The United States has 5,244 nuclear weapons,  and a whole bunch of different ways to move  

them. Some can be fired from the ground, others  from submarines. Some can be dropped from planes,  

and others are just collecting dust. But all  of these systems for moving nuclear weapons are  

systems for deploying them; as in, that’s how  we move them from here, in Montana, to here,  

where the bad people are—but what about when we  need to transport nuclear weapons without blowing  

them up? Well, it turns out that moving a warhead  from one part of the United States to another is,  

like, a whole thing, so… you know  the drill: we’ll explain the thing,  

and then we’ll tell you to go buy something, and  then about 2% of you will buy it, and then I will  

give my writer Ben some money to go buy more  croissants, which he needs to live. Here we go. 

Nuclear warheads in the United States live  here: in the 450-or-so missile silos in Montana,  

Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and North Dakota,  with a few spread out in other states. But,  

throughout their lives, these warheads also  sometimes need to be here, here, here, here,  

here, here, or here. And at this point, you  probably have the same question that I did when I  

started writing this video: “Why, exactly, are we  moving nuclear warheads in the first place? It’s  

not like we’re using them. This must only happen,  like, every few decades.” And you’d be right,  

if you just replaced “every few decades” with  “several times a week,” which I guess means that  

you weren’t very right at all. The US Department  of Energy moves warheads all the time, and it is  

precisely because we aren’t doing anything with  them that they have to be moved so often; you see,  

the delicious plutonium center of every nuclear  warhead has an expiration date—a point past which  

it won’t detonate reliably—and the problem is…  we don’t really know when that expiration date  

is. So instead of rolling the dice on World War 3,  the Department of Energy has started the process  

of recycling and replacing the plutonium in each  of these warheads, and that means bringing them  

from their silos to one of these locations for  disassembly, reassembly, maintenance, or testing. 

But the question is: how do you get a warhead from  here to here—safely—multiple times a week? Surely,  

we don’t just… bring a nuclear bomb onto a public  interstate highway, and… no… we do do that,  

don’t we? Yes, in fact, here is a map of  the interstates that the Department of  

Energy uses to transport their warheads—but  it’s not quite that simple because bringing  

a nuclear bomb onto a public interstate  highway requires a carefully coordinated  

operation that is almost entirely classified,  except for the fact that this Department  

of Energy nuclear warhead transportation  training video ended up on YouTube somehow,  

and now I can tell you exactly how it works. The warhead itself is first loaded into one  

of these. “I know about those,” you might  be saying. “That’s called a truck.” But oh,  

dear, simple viewer, you have once again been  fooled by the US Department of Energy Office of  

Secure Transportation, because that is no simple  truck, that is a US Safeguards Transporter, and  

this grainy picture is actually one of the only  verified photos of one in existence. While they’re  

designed to look like a typical 18-wheeler—with no  recognizable markings and an uniformed driver—they  

are anything but. The entire truck is bulletproof,  with 12-inch steel doors, invulnerable tires,  

and can sit directly in the middle of a fuel  fire for up to 60 minutes without the cargo  

taking any damage. The axles will explode if an  attacker tries to tow it, and the entire trailer  

will fill itself with rapidly-expanding foam if  the truck goes off-axis. It’s also equipped with  

various ways to kill you, the details of which the  Department of Energy still refuses to disclose,  

though independent journalists have found good  evidence for at least two: it can electrocute  

you to death, and, by reading through the DOE’s  contract with an Australian arms manufacturer from  

2005, we’re pretty sure that it has a robotic  40-millimeter turret that is designed to,  

“distribute large quantities of ammunition  over a large area in an extremely short time  

frame.” So, no, it’s not really a truck. But even with its fancy foams and turrets,  

this truck-looking-thing is only one part of  moving the warhead. Every safeguards transporter  

moves as part of a convoy, alongside two to three  other unmarked and armored emergency response  

vehicles—one of which acts as the convoy’s  command center—and aerial support, which can  

conduct surveillance, or, like every other part  of the convoy, kill you super dead. Each one of  

these vehicles is operated by armed OST agents,  which is a federal agency that you’re probably  

not familiar with, but all you really need to know  is that you probably shouldn’t try to steal one of  

their cars; every single one of these agents has Q  clearance—the highest level of clearance that the  

Department of Energy can issue—and they also have  the authority to directly enforce 28 federal laws,  

most of which allow them to, you guessed it,  kill you. These agents can also—in the event  

of an emergency—create what’s called a “National  Security Area,” which essentially allows them to  

put any non-federal land in the United States  under the control of the Department of Energy,  

regardless of who owns it. So these  agents—empowered to kill you and steal  

your house—escort the safeguards transporter  along a classified, predetermined route,  

which is monitored at all times by the Emergency  Control Center in Albuquerque; this center is  

responsible for contacting all of the local law  enforcement departments along the route to give  

them a sort of… vague message about a “special  mission” that they’re not allowed to know  

about and definitely shouldn’t mess with. In the  event that local police do encounter the convoy,  

tensions might be a little high, given that both  parties have guns and one of them has a nuclear  

bomb, so the Emergency Control Center can give  both parties what’s called a “sign-countersign,”  

where the police state a codeword and the OST  agents respond with another codeword. And all  

of these elements and procedures need to come  together flawlessly in order to get the cargo  

from point A to point B, so it’s a good thing  that our nuclear warheads are in the hands of  

an agency that truly does not mess around… unless  you consider “drinking on the job” messing around,  

or “threatening to kill each other” messing  around, or “being severely understaffed and  

not having the money for weapons training anymore”  messing around, but they sure don’t seem so, and  

I’m not in the business of disagreeing with people  who, again, can legally kill me and take my house. 

Anyway, it would seem that I have once again  written a video that probably would not be  

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