By Mark Howell

In a world already crazed by acronyms and passwords, it was revealed last week that, for almost 20 years, the secret code to authorize the launch of U.S. nuclear missiles and start WWIII (world war three) was this: 00000000 (eight zeroes).

 

From 1962, when JFK (John Fitzgerald Kennedy) first instituted the encoding called PAL (permissive action link) for nuclear weapons, all the way to 1977, eight zeroes was the combination of choice to fire our MAD (mutually assured destruction) into the heart of the Cold War.

They were chosen by SAC (strategic air command) in an effort to make the weapons as quick and as easy to launch as possible. HIT?

 

(how insane is that?)?

 

Meanwhile the San Luis Obispo Tribune reports that “trouble inside the Air Force’s nuclear missile force runs deeper and wider,” citing “burnout” among launch officers responsible for 10 missiles each in separate silos. They find it “exhausting, unrewarding and stressful work, leading to heightened levels of misconduct such as spousal abuse.” Court-martial rates in the nuclear missile force are more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force.

 

It is the nuclear arms race that served to upend a number of orthodoxies long held by science.

 

In the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Defense began to bury sealed containers of radioactive waste deep below its nuclear processing facilities. Scientists were concerned, however, that unknown microbes at that depth might eat through the seals.

 

By 1987, the hunt for deep-down life began in earnest in boreholes beneath the Savannah River facility in South Carolina. Discovered were bacteria living hundreds of feet below the surface. Indeed, tens of millions of microbes were existing in every cubic centimeter of dirt. Heat emanating from the Earth’s interior at that depth should have been enough to kill anything we know as life, but instead a good percentage of the planet’s microbial life is thriving down there.

 

It is now believed that these life forms have survived alive since before the dinosaurs went extinct. Further, scientists estimate that evolution itself is on hold in such depths, since it would be a kind of suicide for these exquisitely corpse-like life forms to reproduce. Nothing to eat, nowhere to go, it would kill them to divide their cells, says Katrina Edwards of the University of California. They might instead be focusing their efforts on repairing their own machinery rather than risk the activity that most other organisms live for: reproduction.

 

When we reviewed local author Reef Perkins’ memoir, “Sex, Salvage & Secrets,” earlier this year, we wrote what the author’s wife, Roberta DePiero, has often said to him: “Perkins, we’re worried about you.”

 

With publication of his latest book, the hilarious “ Screwed, Blu’d and Tattooed,” maybe we should not worry so much.

 

“There is little useful information in this book,” declares the author. “I made up some words. Most of the facts are wrong. Some of the timing is off and all emotions are temporary. No fictional turtles, dogs, stink-bugs, birds or worms where harmed during the writing. Except for the fly, the fly was real and for that I am sorry.”

 

 

Quote for the Week:

 

“Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen” by Gary Snyder

In the high seat, before-dawn dark and the shiny diesel stack
 warms and flutter up the Tyler Road grade
 to the logging on Poorman 
Creek.Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life.

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