Whose Need to Know?

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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 ouragreement, I'm finally free to write about this horror story. Ethan had read about a recent decontamination drill that was conductedin Denver. They had multi-hundred-thousand-dollar geodesic tent which fitover a transit train and was filled with mock victims and decontaminationpersonnel. The article went on at length about the abomination of "dirtybombs"--the impetus for this drill--and what sort of filthy terrorist woulduse such a horrible weapon. It reminded Ethan of the time he was in the Marine Corps, when he wasstationed on a big aircraft carrier. "Jarheads" were placed on these shipsfor the exclusive purpose of guarding the nukes. That, and administration. His job was to interview Marines in order to gather information abouttheir status, with mundane questions such as, "Do you want to continue yourdental and medical coverage for your dependents this year?" and "Do youwant to take your accumulated leave or cash it in?" In spite of the innocuous nature of his work, it often took him belowdecks to the weapons holds where the security personnel were. That requireda Top Secret clearance. "While that sounds super-secure," he told me, "it's really not. Youhave ENTNAC clearance at the very bottom, for anyone who will deal with anyweapons bigger than an M-16. Then you have Secret, which covers mostartillery, and for me covered my having access to everyone's SSN's, homeaddresses, medical records, disciplinary records, etc. Then you have TopSecret, 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 timeasking folks about you. And when the investigation is done, prior toissuing the clearance, you are sworn not to disclose any of the informationthat the clearance exposes you to...ever in life." Since he was in Administration, his work took place above decks. Hisoffice was right down the hall from the Admiral's office. He also had thebenefit of having quarters right next to the officers' staterooms. Althoughhis was called a "duty barracks" and was not in fact a stateroom, it was thesame thing minus the mahagony. Meaning he didn't have to sleep in steeragewith the rest of the Jarheads. He was also right down the hall from the Officers Club, for field gradeand down. He had met an officer there who was "a cool guy" who regularlyinvited him to the Officers Club to play cards, smoke cigars and engage inconversation. This officer would be on duty for three days and off duty forthree days, completely disappearing. It turned out that he was the Officerin 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 leavingthe ship to go ashore and would not see him again, so he wanted to make sureto get his request right because he knew that his friend really wanted tostay. While the officer was in the hold, he was not, under anycircumstances, allowed to leave. Ethan couldn't reach him on the phone, sohe 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 throughseveral guarded vault type doors and finally arrived at a duty stationwhere, for the fifth or sixth time, I was required to show my Top Secretclearance credentials and enter the day's pass code onto a small computerconsole. When I was cleared, I stated my business and was given a radiationsuit--bit space-suit lookin' thing." He asked the Duty NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer), "What the hell'sthis?" He'd been around nukes before, but was never required to wear asuit. 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 todiscuss any details of his post. Ethan suited up and walked into a triple door sally-port, where heprogressed through each airlock via ten-inch thick lead-lined doors. Pastthe last door, he stepped into a massive room/warehouse, about 60 feet wideby 100 feet length, with a 20-foot ceiling--huge for battleship storage roomstandards. From the floor to the ceiling, thousands upon thousands of whatlooked like missiles were stored. It was weird, because he'd never seenmissiles 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 thequestion he had for him about his TAD request, and then asked him, "What thehell 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 aredesigned to slide on over most of our conventional ordinance. They're madeout of radioactive cobalt, and when the bomb they're wrapped arounddetonates, they contaminate everything in the blast zone and quite a bitbeyond." "So they turn regular ordinance into nukes?" "No, not exactly. The cobalt doesn't detonate itself. It just scatterseverywhere." "Well, what? Does the radiation kill people?" "Not immediately. Cobalt jackets will not likely ever be used. They'refor 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 ascorched earth policy. If we are going to lose, we arm everything withcobalt--and I mean everything, we have jackets at nearly every misslemagazine in the world, on land or at sea--and contaminate the world. If wecan't have it, nobody can." Wow, huh? "Just another example," Ethan told me, "of what treacherous creaturesour leadership is made of." I e-mailed the above--labeling the Subject line, "Yikes!"--to no-nukesactivist Harvey Wasserman, author of *The Last Energy War* and co-author of*The Superpower of Peace,* available from freepress.org. I asked him tocomment in a couple of hundred words. "Yikes is right," he responded. "This nightmare has now essentiallycome true with the use of depleted uranium on anti-tank and other shells inYugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The military rationale is that thesuper-hard depleted uranium helps shells penetrate tanks and other hardstructures. But the long-term effect is that the uranium vaporizes uponexplosion and contaminates everything for hundreds of yards, if not miles. "Thus there are now whole regions that are heavily radioactive. Reportsare pouring in from all three countries about soaring cancer rates, infantdeath rates and more. The mysterious 'Gulf War Syndrome' may have beencaused by radiation exposure suffered by U.S. troops. So, though 'off thebooks,' the last three major U.S. attacks have in fact been nuclear innature. "Sorry...not 200 words...I tried, but they mutated...."======================================================================= Paul Krassner is the author of *Murder At the Conspiracy Convention andOther American Absurdities*; see paulkrassner.com for George Carlin'sintroduction.