Letters From The Mushroom Cloud
We had an interesting conversation arising from an article we read on slate.com. The article stated that on Royal Navy SSBN’s (nuclear missile submarines), there is a safe containing a letter from the Prime Minister.
The letter contains the PM’s final orders to the captain of the submarine in the event he (the PM) is killed in a surprise nuclear attack. The current PM, Gordon Brown, apparently wrote this letter out four times, in longhand.
Previous PM’s have had to do the same thing, though all their orders have been destroyed. Presumably, only they know what they wrote, but none of them have ever revealed the contents of their letters publicly.
This, obviously, prompted the question: What did they write?
What would you write?
Here is the situation: You are the Prime Minister (or the President of the United States, or Russia, etc.) and you are tasked with writing your final orders to the commanders of your nation’s nuclear missile submarines. These vessels carry enough firepower to vaporize the world’s largest cities, and most of the smaller ones as well. (A single U.S. Ohio class submarine, for example, carries up to 192 nuclear warheads, each of them at least 5 times as powerful as the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
Your orders will determine whether or not these submarines fire their weapons and kill millions upon millions of people. (Not to mention leaving the survivors in a world radically different than the one prior.) You are dead because your nation has already been destroyed. You’ve lost. You’re only decision is whether to take the attackers with you to the grave.
We didn’t come up with an answer. Neither do we don’t envy those who have to write these letters, or those who’s task it would be to read them.
(Photo courtesy jmuhles’s flickr page through creative commons license. Thanks, jmuhles!)