Spin Control: Resume nuclear testing? Haven’t we been there, done that?

When I read that President Donald Trump last week ordered the Defense Department to begin “nuclear testing,” I had to wonder if I was still in 2025 or back in the 1980s.

Haven’t we been down this road before and decided it was time to go a different route?

As a young reporter assigned to cover the military in the 1980s, I wrote about the prospect of nuclear proliferation in the Northwest, including at Fairchild Air Force Base. One of the first things I learned was that the Air Force neither confirms nor denies the existence of nuclear weapons at any given place at any given time.

This despite the fact that several Fairchild B-52 bombers always sat on “ground alert,” which meant the planes were gassed up and ready to go, and the crews were a short sprint away at the special housing facility, should the klaxon sound.

Were they going to execute a quick takeoff, fly to some other destination, land, load up the nuclear bombs and take off again? Seemed unlikely.

In 1983, a B-52 coming off alert was taxiing down the runway when a fire broke out and threatened to spread to the bomb bay where missiles were loaded. Radio transmission to the tower included the phrase “call broken arrow,” which is the code for a possible nuclear accident. The Air Force didn’t publicly acknowledge the nuclear aspects of the incident, although it did in the commendations for the fire crews that risked their lives to put out the fire.

In the early 1980s, Fairchild was one of the bases assigned to house the new air-launched cruise missiles. At the time, that particular missile, with its special terrain-reading guidance system that made sure it could hit a target after traveling up to 1,500 miles, only came with a nuclear warhead that was roughly 10 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On the other side of the state, the new Trident submarines were being assigned to the Bangor Naval Base, and trains carrying nuclear missiles were crossing the state. Anti-war activists sometimes protested on the tracks as they came through Spokane.

Meanwhile, the folks down at Hanford had restarted the Plutonium Uranium Extract Plant to make nuclear material for new weapons.

Later in the 1980s, the Reagan Administration was looking for homes for a new land-based ballistic nuclear missile, ironically or oxymoronically named the Peacekeeper. Early designs called for it to be put on trains that traveled around the country so the Soviets wouldn’t know where they were. Fairchild was on the list to be a station but either cooler or cheaper heads prevailed; the Peacekeepers were placed in silos in Wyoming.

Then in late 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and within two years the Soviet Union collapsed. In late 1991, President George H.W. Bush ordered ground alert to be canceled, and I was at Fairchild for the flight of the first B-52 to take off after that. As the plane taxied for takeoff, the pilot pointed to the ground alert area empty for the first time in decades and said “Kind of weird, isn’t it?”

It was the good kind of weird.

The orders for the U.S. to stop all nuclear testing – which had pretty much been occurring in one form or another since the Trinity blast in New Mexico desert in 1945 – came a few months later.

It’s not clear what Trump’s statement to resume nuclear testing means. It almost certainly means we won’t return to the above-ground testing of the 1940s and 1950s that pushed so much radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that worried scientists began collecting baby teeth to test the levels of strontium-90 in children.

Perhaps it will just be computer simulations of new designs and strategies. Although if that’s the case, it might be easier to just watch the 1983 movie “War Games,” where the computer explains that the only winning move in a nuclear war is “not to play.”

One more reminder

If that ballot is still on your counter waiting to be marked, there’s still plenty of time to make your choices. But there isn’t really plenty of time to mail it in.

Because of concerns about possible delays in postmarking at processing centers, just leaving it out for your letter carrier or putting it in a neighborhood pickup box might mean it isn’t postmarked by Tuesday. Elections officials are urging you to deposit it in a drop box – in Spokane County, they can be found at public libraries as well as other locations listed online – or take it to a post office and ask them to postmark it there.