Monday, November 20, 2017

The US military tweeted out bad information about its nukes. North Korea will notice.

Alex Ward · Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 4:38 pm

And it couldn’t come at a worse time.

The military command overseeing America’s nuclear arsenal just made an embarrassing — and potentially dangerous — mistake.

On Wednesday afternoon, it tweeted a link to an article falsely claiming that the US maintains “secret silos” for its nuclear warheads, and has “B-1 bombers that can drop them from the air.”

The problem, as experts almost immediately pointed out on Twitter, is that the US doesn’t have “secret” silos — you can find their locations on Google — and the B-1 bomber isn’t capable of dropping nuclear bombs.

And here’s why this matters: Tweeting out the article only increases the chance of miscalculation between North Korea and the United States while tensions between the two nuclear powers are already sky-high.

Since there is very little communication between the two countries, any kind of message the US sends out is read by Pyongyang with great interest.

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