Training and Deployment of America's Nuclear Cold Warriors in Asia: Keepers of Armageddon

This book presents first-person accounts of soldiers stationed at a nuclear weapons storage base in Okinawa during the late 1960s in the context of nuclear weapons deployments in Asia, Cold War conflicts, the proposal to use them in the Vietnam War, and the grossly disproportionate American military presence that continues in Okinawa to this day. The soldiers describe their experiences transporting, maintaining, repairing, and guarding nuclear weapons, focusing much-needed attention on the dangers of nuclear weapons deployments. They recount a little-known missile misfire accident in Okinawa that took the lives of two Army crewmen, an erroneous launch order there during the Cuba Missile Crisis that almost started a nuclear war, the loss of a hydrogen bomb and the drowning of a pilot when his plane rolled off an aircraft carrier, and cancers associated with radiation exposure among base veterans, one of whom died in 2015. The book concludes that, far from “defending” and “deterring,” the deployment of nuclear weapons greatly increases the danger of war.