Yeah, but it wouldn’t stand upright on the launchpad properly.
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That only happens after the first move. Which isn’t a problem for an ICBM.
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Just crawled out of my shelter to ask: was it one of those $450,000 pentagon wrenches?
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Huh, no one’s linked to John Oliver’s thing on the nuclear weapons yet. This is entirely in line with what he was reporting. How many of those 8" floppy drives do you think they have kicking around in reserve?
My grandpa could have made them extra copies, as any competent machinist could.
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If the photo in the link below is correct, it appears to be a tap. A pretty big tap at that. My question is: Why are they tapping holes in the silos?
I remember 8" floppies…that’s what we booted the tape drive from at my old job at a bank Of course at my current job we were still punched paper tape at the beginning of this century…
And yes, as other have pointed out, probably a very special wrench. It may well be specially shaped to get to that one nut that you can’t reach with any other tool.
No, it would be simple. From what I’ve observed with friends who work for DoD I see no reason to assume it would be easy to get it through the bureaucracy,
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the approved vendor no longer exists, That certainly would complicate re-orders.
Wow, you guys are naive. This was a very special “wrench” that everyone took turns with. At an early conference of the “Nucular Engineers Club” someone found a copy of a really hot, um, magazine, and they agreed to share it among the members. It was someone’s grand idea to pass the shipping costs off to the government by calling it a “warhead wrench” (heh.) They been shipping it around the world for 50 years even though it isn’t “hot” anymore. It has become a great story to tell around the broken and unusable control panel at every facility on every continent.
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That’s because common sense is a weapon, if wielded by the military, that would turn against them as often as the enemy.
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I’m just slightly curious what would’ve happened if the package had got lost somewhere in the Fed Ex system. If I have one irreplaceable holy grail, I’m not going to Fed-Ex it to my friends. More importantly, I imagine that there used to be many of them, back when we had 1000 ICBMs at more bases, so where did they go? There should be a better tracking system and base exchange for our “special” systems.
Truthfully the Saab fighter jets follow that exact philosophy. They are designed to be maintained out of a garage like hangar cut off from resupply, maintained by some weekend warriors, and fly from country roads or dirt strips in any weather.
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EVERYTHING, from a war plane through a car to a washing machine, should be designed following this philosophy!
…though you’d need to bolt a JATO to a washing machine to make it fly from a country road. Would make a great video, too.
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Or use a screw remover kit. (you use a reverse spiral drill bit to to chew away at the head and then use a reverse spiral tap to extract the screw).
Then you retap the hole with a larger screw and use different screws. Problem solved.
Also, screws don’t last forever. They break, the heads get stripped, etc. Someone has to be machining replacement screws. They already have security clearance to machine the screws, they could machine the wrench to go with them.
Probably because HF’s cheaply made shit usually breaks within one or two hammer-blasts 
Given that the folks who manage the nukes in America’s arse-anal (HA!) have not exactly shown themselves to be capable (from NYT: “A broad review was begun after academic cheating scandals and the dismissal of top officers for misbehavior…”), it shouldn’t come as a shock that the system as a whole is seriously flawed.
If I understand you correctly, I would guess that these are not systems where one can alter the diameters (whether inside or outside) of parts on a whim as that approach would lend itself to having an arsenal of mix-and-match pieces with no documentation.
You can always tap it with even larger screw, put a screw stub with drilled hole and original thread size tapped in, and weld or glue or braze it in place. More hassle than just putting in a bigger thread but keeps the thing standardized.
