Thank you for your service.
When I was in the USN back in the Seventies, I was assigned to be on a load team. I wasn’t an ordinanceman, I was a jet mechanic but apparently, for nuclear weapons, they had mixed teams of non-ordinance personnel to load the bombs. I am pretty sure they were dummy bombs we practiced with, but it was extremely rigid and structured, with a the guy in charge reading from a checklist, and at each step, it had to be read:
“Insert the Gerblotz pin”, then the person who did it would verify by voice “Gerblotz pin inserted”, and someone other than the person inserting it would visually verify it and say something like “Gerblotz pin insertion verified”, and so on.
The thing that always struck me was the Marines they had stationed around the site (i can’t remember how many, but I seem to think there were four Marines for each bomb, and they were in full gear with M-16, helmet, flak jacket, etc. standing rigidly at port arms the whole time facing outward. They said that nobody was allowed to enter the area while the loading was going on, and that they were authorized to use deadly force. I heard an apocryphal story about a young sailor who unthinkingly ran through the area, and got decked by a Marine who bashed him in the face with his M-16. They took their jobs very seriously.
I do remember thinking “Why do they need them there? We’re on a ship...who is going to interfere with the loading?” I have since wondered what they do now that they apparently don’t have Marine detachments aboard carriers anymore. (I heard they did away with that during the 1990’s)
Someone might go nuts!
Thank you for your service. About the rigid manner of handling nukes...two people. Rickover and Lemay. They built a culture trying to reduce the risk as much as possible.