Lt. Raj Bansal is the official executioner of the President’s command.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: Ingrained in popular culture are Hollywood films where the ultimate decision to press the trigger for a nuclear launch from America rests with the President. Or else, an arch villain devises a way to circumnavigate the operating systems, takes charge and attempts a near-catastrophe. Of course, both the scenarios always come to naught. The President doesn’t have to make that wrenching call. The villain’s purpose is defeated. Nuclear disaster is averted.
But in real life, some things hold true: in case of a nuclear strike from America on enemy shores, the President does indeed give the final go-ahead. It travels through a chain of command, before somebody finally punches in the codes for the launch, puts the system in place. Pushes the ‘trigger’.
One of the persons officially in charge for pushing that dreaded and no-comeback ‘trigger’, to be the sanctioned hangman of millions of people in one go, wipe out civilization in large swathes of land for decades, is an Indian American: Lt. Raj Bansal, of the Air Force’s 90th Missile Wing.
Geoff Brumfiel of the NPR, in a story on Tuesday, describes the location – a stretch of Interstate 80 between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Lincoln, Nebraska – where the nuclear weapons are located, and the people who are ultimately in charge of discharging it. And one of them is Bansal.
There’s not much details of Bansal, as to his background, or how he came to be selected for that position, except that sometimes he does 24-hour shifts, and has spent holidays underground – the actual discharge location is located 60 feet underground. Brumfiel was amongst some journalists who were given rare access to the location maintained by the US Air Force.
According to the report, Bansal and a colleague of his, on a shift stretching for 24 hours – are responsible for 10 nuclear weapons. They oversee security and maintenance, and if the order comes, they will launch these warheads within a matter of minutes.
When asked if they will ever get a coded message from the president ordering them to unleash their weapons, Bansal says: “I think it’s something everybody thinks about when they get the job. I mean you’re basically eating most of your meals when you’re on alert next to the keys and switches that would cause that act.”
The report says Bansal’s friends know where he works but don’t have a clue what he does.
“A lot of them are like, ‘Hey, why are you complaining? You don’t really do anything,'” he says.
Nuclear deterrence is at the heart of the job that Bansal and his colleagues do, as the NPR report points out, and for most part – and that is what the personnel handling the controls would hope for – it’s just watching movies, whiling time, waiting.
Hopefully, Hollywood will not come up with a nuke-themed film, where a holocaust of the worst kind does play out. Bansal may not like to watch that sitting in front of the controls to some of the deadliest weapons conceivable on earth.