office of secure transportation
I've seen them at least twice on /r/whatisthisthing, a good couple dozen times on the road, and these days, even in press photos: GMC trucks with custom square boxes on the back, painted dark blue, with US Government "E" plates. These courier escorts, "unmarked" but about as subtle as a Crown Vic with a bull bar, are perhaps the most conspicuous part of an obscure office of a secretive agency. One that seems chronically underfunded but carries out a remarkable task: shipping nuclear weapons.
The first nuclear weapon ever constructed, the Trinity Device, was transported over the road from Los Alamos to the north end of the White Sands Missile Range, near San Antonio, New Mexico. It was shipped disassembled, with the non-nuclear components strapped down in a box truck and the nuclear pit nestled in the back seat of a sedan. Army soldiers, of the Manhattan Engineering District, accompanied it for security. This was a singular operation, and the logistics were necessarily improvised.
The end of the Second World War brought a brief reprieve in the nuclear weapons program, but only a brief one. By the 1950s, an arms race was underway. The civilian components of the Manhattan Project, reorganized as the Atomic Energy Commission, put manufacturing of nuclear arms into full swing. Most nuclear weapons of the late '40s, gravity bombs built for the Strategic Air Command, were assembled at former Manhattan Project laboratories. They were then "put away" at one of the three original nuclear weapons stockpiles: Manzano Base, Albuquerque; Killeen Base, Fort Hood; and and Clarksville Base, Fort Campbell [1].
By the mid-1950s, the Pantex Plant near Amarillo had been activated as a full-scale nuclear weapons manufacturing center. Weapons were stockpiled not only at the AEC's tunnel sites but at the "Q Areas" of about 20 Strategic Air Command bases throughout the country and overseas. Shipping and handling nuclear weapons was no longer a one-off operation, it was a national enterprise.
To understand the considerations around nuclear transportation, it's important to know who controls nuclear weapons. In the early days of the nuclear program, all weapons were exclusively under civilian control. Even when stored on military installations (as nearly all were), the keys and combinations to the vaults were held by employees of the AEC, not military personnel. Civilian control was a key component of the Atomic Energy Act, an artifact of a political climate that disfavored the idea of fully empowering the military with such destructive weapons. Over the decades since, larger and larger parts of the nuclear arsenal have been transferred into military control. The majority of "ready to use" nuclear weapons today are "allocated" to the military, and the military is responsible for storing and transporting them.
Even today, though, civilian control is very much in force for weapons in any state other than ready for use. Newly manufactured weapons (in eras in which there were such a thing), weapons on their way to and from refurbishment or modification, and weapons removed from the military allocation for eventual disassembly are all under the control of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration [2]. So too are components of weapons, test assemblies, and the full spectrum of Special Nuclear Material (a category defined by the Atomic Energy Act). Just as in the 1940s, civilian employees of the DoE are responsible for securing and transporting a large inventory of weapons and sensitive assets.
As the Atomic Energy Commission matured, and nuclear weapons became less of an experiment and more of a product, transportation arrangements matured as well. It's hard to find much historical detail on AEC shipping before the 1960s, but we can pick up a few details from modern DoE publications showing how the process has improved. Weapons were transported in box trucks as part of a small convoy, accompanied by "technical couriers, special agents, and armed military police." Technical courier was an AEC job title, one that persisted for decades to describe the AEC staff who kept custody of weapons under transport. Despite the use of military security (references can be found to both Army MPs and Marines accompanying shipments), technical couriers were also armed. A late 1950s photo published by DoE depicts a civilian courier on the side of a road wielding a long suit jacket and an M3 submachine gun.
During that period, shipments to overseas test sites were often made by military aircraft and Navy vessels. AEC couriers still kept custody of the device, and much of the route (for example, from Los Alamos to the Navy supply center at Oakland) was by AEC highway convoy. There have always been two key considerations in nuclear transportation: first, that an enemy force (first the Communists and later the Terrorists) might attempt to interdict such a shipment, and second, that nuclear weapons and materials are hazardous and any accident could create a disaster. More "broken arrow" incidents involve air transportation than anything else, and it seems that despite the potentially greater vulnerability to ambush, the ground has always been preferred for safety.
A 1981 manual for military escort operations, applicable not only to nuclear but also chemical weapons, lays out some of the complexity of the task. "Suits Uncomfortable," "Radiation Lasts and Lasts," quick notes in the margin advise. The manual describes the broad responsibilities of escort teams, ranging from compliance with DOT hazmat regulations to making emergency repairs to contain leakage. It warns of the complexity of such operations near civilians: there may be thousands of civilians nearby, and they might panic.
Escort personnel must be trained to be prepared for problems with the public. If they are not, their problems may be multiplied---perhaps to a point where satisfactory solutions become almost impossible.
During the 1960s, heightened Cold War tensions and increasing concern of terrorism (likely owing to the increasingly prominent anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, sometimes as good as terrorists in the eyes of the military they opposed) lead to a complete rethinking of nuclear shipping. Details are scant, but the AEC seems to have increased the number of armed civilian guards and fully ended the use of any non-government couriers for special nuclear material. I can't say for sure, but this seems to be when the use of military escorts was largely abandoned in favor of a larger, better prepared AEC force. Increasing protests against nuclear weapons, which sometimes blocked the route of AEC convoys, may have made posse comitatus and political optics a problem with the use of the military on US roads.
In 1975, the Atomic Energy Commission gave way to the Energy Research and Development Administration, predecessor to the modern Department of Energy. The ERDA reorganized huge parts of the nuclear weapons complex to align with a more conventional executive branch agency, and in doing so created the Office of Transportation Safeguards (OTS). OTS had two principal operations: the nuclear train, and nuclear trucks.
Trains have been used to transport military ordnance for about as long as they have existed, and in the mid-20th century most major military installations had direct railroad access to their ammunition bunkers. When manufacturing operations began at the Pantex Plant, a train known as the "White Train" for its original color became the primary method of delivery of new weapons. The train was made up of distinctive armored cars surrounded by empty buffer cars (for collision safety) and modified box cars housing the armed escorts. Although the "white train" was repainted to make it less obvious, railfans demonstrate that it is hard to keep an unusual train secret, and anti-nuclear activists were often aware of its movements. While the train was considered a very safe and secure option for nuclear transportation (considering the very heavy armored cars and relative safety of established rail routes), it had its downsides.
In 1985, a group of demonstrators assembled at Bangor Submarine Base. Among their goals was to bring attention to the Trident II SLBM by blocking the arrival of warheads on the White Train. 19 demonstrators were arrested and charged with conspiracy for their interference with the shipment. The jury found all 19 not guilty.
The DoE is a little cagey, in their own histories, about why they stopped using the train. We can't say for sure that this demonstration was the reason, but it must have been a factor. At Bangor, despite the easy rail access, all subsequent shipments were made by truck. Trucks were far more flexible and less obvious, able to operate on unpredictable schedules and vary their routes to evade protests. In the two following years, use of the White Train trailed off and then ended entirely. From 1987, all land transportation of nuclear weapons would be by semi-trailer.
This incident seems to have been formative for the OTS, which in classic defense fashion would be renamed the Office of Secure Transportation, or OST. A briefing on the OST, likely made for military and law enforcement partners, describes their tactical doctrine: "Remain Unpredictable." Sub-bullets of this concept include "Chess Match" and "Ruthless Adherence to Deductive Thought Process," the meaning of which we could ponder for hours, but if not a military briefing this is at least a paramilitary powerpoint. Such curious phrases accompanied by baffling concept diagrams (as we find them here) are part of a fine American tradition.
Beginning somewhere around 1985, the backbone of the OST's security program became obscurity. An early '00s document from an anti-nuclear weapons group notes that there were only two known photographs of OST vehicles. At varying times in their recent history, OST's policy seems to have been to either not notify law enforcement of their presence at all, or to advise state police only that there was a "special operation" that they were not to interfere with. Box trucks marked "Atomic Energy Commission," or trains bearing the reporting symbol "AEC," are long gone. OST convoys are now unmarked and, at least by intention, stealthy.
It must be because of this history that the OST is so little-known today. It's not exactly a secret, and there have been occasional waves of newspaper coverage for its entire existence. While the OST remains low-profile relative to, say, the national laboratories, over the last decade the DoE has rather opened up. There are multiple photos, and even a short video, published by the DoE depicting OST vehicles and personnel. The OST has had a hard time attracting and retaining staff, which is perhaps the biggest motivator of this new publicity: almost all of the information the DoE puts out to the public about OST is for recruiting.
It is, of course, a long-running comedy that the federal government's efforts at low-profile vehicles so universally amount to large domestic trucks in dark colors with push bumpers, spotlights, and GSA license plates. OST convoys are not hard to recognize, and are conspicuous enough that with some patience you can find numerous examples of people with no idea what they are finding them odd enough to take photos. The OST, even as an acknowledged office of the NNSA with open job listings, still feels a bit like a conspiracy.
During the early 1970s, the AEC charged engineers at Sandia with the design of a new, specialized vehicle for highway transportation of nuclear weapons. The result, with a name only the government could love, was the Safe Secure Transporter (SST, which is also often expanded as Safe Secure Trailer). Assembly and maintenance of the SSTs was contracted to Allied Signal, now part of Honeywell. During the 1990s, the SST was replaced by the Safeguards Transporter (SGT), also designed by Sandia. By M&A, the Allied Signal contract had passed to Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technology (FM&T), also the operating contractor of the Kansas City Plant where many non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons are made. Honeywell FM&T continues to service the SGTs today, and is building their Sandia-designed third-generation replacement, the Mobile Guardian [3].
Although DoE is no longer stingy about photographs of the SGT, details of its design remain closely held. The SGT consists of a silver semi-trailer, which looks mostly similar to any other van trailer but is a bit shorter than the typical 53' (probably because of its weight). Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the trailers is an underslung equipment enclosure which appears to contain an air conditioner; an unusual way to mount the equipment that I have never seen on another semi-trailer.
Various DoE-released documents have given some interior details, although they're a bit confusing on close reading, probably because the trailers have been replaced and refurbished multiple times and things have changed. They are heavily armored, the doors apparently 12" thick. They are equipped with a surprising number of spray nozzles, providing fire suppression, some sort of active denial system (perhaps tear gas), and an expanding foam that can be released to secure the contents in an accident. There is some sort of advanced lock system that prevents the trailer being opened except at the destination, perhaps using age-old bank vault techniques like time delay or maybe drawing from Sandia's work on permissive action links and cryptographic authentication.
The trailers are pulled by a Peterbilt tractor that looks normal until you pay attention. They are painted various colors, perhaps a lesson learned from the conspicuity of the White Train. They're visibly up-armored, with the windshield replaced by two flat ballistic glass panels, much like you'd see on a cash transport. The sleeper has been modified to fit additional equipment and expand seating capacity to four crew members.
Maybe more obvious, they're probably the only semitrailers and tractors that you'll see with GSA "E" prefix license plates (for Department of Energy).
SGTs are accompanied on the road by a number of escort vehicles, although I couldn't say exactly how many. From published photographs, we can see that these fall into two types: the dark blue, almost black GMC box trucks with not-so-subtle emergency lights and vans with fiberglass bodies that you might mistake for a Winnebago were they not conspicuously undecorated. I've also seen at least one photo of a larger Topkick box truck associated with the OST, as well as dark-painted conventional cargo vans with rooftop AC.
If you will forgive the shilling for my Online Brand, I posted a collection of photos on Mastodon. These were all released by NNSA and were presumably taken by OST or Honeywell staff, you can see that many of them are probably from the same photoshoot. Depending on what part of the country you are in, you may very well be able to pick these vehicles out on the freeway. Hint: they don't go faster than 60, and only operate during the day in good weather.
These escort vehicles probably mostly carry additional guards, but one can assume that they also have communications equipment and emergency supplies. Besides security, one of the roles of the OST personnel is prompt emergency response, taking the first steps to contain any kind of radiological release before larger response forces can arrive. Documents indicate that OST has partnerships with both DoE facilities (such as national labs) and the Air Force to provide a rapid response capability and offer secure stopping points for OST convoys.
The OST has problems to contend with besides security and anti-nuclear activism: its own management. The OST is sort of infamously not in great shape.
Some of the vehicles were originally fabricated in Albuquerque in a motley assortment of leased buildings put together temporarily for the task, others were fabricated at the Kansas City Plant. It's hard to tell which is which, but when refurbishment of the trailers was initiated in the 2000s, it was decided to centralize all vehicle work near the OST's headquarters (also a leased office building) in Albuquerque. At the time, the OST's warehouses and workshops were in poor and declining condition, and deemed too small for the task. OST's communications center (discussed in more detail later) was in former WWII Sandia Base barracks along with NNSA's other Albuquerque offices, and they were in markedly bad shape.
To ready Honeywell FM&T for a large refurbishment project and equip OST with more reliable, futureproof facilities, it was proposed to build the Albuquerque Transportation Technology Center (ATTC) near the Sunport. In 2009, the ATTC was canceled. To this day, Honeywell FM&T works out of various industrial park suites it has leased, mostly the same ones as the 1980s. Facilities plans released by the DoE in response to a lawsuit by an activist organization end in FY2014 but tell a sad story of escalating deferred maintenance, buildings in unknown condition because of the lack of resources to inspect them, and an aging vehicle fleet that was becoming less reliable and more expensive to maintain.
The OST has 42 trucks and about 700 guards, now styled as Federal Agents. They are mostly recruited from military special forces, receive extensive training, and hold limited law enforcement powers and a statutory authorization to use deadly force in the defense of their convoys. Under a little-known and (fortunately) little-used provision of the Atomic Energy Act, they can declare National Security Areas, sort of a limited form of martial law. Despite these expansive powers, a 2015 audit report from the DoE found that OST federal agents were unsustainably overworked (with some averaging nearly 20 hours of overtime per week), were involved in an unacceptable number of drug and alcohol-related incidents for members of the Human Reliability Program, and that a series of oversights and poor management had lead to OST leadership taking five months to find out that an OST Federal Agent had threatened to kill two of his coworkers. Recruiting and retention of OST staff is poor, and this all comes in the context of an increasing number of nuclear shipments due to the ongoing weapons modernization program.
The OST keeps a low profile perhaps, in part, because it is troubled. Few audit reports, GSA evaluations, or even planning documents have been released to the public since 2015. While this leaves the possibility that the situation has markedly improved, refusal to talk about it doesn't tend to indicate good news.
OST is a large organization for its low profile. It operates out of three command centers: Western Command, at Kirtland AFB, Central Command, in Texas at Pantex, and Eastern Command, at Savannah River. The OST headquarters is leased space in an Albuquerque office building near the Sunport, and the communications and control center is nearby in the new NNSA building on Eubank. Agent training takes place primarily on a tenant basis at a National Guard base in Arkansas. OST additionally operates four or five (it was five but I believe one has been decommissioned) communications facilities. I have not been successful in locating those exactly besides that they are in New Mexico, Idaho, Missouri, South Carolina, and Maryland. Descriptions of these facilities are consistent with HF radio sites.
That brings us to the topic of communications, which you know I could go on about at length. I have been interested in OST for a long time, and a while back I wrote about the TacNet Tracker, an interesting experiment in early mobile computing and mesh networking that Sandia developed as a tactical communications system for OST. OST used to use a proprietary, Sandia-developed digital HF radio system for communications between convoys and the control center. That was replaced by ALE, for commonality with military systems, sometime in the 1990s.
More recent documents show that OST continues to use HF radio via the five relay stations, but also uses satellite messaging (which is described as Qualcomm, suggesting the off-the-shelf commercial system that is broadly popular in the trucking industry). Things have no doubt continued to advance since that dated briefing, as more recent documents mention real-time video links and extensive digital communications.
These communications systems keep all OST convoys in constant contact with the communications center in Albuquerque, where dispatchers monitor their status and movements. Communications center personnel provide weather and threat intelligence updates to convoys en route, and in the event of some sort of incident, will request assistance from the DoE, military, and local law enforcement. Some of the detailed communications arrangements emphasize the cautious nature of the OST. When requesting law enforcement assistance, communications center dispatchers provide law enforcement with codewords to authenticate themselves. An OST training video advises those law enforcement responders that, should they not have the codeword or the OST guards refuse the codeword they provide, they are to "take cover."
Paralleling a challenge that exists in the cash handling industry, the fact that law enforcement are routinely armed makes them an especially large threat to secure operations. OST may be required to use force to keep armed people away from a convoy, even when those people appear to be law enforcement. The way that this is communicated to law enforcement---that they must approach OST convoys carefully and get authorization from a convoy commander before approaching the truck---is necessarily a bit awkward. The permits and travel authorizations for the convoy are, law enforcement are warned, classified. They will not be able to check the paperwork.
The OST has assets beyond trucks, although the trucks are the backbone of the system. Three 737s, registered in the NNSA name, make up their most important air assets. Released documents don't rule out the possibility of these aircraft being used to transport nuclear weapons, but suggest that they're primarily for logistical support and personnel transport. Other smaller aircraft are in the OST inventory as well, all operating from a hanger at the Albuquerque Sunport. They fly fairly often, perhaps providing air support to OST convoys, but the NNSA indicates that they also use the OST aircraft for other related NNSA functions like transportation of the Radiological Assistance Program teams.
It should be said that despite the OST's long-running funding and administrative problems, it has maintained an excellent safety record. Some sources state that there has only been one road accident involving an OST convoy, a 1996 accident in which the truck slid off the road during an ice storm in Nebraska. I have actually seen OST documents refer to another incident in Oregon in the early '80s, in which an escort vehicle was forced off the road by a drunk driver and went into the ditch. I think it goes mostly unmentioned since only an escort vehicle was involved and there was no press attention at the time. Otherwise, despite troubling indications of its future sustainability, OST seems to have kept an excellent track record.
Finally, if you have fifteen minutes to kill, this video is probably the most extensive source of information on OST operations to have been made public. Even though I'm pretty sure a couple of the historical details it gives are wrong, but what's new. Special credit if you notice the lady that's still wearing her site-specific Q badge in the video. Badges off! Badges!
Also, if you're former military and can hold down a Q, a CDL, EMT-B, and firearms qualifications, they're hiring. I hear the overtime is good. But maybe the threats of violence not so much.
[1] The early Cold War was a very dynamic time in nuclear history, and plans changed quickly as the AEC and Armed Forces Special Weapons Project developed their first real nuclear strategy. Many of these historic details are thus complicated and I am somewhat simplifying. There were other stockpile sites planned that underwent some construction, and it is not totally clear if they were used before strategies changed once again. Similarly, manufacturing operations moved around quite a bit during this era and are hard to summarize.
[2] The NNSA, not to be confused with the agency with only one N, is a semi-autonomous division of the Department of Energy with programmatic responsibility for nuclear weapons and nuclear security. Its Administrator, currently former Sandia director Jill Hruby, is an Under Secretary of Energy and answers to the Secretary of Energy (and then to the President). I am personally very fond of Jill Hruby because of memorable comments she made after Trump's first election. They were not exactly complimentary to the new administration and I have a hard time thinking her outspokenness was not a factor in her removal as director of the laboratory. I assume her tenure as NNSA Administrator is about to come to an end.
[3] Here's a brief anecdote about how researching these topics can drive you a little mad. Unclassified documents about OST and their vehicles make frequent reference to the "Craddock buildings," where they are maintained and overhauled in Albuquerque. For years, this lead me to assume that Craddock was the name of a defense contractor that originally held the contract and Honeywell had acquired. There is, to boot, an office building near OST headquarters in Albuquerque that has a distinctive logo and the name "Craddock" in relief, although it's been painted over to match the rest of the building. Only yesterday did I look into this specifically and discover that Craddock is a Colorado-based commercial real estate firm that developed the industrial park near the airport, where MITS manufactured the Altair 8800 and Allied Signal manufactured the SSTs (if I am not mistaken Honeywell FM&T now uses the old MITS suite). OST just calls them the Craddock buildings because Craddock is the landlord! Craddock went bankrupt in the '80s, sold off part of its Albuquerque holdings, and mostly withdrew to Colorado, probably why they're not a well-known name here today.