I will tell you something that will either make you feel safe or make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

I was in the Navy and therefore ships and submarines have always interested me. There is probably only a hand full out of a thousand people that have even heard of an Ohio Class Submarine. The United States has 18 Ohio Class subs of which 14 carry the Trident ballistic nuclear missiles. Every sub always has two complete crews (14 officers & 120 enlisted) and each patrol lasts 70-90 days. Four subs are always on patrol, four are always stand-by ready and the balance are being resupplied and waiting for their rotation turn. Each Sub carries 24 Trident missiles with a range of seven thousand miles and each missile has eight separate nuclear war heads that split off and are set to different targets. Therefore, each Ohio Class sub has the capability to launch a nuclear attack on 192 different targets at the same time. Multiply that times four and you have the US nuclear capacity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Now, the nuclear bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 at the end of WWII was a 15-Kiloton atomic/nuclear bomb.  The 192 nuclear war heads on each sub are approximately 475 kilotons each. Meaning that each one is 31 times the power of the original atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. To put this in context, should one of these nuclear war heads detonate on Atlanta, it would take out 1/3 – 1/2 of the state of Georgia.

These Ohio Class Subs have never been called to deploy these nuclear missiles and hopefully they never will. Ronald Reagan said, “the greatest cold war strategy is peace through strength.” These Ohio class submarines are the front-line defense of the world that not only protects the interest of the United States but that of other allied countries as well.

So, any given night that you are asleep safe in your bed, know that four Navy Ohio Class Subs are always on patrol all over the world because it is the show of strength that keeps peace in a radical world. KT