[JetMechZ16]

Originally Posted by Steve_R

Weight, wut? It rains in southern Lousyana? Huh, who woulda thunk it?

He's not good at thunking.

Originally Posted by Steve_R

Marines? I was in the nuclear Navy; Marines aren't allowed within a mile of anything with the word "nuclear" in it.

Now I have to question your Navy credentials. Didn't you ever serve on a carrier?

Ships used to have a Marine detachment (MARDET) that provided security but this is being steadily phased out to my knowledge

What they won't say here is the reason for the phase out of Marine security onboard. What where they providing security for??? Hmmm??? With those items no longer onboard there was no reason to keep the Marines onboard a carrier.

I can neither confirm nor deny the below statement that I found on the internet.

Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, each Aircraft Carrier had an ammo locker full of various types of nuclear weapons. It is the policy of the U.S. Navy to have Marines guard nuclear weapons facilities (still true today, which is why there are Marines at King's Bay, Georgia, and Bangor, Washington, guarding the stockpiles of Trident D-5 warheads). Since the carriers had nuclear weapons storage, they obviously needed a detachment of Marines to guard them, leading to a reinforced platoon-sized (about 40-60) Marine unit assigned to each aircraft carrier, completely separate from whether or not there were Marine aircraft embarked. At the time, there were smaller Marine detachments (30-40) on guided-missile cruisers and the recommissioned battleships, which also carried nuclear-armed missiles.

Declassified: US Nuclear Weapons At Sea
the 1980s deployed about a quarter of its entire nuclear weapons stockpile at sea. The all-time high was in 1975 when 6,191 weapons were afloat, but even in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were 5,716 weapons at sea. That’s more nuclear weapons than the size of the entire US nuclear stockpile today.

An interesting read

https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/...eapons-at-sea/