CEP

The other day, I was asked to accumulate some documention about our computing environment in order to prepare for an audit. The person who asked me to do this said that it was for a 'CEP'. I asked what that was, adding that the only CEP that I knew was Circular Error Probable, a measure of the likelihood of hitting a given target in the middle of a circule of varying width. I didn't mention that the reason I know this is that my former job used that acronym. That former job was as a Missile Launch Officer in the US Strategic Air Command.

Today, I mentioned to a friend that I had been stationed at a specific Air Force base, and when she said that she would occasionally find herself there, I said that she would probably never have seen me (though the temptation to say 'I was the guy in blue' was pretty strong), insofar as my job was done a couple of hundred miles away from the base, not to mention, sixty feet down, and behind a fence, barbed wire, guards, and an eight ton blast door. She said that this was enough information, and that I was getting into a scary area. This surprised me. Its just part of my past, after all. What could be scary about that?

Then I remembered that the first time I took a missile launch simulator run, I had nightmares the following night. I thought of what it would truly mean to do what my job description said. I can't pretend that my thoughts were particularly profound, but they were real.

We live in a scary world now, but at least the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction has abated.