Jeffrey LewisAtomic Nuked Veteran

Murdoc asks: “How do they verify that an applicant is eligible for this plate? With a Geiger counter?”

Apparently not, according to Eric Felten of the Wall Street Journal:

And Alabama offers what has to be the single most bizarre plate on the road today, a tag that reads “Atomic Nuked Veteran.” Those who would like to advertise this particular fact of their personal history must get a letter of verification from the Defense [Threat Reduction] Agency proving that they “were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation due to atomic bomb and weapons tested from 1946 to 1962.” No Geiger count is required.

Comments

  1. Murdoc (History)

    LOL! Thanks for the link.

  2. Jeffrey Lewis

    No problem, man.

  3. Don Gwartney (History)

    As you can imagine, most of those vets records were “lost”One of our vets was there and will be happy to tell you about it. http://www.home.earthlink.net/~dgwars/

  4. James (History)

    Not quite as dramatic, but it bears mention that the Nevada Test Site also has its own license plate.

  5. superdestroyer

    The name of the agency changed a few years back to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Before that is was the Defense Special Weapons Agency.

  6. Jeffrey Lewis

    Yeah, I should have put the current name in brackets.

  7. Drew (History)

    And before DSWA, it was the Defense Nuclear Agency.

  8. K. Boland (History)

    I grew up in Los Alamos. Does that count for a special license plate?

  9. Karl Rahder (History)

    Your number of hits from Chicago will no doubt surge soon, or at least creep up almost imperceptibly, since I just emailed all my international relations students about the license plate. I had thought that Washington State’s “Square Dancer” plates were the strangest – but how wrong I was…