"In the very early days and weeks of pregnancy, the recycled atmosphere [in a submarine] includes elements that are very unsafe for an unborn child," she notes.
Citation needed. What elements, pray tell? I'd wager the air in the average, modern submarine (especially an American one) is of a significantly higher quality than most major cities. Oh, wait, I was forgetting the ultraconservative mindset - polluting the air inside your own premises is bad because your employees can get sick (this is not, it should be stressed, because you give a fuck about their wellbeing, it's just that it allows them to sue your ass), but pumping all your exhaust fumes up the chimney so they diffuse into the biosphere cannot even conceivably do any harm, ever, no matter how many other people do the same thing or for how long. Besides, if everyone else is doing it, you should be allowed to as well, and any intervention to fairly regulate everyone at once is teh evul gubmint crushing basic freedoms and violating your god-given right to vent whatever filth you feel like on your own property; that it then diffuses across other people's property can hardly be blamed on you!
"So let's suppose three weeks out [to sea], a married sailor discovers she's pregnant. And the ship commander has two choices -- either [he] violate the stealthy status of the submarine by surfacing for a dangerous evacuation, or he tells her that she will have to remain as she is throughout the deployment.
Pregnancy test immediately before putting to sea and general issue of birth control pills leading up to and during the voyage. Problem solved. Also, I think anyone you'd trust enough to be put in charge of a goddamn nuclear weapons platform probably has a sufficient grasp of the concept of long-term consequences not to literally fuck around on duty anyway.
"This is an impossible dilemma that can and should be avoided," says the military watchdog.
Counterexamples exist; not impossible. And I'd expect any competent armed force to take a somewhat dim view of any defeatist statement of impossibility like that, without any apparent effort to even try to come up with an alternative.
