[wlindley]

In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hiroshima, Nagasaki) which were Able and Baker.

Able was an air burst over Bikini (thus the name of the swimsuit).

Baker, the water burst, was the world's first atomic disaster; as a result of Baker, the third scheduled test Charlie was cancelled. My father died years later of colon cancer, perhaps not unrelated to contaminated air and water at the Eniwetok base afterwards.

FUBAR indeed.

[somat]

The change from able... to alpha... was a NATO thing. some European countries don't use the "a" in "able", so it was changed to the "a" in "alpha"

[dfox]

Also there is a way to pronounce all of the NATO alphabet words that is not exactly a normal english pronounciation in order to make the first letter obvious and to reduce the possibility of mistranscription (the most obvious example is “nineR”). Sadly this does not really work in Czech, as laypeople will very often interpret “keˈbɛk” as K. (So the takeaway there is to not use NATO phonetic alphabet when you are dictating the pickup code to the package pickup point clerk)