The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus describes how an almost inexplicable series of events lined up to permit a B-52 crew to fly from Minot, North Dakota to Barksdale, Louisiana:
Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.
The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane’s wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.
That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.
Read the rest to get a feeling for how an almost unthinkable collapse of weapons security led to six nuclear weapons being unaccounted for – and only loosely protected – over 36-hour period.
Avoid reading the rest if you remain convinced that was some kind of insanely clever plot engineered by President Cheney to move six nuclear weapons to Barksdale for further transit to the Middle East where they’d be used in some kind of attack on Iranian nuclear sites. Which we would have been able to subsequently deny had not the devious plan gone off track when no one bothered to tell either the delivering air crew nor the receiving ground crew what to do with the weapons once they got to Barksdale. Which, oops!
Unless you think that maybe Walter Pincus and the Washington Post is on this. After all, cui bono, right?
Update: Demonstrating once again that one kind of lunacy is the ability to simultaneously hold two mutually antagonistic beliefs, those who have at last realized that, well, this probably wasn’t an insanely clever plot by President Cheney to nuke Iran have nevertheless come to the conclusion that this lapse in security is somehow the Chimperor’s fault. Because he’s so damned stupid that he isn’t personally seeing after the security of obsolescent USAF ACMs in Minot, ND apparently.
He should have known!
Lord, I do wonder who these people will be blaming for, well – whatever – in 18 months’ time.
This whole incident is unbelievable to me.
My first tour was on an AE, sometimes we had ‘specials’ onboard, sometimes we didn’t.
But the extra care taken when we on-loaded or off-loaded ‘specials’ .
Complete verification of the warhead’s each time they moved..
How do you you not know which had ‘nuke’ warheads and which did not.
This is just such a disturbing story all the way around, particularly since we’ll never see the details of the break downs involved. Although I feel for the poor E-4 or E-5 who first noticed it… “Uh, Sergeant, how come the tell tales are different on this MER?” He had to be thinking it was some kind of test.
We got babes powering up Chesapeake bay (well, ‘near’) handing out medals while others on the bridge are enjoying the nice day.
We got some dude who breaks out the booze for a party (this cannot be my Navy!), has a little fire down in the engineering spaces , can’t find enough sober to fight it.
We got jet jockeys strapping on some Nukes , “As for the air crew, they’re bus drivers at this point, as far as they know.” or care.
Sorry fellas, but our ‘sophisticated’ casual attitude towards chemical mood modifiers/enhancers doesn’t cut it with me. Oh!! …..No Connection!! I beg to differ. Strongly.
Singapore has a system that deals well with the problem, if any one cares.
B-52H Stratofortress – ~$160,000,000.00
AGM-129 – $4,000,000.00
Drinks at the Club the night before – $110.00
Letting your nuclear guard down long enough to completely destroy any shred of trustworthyness – Not exactly PRICELESS.
They had me at: “While Air Force officials see the Minot event as serious, they also note that it was harmless, since the six nuclear warheads never left the military’s control. Even if the bomber had crashed, or if someone had stolen the warheads, fail-safe devices would have prevented a nuclear detonation.”
Nothing say’s “no big deal” like THAT statement. What happened to all the nuclear security measures we used to have? Sure, they were a pain in the A$$, but, we never lost track of a silver bullet (that I can think of). I remember all the special extra times I was required to provide samples as a member of the PRP aboard ship. Need more of that, maybe. Seems to me, once the Big Bear went away, so did our concern for security. Hope it changes… soon.
You said “Lord, I do wonder who these people will be blaming for, well – whatever – in 18 months’ time.”
No no… if they get their “brand” of representative in the oval office they will suddenly become deaf and blind: What is the definition of “is”? He didn’t sleep with that girl.. (they did it in the closet… Shhhh).
You get the picture. There will be no blame… ever, if a sainted Democrat is elected.
we never lost track of a silver bullet (that I can think of)
5 February 1958
A B-47 carrying a Mark 15, Mod 0, nuclear bomb on a simulated combat mission from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida collided with an F-86. After three unsuccessful attempts to land at Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia, the B-47 crew jettisoned the nuclear bomb into the Atlantic Ocean off Savannah. The Air Force conducted a nine-week search of a 3-square-mile area in Wassaw Sound where the bomb was dropped, but declared on April 16 that the bomb was irretrievably lost. The bomb was rediscovered in September 2004.
Then there’s the lost nuke off the Ticoduring Vietnam, those off the Scorpion and several others (total of about 50 US and Soviet) weapons that remain unlocated/unrecovered (most are Soviet and almost all are at the ocean’s bottom).
- SJS
…and we won’t mention the night Goldsboro was almost nuked by a hydrogen weapon after a B-52 came apart in the air…
- SJS
You get the picture. There will be no blame… ever, if a sainted Democrat is elected.
No, it will be the reactionary forces who will be blamed. Of course, those would be the same ones blamed in the Communist world for setbacks and opposition…
- SJS
fer Chrissake SJS, I wasn’t even a seaman semen in 1958…
besides… the ‘we’ I was referin’ to was my previous commands… works to get me outa this jam anyways! Thanks for the info.
Lex, the only thing I’ll be blaming you for is, “why isn’t the book in print yet?”
Lee:
Just chalk it up to the nuclear curmudgeon in me
-SJS
Steeljaw, is that one off Tico the A-4 with a nuke under and an ensign still in it, somewhere on the bottom of the sea? I think things like that are why the Navy in general, and Bob Ballard in particular, are so anti-salvage lately, going against a thousand years or so of the law of the sea.
M’self, I had me some shrimp from Canveral Seafoods, about a month after Challenger unincorporated. Krista was delicious.
Um, that’s “Canaveral.”
JTG:
The one and the same — and it turns out it was much closer to Japan than originally told which caused no end of troubles – doubly so since Tico was returning from a line period off North Vietnam…
- SJS
Curtis LeMay must be in rotissery mode.
Time to bring back SAC.
As someone who spent 15 months at a nuke base as a SAC-umcized security droid, this boggles my mind.
Multiple levels of security procedures were disregarded at multiple levels of command. While no system is perfect, the nuke security system has to be as close to it as humanly possible. There will, no doubt, be a renewed emphasis on secuirty at all levels.
Cui bono? Who do you think benefits!!??
Mr. Pincus and Mr. Warrick have written a story, they are trying to ‘float’ a scenario. They do their best to pretend it’s no big deal since, after all, “no harm was done.” Even the military thought there’d be no interest by the press, according to WarPinc.
Who do you think benefits? The people who would very much like to get this out of people’s minds, out of the spotlight, that’s who!
For a great read, check out The Wayne Madsen Report’s article titled “B-52 Nukes Headed for Iran, Not For Decommissioning: Airforce Refused” at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6909.
[...] sort of holding the people responsible accountable for their mistakes is exactly the sort of thing conspirators would [...]
The delivery system is exactly the same for HE and Pu238 warheads. I was one of those glow in the dark sailors and stowing regular and hightest weps in the same magazine would never occur…How did they mix these up.