Loose nukes — this time, they’re ours

September 6, 2007

It’s still very hard to fathom how something like this can happen, even accidentally. I realize that there are occasional bureaucratic snafus in any multi-layered system, even one as sophisticated as the U.S. military, but I simply cannot wrap my head around the notion that an Air Force bomber accidentally flew six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads across the country — and no one realized the nuclear-armed missiles were missing for several hours.

An Air Force B-52 bomber flew across the central United States last week with six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads that were mistakenly attached to the airplane’s wing, defense officials said yesterday.

The Stratofortress bomber, based at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, was transporting a dozen Advanced Cruise Missiles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Aug. 30. But crews inadvertently loaded half of them with nuclear warheads attached.

Air Force officials said the warheads were not activated and at no time posed a threat to the public. But a timeline of the episode supplied by the Air Force yesterday to House and Senate lawmakers indicated that the missiles in question sat on a runway in Louisiana for nearly 10 hours before workers noticed that the nuclear warheads were inside.

Military officials also said they were concerned that the warheads were unaccounted for several hours while the missiles were in transit. The missiles never left Air Force control, they said.

According to reports, these cruise missiles have a range of about 2,000 miles and are “designed to hit precision targets well behind a potential enemy’s lines.”

At this point, there are far more questions than answers. Worse, all of the questions are of the catastrophic variety.

First, I’ve heard a variety of competing ideas, but Larry Johnson argues that this may not have been an accident.

…I called an old friend and retired B-52 pilot and asked him. What he told me offers one compelling case of circumstantial evidence. My buddy, let’s call him Jack D. Ripper, reminded me that the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site.

Then he told me something I had not heard before.

Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can’t imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations?

His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.

Josh Marshall notes that he’s heard from knowledgeable sources that this really was just a “pretty damn serious accident.” Atrios added, “I have no idea if it really has anything to do with Iran, but the idea that nukes just happen to accidentally climb aboard a bomber is a wee bit absurd. There’s some story here.”

Military oversight of nuclear warheads is, I would imagine, about as thorough as any oversight on earth. So what possibly could have happened here?

“Nothing like this has ever been reported before, and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation. “The complete breakdown of the Air Force command and control over enough nuclear weapons to destroy several cities has frightening implications not only for the Air Force, but for the security of our entire nuclear weapons stockpile.”

A munitions squadron commander has already been relieved of his duties, and other airmen have been temporarily suspended, pending further investigation.

This one will be tough to just sweep under the rug.

Since information about movement of nuclear weapons is probably highly classified, how did it happen to “leak” out unless someone in high authority wanted it to leak out? Maybe they don’t want to sweep this under the rug.

Is this a prelude to the attack on Iraq that has been rumored for this week?

What we have been told about this episode doesn’t add up. Let’s stay tuned.

  • Given all the shocking things the Bush administration has done intentionally and then lied about over and over again, I would not be surprised if this was supposed to be a secret military maneuver to send planes to nuke Iran that got screwed up. I really wouldn’t. Paranoia? Maybe.

    I feel much more “secure” about knowing what’s going on by taking huge tablespoons of salt about anything the Bush administration says. In this case, I think we can only suspend judgment or conclusion, a very tension-filled uncomfortable place to be in. No matter what anybody says.

    Terrible.

  • The misidentified nukes were being carried by a Boeing B-52. The first B-52 went into service in 1955, the last one was built in 1964. That means that the weapons were slung under the wings of an aircraft that was likely older than its pilot. The military has spent a lot of money on updating these aircraft and I’m sure that the maintenance crews do the best that they can with them but, they’re old airplanes.

    Because the pilots didn’t know that these were actually nuclear weapons, they would have felt free to jettison them in an emergency. The likelihood of them detonating was practically zero but we would have had some seriously dirty bombs courtesy of the USAF.

  • Lets see…They either lost track of enough weapons to wipe out our 6 largest cities, or they’re seriously upping the sabre rattling with Iran in the hope of provoking a reaction?

    Either the Bush regime’s mind numbing incompetence is contagious, or I’ve severely misunderestimeted their blood lust. I feel soooo safe.

  • When US and other Western leaders complain about the threat of rogue states that can’t secure their nuclear stockpiles, I didn’t realize they were talking about North Dakota!

  • I’ll stop yawning when the discussion moves from how to secure our nukes to how to eliminate all nukes.

  • something like this doesn’t happen accidentally, it’s on purpose. so are we:

    1, gaging iran’s/korea’s/china’s reactions

    2, moving nukes to the east to potentially use against people/countries in defense, or offense for economic/social/political gain

    3, moving nukes to the east for “people” (insiders) to use against us to perpetuate war and a national state of emergency for economic/social/political gain

    if 2 or 3:

    DON’T be surprised
    DO act, raise hell about it

  • I am glad the proper people are being disciplined. This DOES sound like a serious screw-up.

    I doubt there’s anything particuarly conspiratorial here, but I’d like to know the full story.

  • DragonScholar– No, the proper people are not being disciplined. The line folks aren’t to blame on this one.

    In other words, you don’t have the nukes stacked right next to the other missiles. This isn’t a case of, “oops, I grabbed the wrong one”. There is an entire fail-safe system in the check-out of weapons. If it failed accidentally, fine. But– and a big but– it wasn’t the handiwork of just a couple of low-ranking airmen.

  • “3, moving nukes to the east for “people” (insiders) to use against us to perpetuate war and a national state of emergency for economic/social/political gain”

    Wow. You can’t be serious. You just finish watching some old seasons of 24 on DVD or something?

  • @ joe mama: it’s something to consider, and it’s worked for them (whoever’s at the top) before. the world trade and pearl harbor attacks were known beforehand, and nothing was done because it offered a perfect segue into war, which traditionally profits who? the top, not the people. with that in mind, one may even suggest those events were intentional and engineered by the profiteers themselves. of course, they’d do everything they could to make such an accusation sound absurd to the average citizen. they’d be stupid not to. the only way to be sure is to investigate it yourself, read history. read read read, from as many sources as possible.

    if the end justifies the means in the eyes of the top, and killing hundreds of people is “ok”, why do you think a few thousand isn’t within their consideration? think of the knee-jerk reaction and public support for war when the country hears someone nuked us! “how dare they!” it’s unlikely perhaps, but suddenly it’s not so absurd.

    i think the real question should be, what the hell business do we have bullying countries into non-proliferation and non-agression (irony!) when we ourselves have so many nukes that we can’t keep track of them all? are warheads just laying around waiting to be spirited away? disassembling all of them everywhere is the only way out of mutually assured destruction, because as long as at least one exists, someone’s going to be tempted to use it. the proof is that some part of our administration is MOVING THEM AROUND now.

  • Nuclear ordnance is always stored in an area completely across-base from conventional ordnance—just so something like this doesn’t happen. The mere fact that half of this flight’s payload was conventional, and the other half was nuclear, ought to remove any and all doubt as to whether this was “an acident.”

    In short: This was an intentional act to prep nuclear weapons for pre-ME staging.

    Could it be the WH? Sure it could—and it could be the top brass in USAF—but it could also be the act of a small band of “theocratic patriots” within the overall USAF structure. They’re rather rife with fundies these days, y’know, and it’s really not far-fetched at all to imagine a group of these guys to get all “pro-Jehovah” by helping Armageddon along a wee bit.

    So—I’ll sit back and see how this one pans out. But if things should come to light that identify this as an attempt by the administration to foment its “glorious eternal struggle for Bushylvania,” then impeachment should be the very least of Mr. Bush’s problems….

  • According to the article I saw:

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070905/ap_on_re_us/bomber_warheads_1

    “The bomber carried advanced cruise missiles as part of a Defense Department program to retire 400 of the missiles, the Military Times said, quoting three officers who spoke on condition they remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.

    The officers said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were mounted onto pylons under the bomber’s wings for the Aug. 30 flight from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the newspaper said Wednesday.”

    In other words, the missles weren’t “accidentally” loaded onto the plane, but the nuclear warheads were “accidentally” left in the missles.

    While it may be true that “Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations”, is it possible that Barksdale Air Force Base is also being used in the process to retire 400 of these missles?

    I agree that someone screwed up, and that it was very bad for this to happen, but I think we can put the tin-foil hats away.

  • 1) If this were a conspiracy to intimidate the Iranians, why would the Air Force top brass make themselves look like complete fools? We’re trying to scare the enemy, not laugh him to death!

    2) The B-52 could not be the weapon of choice for use against Iran’s nuclear complex, as it is far too slow and visible a target. The B-2 would be much likelier to play this role, were a strike to occur (see this month’s Atlantic). The B-2, however, is not based at Barksdale, but rather at Whitman, in Missouri. Let’s hope our bomber crews are a bit more accurate with their bomb runs than they are with their deliveries…

    3) The ACM is not the type of nuke you would want to use in a strike against the heavily fortified nuclear complex in Iran: it just doesn’t have enough penetrating power to do the job right.

    I’m all for exposing conspiracies, but let’s try and make sure they’re somewhat plausible before we start tossing them around, eh?

  • Yeah right, thanks for bringing some common sense forth. Just because a base is used as a staging point for the middle east doesn’t mean it’s ONLY used for that. However, if you’re an anti-bush conspiracy lunatic, it may be easier to interpret it like that.

  • Joe Mama @14, Karmaduck was watching the CBS show Jericho.

    Yet – YeahRight @20 and rest instructing us to put the tinfoil hats away…yes, you’re probably right. BUT – Prez Cheney and his cohort, Shrub II are madmen…

  • the plane crashing would not cause the nukes to go off. it may damage them, which isn’t good, but still nothing like detonating them.

  • The real issue is our continued leadership in the nuclear arms race:

    We lead this by our actions:
    1. Ignoring our commitment in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to “achieve at the earliest possible date the cessation of the nuclear arms race” (ratified in 1969)
    2. Scutteling the ABM treaty (Bush administration)
    3. Not ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (Clinton, Bush)
    4. Pushing for the development of new nuclear weapons (earth penetrators-Bush)
    5. Supporting &/or not condeming some nations in their acquisition of nuclear weapons (Israel, India, Pakistan) , while vilifying others (N.Korea, Iran)
    6. Continuing to have a first strike policy with nuclear weapons
    7. Continuiing to threaten the use of nuclear weapons (Just listen to the present administration and to the democratic candidates) Is having a gun pointed at your head using the gun?

    We are a nation wedded to nuclear weapons and armaments in general—Just the scenario that Eisenhower warned us against in his famous speech about the military industrial complex.

    “There is no way to peace, Peace is the way”. A.J.Muste

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