Slashdot Mirror
Air Force Mistakenly Transports Live Nukes Across America
kernel panic attack writes "Surely the late Stanley Kubrick is somewhere smiling at this one. Forbes.com has a story about a B-52 Bomber that mistakenly flew 6-nuclear tipped cruise missles across several states last week.
The 3-hour flight took the plane from Minot Air Force Base, N.D, to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30.
The incident was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force probe, said Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell."
Well, boys, I reckon this is it - nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies. Now look, boys, I ain't much of a hand at makin' speeches, but I got a pretty fair idea that something doggone important is goin' on back there. And I got a fair idea the kinda personal emotions that some of you fellas may be thinkin'. Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human bein's if you didn't have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nuclear combat. I want you to remember one thing, the folks back home is a-countin' on you and by golly, we ain't about to let 'em down. I tell you something else, if this thing turns out to be half as important as I figure it just might be, I'd say that you're all in line for some important promotions and personal citations when this thing's over with. That goes for ever' last one of you regardless of your race, color or your creed. Now let's get this thing on the hump - we got some flyin' to do.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
Is this even a story? Yes, we possess tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and yes they get transported sometimes. So what?
Some news sources say five, some say six.
I know what you're thinking. 'Did they lose six warheads or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. You've got to ask yourself a question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
So, how's that rigorous nuclear oversight working out for you?
Wrong branch of the service, but if Admiral Hyman Rickover were still alive he'd be shitting cinderblocks when he heard about this fiasco. I'm still not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Can't stop the Beta? Time to evacuate to ##altslashdot at webchat.freenode.net - Slashcott in effect.
is still waiting for their baggage to show up.
What?
We can drive the nukes across the country, we can throw them on a train, or we can fly them. Personally, I'm much happier knowing they are being flown places then being sent via ground. I don't care how many safe guards are in place to prevent the weapons going off accidentally, there is always the risk of a crash sending radioactive material all over the place (not an explosion, but a leak). At least in the air the material is safer from accidents (how many air-to-air collisions are there?), and a plane can always find the most depopulated areas to fly over. Trucks and trains don't have that option.
Or maybe that's just me.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
Calls to mind another recent situation http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/15 55206
What is amazing is that the weapons made it all the way to Texas without Minot AFB missing them. Without going into details, I can say from experience that the US nuclear warheads are very closely tracked. Before this, I would have said it would be impossible for the base to lose track of them for even a few minutes, much less three and a half hours, and then have to be told by Barksdale that they were on the B52 when it arrived. The thing about the munitions crew being decertified until the investigation is finished is a miss direction. The airmen who load the planes don't make the decisions. And (unless things have changed significantly since I was in the USAF) they would not be able to get the warheads to load without a great deal of security and authorization. You don't just go and pick those things up when you want to. More likely, someone got plane ids or missile serial numbers mixed up on the wok orders. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what went wrong.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I would hope we would have protocols in place that would ensure we never lose track of any nuclear weapon. If a nuclear weapon were detonated in a U.S. city how could we verify it wasn't our bomb if we can't keep track of where our weapons are?
"B-52, this is the United States Air Force. You have entered U.S. airspace. If you do not leave immediately, we will be forced to open fire."
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
The problem was, they didn't know the nukes were on board. It may or may not make sense to fly instead of drive them, but you have to agree that transporting nukes without knowing the nature of your cargo is a pretty dicey business.
Nuclear missiles fly YOU over several states!!!!
Why on Earth are we still using WWII-era bombers? Are they just hauling equipment around until they can no longer be repaired?
First of all you have to wonder how it is that the media gets such a story and second of all how they are allowed to tell it.
Doesn't this matter equate to national security, or is national security more a spam and IP issue?
Certainly Homeland security has to be in on this information????
But again, how is it that the media are even allowed to find out about such an insident?
Maybe the US government wanted them to media it, in order to commit more terrorism....
Now maybe someone will flamebait mod me down but seriously, how does the media find out about what
would otherwise be considered a typical US military plane flight? Did the plane accidently have a big "warheads on board" sign stuck on the side of it?
Vote.
The nukes were not armed during the flight. Gotta love the fair reporting on Slashdot. The word "live" didn't even appear in the article.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Why are we only finding out about this now, almost a week later? Is it just for security purposes, to keep information under tight control concerning our nuclear weapons, or did no one notice this story until now? I'm going to assume its A and not B, because if B is true, then who can I trust to tell me if something is going wrong?
How exactly does one mistakenly mount nuclear weapons on a plain? Is it like the stack on the left is the fake ones, and the one on the right the real nukes? I was hoping that nuclear weapons are somewhat more securely stored.
Considering the logistical and safety related problems when transporting those weapons on the ground, could it be that they intentionally moved the weapons and now that the news got wind of the story call it a mistake?
Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson has a different take on this incident:
t aging_nuke_for_iran
http://tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/sep/05/s
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
I don't set what all the fuss is about. Any time you say nuke or nuclear everyone thinks it is the end of the world. Sheez that is the same reason the NMRI was change to MRI, people hear the word and run the other direction. Just looking at this http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclea r-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused -nuclear-war.htm of past incidents this seems very minor. I know we broke treaty on accident, but that is all.
Oh yeah we need to keep the nukes around so when the doomsday asteroid comes we can blow it up into a million little pieces.
Clearly, North Dakota has WMDs and must be invaded.
I more meant that it would be better to move nuclear weapons around as air cargo, rather than high security truck convoys.
An extra flight is serious, but not dangerous.
Where as a leak may not seem serious, but be entirely dangerous.
In this episode Jack Ryan works for the Russian nuclear agency and is worried about the safety of American nuclear warheads so he comes to the US to inspect B 52s. Meanwhile someone explodes a nuke in Moscow and everyone thinks its the Americans as they have a hardliner president. The rest of the plot can remain the same and we have a new blockbuster. Or not. Americans are too chauvinistic to appreciate they are just as big doofuses as the Russians so while movies showing the russian nukes are in danger of getting lost work in Hollywood the same would not work for US nukes even though the Russians have actually never lost a nuke yet while the Americans just lost it again today. I say again for everyone knows they lost nuke material three times- Russia, France and Israel all got their nukes from lost American material.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Here's one take, take your own grain of SALT. Can't take it with the ABM Treaty since Bush withdrew from that in 2001.
http://tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/sep/05/s
So I called a 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.
Now maybe there is an innocent explanation for this? I can't think of one. What is certain is that the pilots of this plane did not just make a last minute decision to strap on some nukes and take them for a joy ride. We need some tough questions and clear answers. What the hell is going on? Did someone at Barksdale try to indirectly warn the American people that the Bush Administration is staging nukes for Iran? I don't know, but it is a question worth asking. I dearly hope that's crazyhead speculation. But even if this is just an accident, this is fucking scary.
http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2007/09/flying_nuclea
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The news outlets are using "armed" to refer to the B-52 being armed with nuclear weapons, not (so far as I've seen) in reference to the weapons themselves being armed. Though they're not all being as clear about that as they should be.
:)
Still, arming a nuke isn't always as hard as it's cracked up to be... remember all those all-zero launch codes we had during the cold war? Now that's a weak password.
He's not claiming that it never happened before, just that it's never been reported before.
Is it shocking that the US Military accidentally forgot to remove live Warheads before the Cruise Missiles were moved? Yes.
... You can't just accidentally set them off. If the plane had crashed more than likely the weapons would have been destroyed in a fairly inert manor.
But there was so little chance of accident detonation that it is a far smaller story than one might immediately think.
Modern Nuclear Weapons are one of those things you have to really WANT to detonate
Plus considering even the military didn't know they were moving Nuclear Weapons, the chances of someone attempting to steal them is next to nill.
I wonder how long until the nutbag conspiracists start claiming this as a dry run? Oh wait, it's already happening...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Professionals treat any gun like it's loaded, always.
Suppose a records keeping error might be the first step in an elaborate plot to steal not one but six nuclear warheads.
Suppose a few months after they went missing, five of them blew up in major cities.
New York.
Washington D.C.
Chicago.
Los Angeles.
San Francisco.
Suppose one were held back to make you wonder if it was going off in your home town tomorrow.
Yeah, so it seems like a minor bookeeping error, compounded by accidental transport. However, the error also implies that they were transported by a crew that didn't know they had nukes on board, landing at a base that wasn't prepared to handle the nukes securely, since they didn't know they were receiving nukes.
It's not a minor thing. It's a big, big story. It's a bigger story than will ever be admitted.
Suppose this wasn't the first time this happened, only the missing nukes were not detected because they were removed from the cruise missiles before the receiving crew noticed they had warheads. This terrifying scenario is why a full inventory is being conducted right now.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
No, the worst thing that could have happened is that they could have been stolen.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Didnt Sideshow Bob do this once? Perhpas the crew flew cross country to eradicate television. My oh my cartoons have a lot to answer for.
Bryant: Christ, Deckard, you look almost as bad as that skin job you left on the sidewalk.
Deckard: I'm going home.
Bryant: You could learn from this guy Gaff. He's a goddamn one man slaughter house. That's what he is. Four more to go. Come on Gaff, let's go.
Deckard: Three. There's three to go.
Bryant: There's four. That-- That skin job that you V-K'ed at the Tyrell Corporation, Rachael. Disappeared. Vanished. Didn't even know she was a replicant. Something to do with a brain implant says Tyrell. Come on Gaff. Drink some for me, pal.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
http://www.portaec.net/library/peace/1950_bomber_c rash_in_bc.html
TERRACE, B.C. (CP) -- A determined group of local citizens wants some answers about the mysterious crash near here almost five decades ago of a B-36 bomber carrying an inactive atomic bomb. The gigantic bomber -- 50 metres long with a 70-metre wingspan -- was apparently flying without a crew when it plowed into Mount Kolaget in the vast Coast Mountains range on Feb. 13, 1950.
It was carrying an inactive Mark IV Fat Man atomic bomb similar to one dropped on Nagasaki when it got into trouble over Hecate Strait, according to a U.S. military declassified report. Three engines were ablaze and the giant aircraft was losing altitude. Crew members dropped the bomb over the strait and bailed out.
Damn, I just used up my last mod point earlier today.
...he continued to read a story to a classroom of young children.
"...the chances of someone attempting to steal them is next to nill."
I don't know about that, I seem to remember John Travolta being involved in this plot....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
"I know there's one country in the world that doesn't have some horrible weapon of mass destruction, they don't have some horrible weapons lab in the mountains... Jamaica. They would never make an atomic bomb. They may make an atomic bong. But I'd rather fight a war with an atomic bong. Cuz when the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation and radiation. When the atomic bong goes off there's celebration!" -- Robin Williams
Circumcision is child abuse.
Has anyone called Jack Bauer yet???
Or maybe just those Godless blue states.
Central Command: Blue Bird C451, this is central, do you copy.
C541: Copy, over.
Central Command: We have good news and bad news for you, over.
C541: Ready to reciev orders, over.
Central Command: Good news is you're going to be famous. Now your payload..
C541: Yes Sir.
Central Command: Can you verify your current payload?
C541: Kidney beans and tomatoes sir, over.
[Muffled laughter, static]
Central Command: Actually, those are nuclear warheads on your left wing, lieutenant.
C541: Spicy kidney beans? Over.
"We have a Broken Arrow"
"A what?"
"A Broken Arrow. It's when we lose a nuclear weapon."
"I don't know what's scarier, the fact that we lost nukes or the fact that it happens often enough that we have a name for it"
Journalists are idiots.
Your comment was the comment of an idiot.
You must be a journalist.
Your comment was soo stupid, you must be an exceptional journalist.
You must work for the New York Times.
I feel tinfoil even suggesting it, but...
This sounds an awful lot like the kind of "accident" that happens on purpose. Russia has just recently resumed strategic bomber flights - am I the only one that thinks that this may just have been a particularly ham-handed attempt by someone at the pentagon to remind the Russians that, hey, we have bombers with nukes too.
We were supposed to be transporting formerly-nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that had had the warheads removed.
It's a big deal for two reasons:
- We're obligated by international treaty to not fly nuclear weapons.
- Anytime nuclear weapons are someplace they're not supposed to be it's a problem. If no one knew these things were not where they were supposed to be, they could have just as well been, well, anywhere.
Not to mention, the crew of the plane didn't know they had a nuclear payload. That means that if they had some sort of issue with the flight, they are in the position where they're not making the right decisions.
paintball
Or hadn't you heard?
If I hadn't spoken to so many people over the years to totally fail to grok basic issues regarding nuclear weapons, I'd say you were right. I'm inclined to think that the AC is sans clue, as that's considerably more likely to be the case than a keen sarcastic wit. The keen wits around here usually post under a login.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The reports said that a bunch of air force weapons handling people have been removed from their posts. Careers have been ruined by this, so I don't think it was psyops.
It's spelled NUKEEELAR, at least until Jan 2009!
well, you know what they say:
"shit happens"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palomares
it wasn't a mistake. You don't screw up stuff like that.
Well, when I first moved into my apartment I was a little curious about the plane traffic flying over me. Now I have to worry about a possible "friendly" nuke being dropped on me?
It is really cool seeing those bad boys cruising low over the interstate coming in for a landing.
I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
Dumbass. The bombs didn't have triggers. Still a bad mistake though.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
..in the Blast Corps!
Its a damn good thing they were not also transporting several boxes full of deadly venomous snakes from Minot to Barksdale zoo ... otherwise Hollywood scriptwriters would be prompted to lower their 'standards' to a whole new level :)
China has infiltrated the defense network and has control of the nuclear inventory, movement and tracking system. They've created this world PR slap in the face to send a message that they own the US military and have visibility into everything the US plan and do. Obviously, they're not going to admit to it either.
Previous answers :
1) We are more RESPONSIBLE about nukes than others!(RTFA)
2) We don't share the knowledge with others(We honestly don't know where israel got those! Seriously! And okay that dictator in pakistan both has WMDs and is profilerating them, but hey... their chief scientist said "ok sorry!"... and plus they are our allies, you know? different rules so the said dictator gets away scott free for something we killed saddam for.)
3) We will never use them! They are too *dangerous* to be *ever* used! (Okay so we dropped a couple on Japanese civilians including women and infants, and we are the only country in history to ever use them ... but hey it was *us* ... that is different!)
Imagine the fallout that would have occurred if one of them had accidentally been dropped :P
A nuclear weapon without its pit is not a threat to anyone. The pit is the fissionable plutonium sphere that is imploded to produce a nuclear detonation. In early U.S. nuclear weapons, the pit was stored separately from the rest of the bomb. To arm the bomb, the weapons officer opened the bomb casing and inserted the pit. This was usually done in flight, to reduce the danger of an accident during take-off. Since it took hours to reach the target, the crew had plenty of time to perform the procedure.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
....the Iranian army today is still trying to figure out why three dummy missiles were dropped on Tehran....
From the beginning this did not smell like any accident. As for careers getting ruined, there are plenty of people in power to whom this would be acceptible collateral damage, as long as they achieved their objective. So perhaps somehow a setup. But what, indeed, was the objective? My gut says it could be used as an excuse for some new scandal, wherein we find other nukes missing somewhere, setting up the possibility of internal terrorists. Which would be a perfect excuse to clamp down, especially if someone now pops a dirty bomb in an American city. Remember, they never did find out who mailed all the anthrax, but it was Ames genome, meaning it came from a US military lab. So someone inside the military. And now, the potential of missing nukes as an inside job? That can't be good, if it becomes real.
That would be some friendly fire.
Forget the terrorists. The US army itself is more dangerous than the enemy.
How do you explain such a swap? (Sorry sir, Sgt. Billy Bob took the middle-left crates instead of the ones left-middle.)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I think we ought to add ASCII art to the axis of evil
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Couldnt have anything to do with Russia resuming bomber flights over the arcitc circle, hmm?
Bauer saves the america by manually defusing falling nuclear warheads in mid-air, without a parachute.
Read radical news here
So which SqlServer bug will be blamed for this coup attemp^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbureaucratic foulup?
And I was not even allowed to check in toothpaste.
Well if we cant find our own Weapons of mass destruction and we know we have them. If we cannot find your either we know you must have the too !
Well, I've never been involved in anything even remotely nuclear, but it seems to me that half of good security is imagining in advance what kind of shit can hit the fan. So I'd be more worried if they didn't have a name and procedure for it until it started happening often enough.
You can see it in programming too. There are people who can write good code, know all the patterns, but can't seem to think of a boundary condition or anything out of the ordinary until it actually happens. _The_ classic example are buffer overflows: the average programmer can't seem to think of what would happen when someone stores more than 4096 characters in his fixed buffer. Oh, he'll fix it when someone reports the bug, but can't seem to think of it in advance until he had to fix it 10 times before.
Or I've had to fix someone's... let's call it a custom file transfer program, without getting into many details, which had 6 different ways why it couldn't continue an interrupted download. And 4 for the upload, btw. I don't even mean that he'd just restart the transfer from start instead of resuming... I mean it couldn't even do that. The program was otherwise well designed, but the implementation ran flawlessly, and was thoroughly tested, on exactly one case: the fortunate case where nothing goes wrong, nothing is out of the range he assumed, etc. I'm sure he would have fixed it retroactively, when it goes productive and shit hits the fan, though. Had he not been moved to another team, that is.
The most valuable people are those who can think in advance what could go wrong, and write the code to handle it from the start. You know, the guys who, when they write a malloc, they already think "buffer overflow", and write the ifs or assertions to guard against it.
So based on that (admittedly flawed) analogy, I'd say the same applies to the military. Anyone can sit around until a nuke is stolen, and only then get in a panic and try to figure out what to do. But it makes me sleep easier at night that someone thought up a name and procedure for it long before anything remotely similar happened.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We do it everyday. Normally over the oceans, but we still do it. At any one time, they are on their way to whoever we consider the enemy. The pilots never know when they are carrying live or not.
Oh did I say Indiana??? I'll send the mayor a gift basket....
Either we have a situation where everything surrounding the regulation of our nuclear arsenal is completely messed up, or there was something intentional about the transporting the nukes the way they were. Never mind the fact that these went in the air -- the relevant fact is that they weren't being transported as *cargo*, in a *cargo plane*, but rather they were *mounted* in the weapon pylons of a *bomber*. Even with nuclear regulations aside, how incredibly dense do you have to be to load nuclear weapons in a deployable state without specific instructions to do so?
At the end of the investigation, I am betting that someone -- likely the air crew and their superiors -- thought it might be some real hot-doggin fun to fly the nukes and take photos or something. It just doesn't make sense that this could have happened without their knowledge. Even without specific briefings to inform them as such, shouldn't a bomber crew *know* what a nuclear warhead looks like, compared to the usual munitions that they carry?
Mounting Nukes (armed or not) to a planes wing - as they *say* it happend - is a mistake. However, this whole thing could just be some 'sword-rattling' (as we call it in Germany) towards we-own-the-northpole Russia, we're-building-nukes Iran or both. Maybe it's just as someone here said: Someone leaked that somebody is rearanging the US nukes and they molded a PR stunt out of it. "OMFG, if someone would've dropped them, OMFG they are so dangerous, our (and this is an actual quote) potential enemies need to know that we can handle our nukes professionally."
I smell lot's of proactive appliance of psychology here.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Well, the B-52 does in fact carry large amounts of cargo, which it unceremoniously unloads when flying over the destination. Getting someone to sign for that cargo at the end point has, historically, been a bit of a problem, but with this particular bird they chalk that up as a feature rather than a bug.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
From a little light reading on the subject ( I like all things nuclear ) wouldn't the pilots have suspected something was up when it took longer to get airbourne and the plane handling characteristics had changed a lot, considering they only have 6 conventional weapons onboard as opposed to some very heavy assed nuclear based one.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
If the Russians discovered that the US had been moving nukes around on planes, it would certainly explain them suddenly, publicly, restarting their flights.
Deleted
That's why there are, ta-dah! "transport" planes. Like a C-5. Or a C-17. One of those can probably carry a lot more than 6 missiles. Bombers are designed to transp... OOPS, did I drop that on you? things, not to deliver them from point A to point B intact with nobody getting hurt.
You don't put a cruise missile on a B-52 because you need to ship it somewhere. You do it because you want to make some kind of point.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
Meh, it looks more like another 24 plot... Those nukes haven't been there just by accident, some terrorists took control over the plane and its load but they didn't anticipated Jack being on board too. After all the government just had to make up a story, so people won't panic. Tune up for the newest episodes soon in your cable TV.
/* Wherever you go there you are... */
OK, USA is keen to invade any country it thinks isn't fit to have nukes. But you can't tell the difference between LIVE and inert nukes ? Time the rest of the world invaded the US & took their nukes off of them.
I mean, the US managed to completely miss Al-Quaeda and hit Iraq instead.
Politics gets in the way.
Deleted
And not as good as the MG-42 either.
Could you imagine Kansas getting their hands on nukes? We'd all have three weeks to start implementing intelligent design in science class and ban gay people or they start the rain of fire!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Another standout example is the M2 .50 caliber machine gun. The good old Ma Deuce 50 cal. Introduced in 1921, still in service everywhere, and better than anything else in its class. A thousand times better than the piece of crap XM312 slated to replace it.
...3 hours to press the button, and they still missed!
It's not "We got nuked, screw the elections we're declaring martial law" time yet is it?
;).
It's always too early for that
These were not "live nukes".
There are several levels of physical safeguards. Typically the polonium initiator and/or a chunk of the fissionable core is stored in a separate bunker, plus several arming devices are stored separately and not configured except when we're at Defcon 2 or at biyearly qualification runs.
Not to mention the bombs do not become "live" until a rather involved configuration procedure, involving several levels of secret codes. Even when "live", they can't go off unless a series of very unlikely events happen in the correct order, including specific changes in altitude, airspeed, arming, g-forces, and parachute release.
So there's no way the things could have gone off. Maybe spilled a little fissionable material in case of a crash, requiring a few bucketloads of dirt to be removed from the site.
Really, not much to see here.
How easy is to modchip the PAL code of the nuclear fission engine!!!
You need to solder the fine cables and put the modchip to crack the PAL code.
To paraphrase my favorite wise man...
"These aren't the bombs you're looking for.....move along..."
KK4SFV
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
these nukes still have to be armed the old fashion way, right? By tapping in an unlocking code? Surely they weren't unlocked!
Something tells this guy will be looking for a new job real soon.
What?
telling you to be afraid.
Live or not there is still a significant risk of plutonium contamination should anything happen to that plane. The warhead used on the ACM uses IHE which reduces the chance of an explosive dispersal, but AFAIK the pit is not fire resistant. Strong arguments were made in the past against flying the weapons needlessly because of the risk of contamination in an accident and the less than stellar record of B-52 operations in the 1960s. I wrote about this in more detail yesterday here.
Well, The Simpsons is such a great show, and we need reminders like this to keep us watching.
it's called posturing. they wanted nuclear somethign to make the papers - its' like they're telling al-qaeda "don't forget we still have these"
"the worst would of been a radiation leak that could of been cleaned up. The military has egg on their face but no-one was put in danger."
That's ok then. I'll pop the USAF a line to let them know if any of their nuclear armed planes are about to crash, to drop them on your property. Heck, if there's no danger it won't matter if the nukes crack open next to where your kids play. Only a radiation leak after all.
"Would have" not "would of" by the way.... I've never understood why coders of all people are slack with their grammar. You guys wouldn't tolerate it in the code you write...
n/t
"Enough is enough! I have had it with these MF nukes on this MF plane!"
Where was Homeland Sec. during all this? Were they too busy policing perilous nail clippers on board commercial flights and potential Toiletry Catastrophes of unprecedented magnitude? I'm not sure if I completely agree with the apparent focus of their resources. Perhaps they should consider adjusting the scope of their monitoring activities.
It's not so much that nukes were flown, but in the accountability of nuclear weapons. While the nukes were always under Air Force control and there was never any danger, the fact remains that the Air Force didn't know where six of its nukes were for three hours. They thought they were at the base when in fact they were on a plane. All of our military must have physically-verified paper accountability of all of its nuclear weapons for every second of every minute of every hour.... you get the picture.
Imagine an inspector coming up to the commander in those three hours, "Where are those nukes?" and he says "Oh, they're here in this --- OH SHIT!" You don't know at that moment if they've been misplaced or if they've been stolen. Everybody panics. The President must be informed.
Any violation of the accountability rules is taken dead seriously. You can get punished if the nukes never moved but you messed up the paperwork, so heads will roll here.
Disclaimer: I worked with nukes before, although not these.
"Well, I can't rightly make it out either. It could be an S or it could be a 5. Don't suppose it makes much difference, 'cause they're both ready to fly. Why don't you take that one? She's a bit closer to the hangar door."
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The literal translation for the German saying actually is "saber-rattling", which also exists in English. The literal German translation for "sword-rattling" would be "Schwertrasseln", a term that doesn't exist in German.
My brother-in-law is a nuclear weapons technician trainee at the base the weapons flew out of. I haven't heard from him for a while, but I've been refraining from emailing him a link to the story and asking, "What did you do?!"
The problem was, they didn't know the nukes were on board.
Bullshit. The entire crew has eyes, and they can look out the cockpit windows and see the damn things (they were cruise missles) hanging down underneath the wings of the B52. This whole thing was deliberately done to get the media all stirred up to distract their attention from something else.
Maybe they were going "accidently" nuke new orleans...
we can only hope.
Correction: it was 110,000 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols, for a total of 190,000 weapons missing and presumed pointed back at us.
OK, I'm way late to this thread, and I know no one will read this.
And I know you are not the first one to say that they were just toting the missles off as cargo somewhere.
But here is my question:
Why is cargo, even weapons being carried as cargo, mounted on the wings, presumably on weapons-launching pylons?
If these missiles were being toted around the country as cargo, why weren't they put in a crate and sent in the belly of a C-130 or something?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
What if you only need to carry 6 and the bomber is already flying there? Why waste a flight and more fuel?
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
It's a message to the ruskies that we have nukes on our planes too, so stop the buzzing Norway crap.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
The most conservative estimates at the time by the US Military estimated that an invasion of the home islands would have cost at least 500,000 civilian Japanese lives. That's conservative, mind you.
This is a myth commonly and often repeated, used by teachers to qualm the guilt middle schoolers feel when watching videos of our country blowing up tens of thousands of civilians. It's easy to picture "those evil japs" fighting to the death with pitchforks and samurai swords against "our boys" for "honor" and to "save the emperor", which is why it made for great propaganda, playing to the racism of WW2 vets and their families, for a good 40 or 50 years.
The fact is that Japanese war machine was so run down they were sending pilots on suicide missions because of a lack of fuel and weapons. Said pilots were not exactly thrilled at the prospect; most of them did it only because the knew they'd be shot if they didn't. Military leadership was very divided on whether the war should continue. For months, some were deeply worried about open revolt leading to revolution among the general populace, which was tired of war, tired of hearing their sons died. Sound familiar?
The use of nuclear weapons to end a war which was largely won, was the greatest display in foolish use of military might.
Please help metamoderate.
"...I've HAD it with the motherfsckin' nukes on that motherfsckin' plane!"
Sorry. It's been too long.
The Air Force, and the other branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.... the USAF does not exclusively run the nuke program in the USA, routinely moves nuclear weapons across the country all of the time. It is necessary for those involved that they know how to handle the real thing and not just play with dummy warheads all of the time.
Generally speaking, the "live" warheads will only go up when there is a time of increased alert (aka the various DefCon levels) mainly to prevent an accidental detonation, but nukes have additional safeguards well above and beyond normal chemical detonation (gunpowerder and C4 explosives) devices. And even those are safeguarded where during some training flights where true dummy warheads will be used that don't have any of the avionics or any kind of explosive on the airplanes. This would be for demo flights like at an airshow or for a flyby at a stadium for events like the Superbowl. I will note that since 9/11 when I've seen these demo flights in a public venue, the warheads on the fighters doing the flyby seem to me as if they were live warheads and not the standard dummy missiles that were on the fighters before hand, but this is just raw speculation based on relatively non-expert observations.
Even more surprising to me about this particular incident is that it was mentioned in the press at all. It is not our responsibility as citizens to know the status of any aircraft, ship, or other military unit in the U.S. armed forces or citizens of other countries to know about their military like this. Indeed knowing that information and having it publicized can significantly jepordize the lives of those military personnel who serve with that unit. If a reporter does find out this kind of information, they shouldn't publishing it, under threat of being prosecuted under federal espionage laws and divulging classified material. This is not to bury a blunder that some general or admiral made and doesn't want to have ruin his future military career, but to protect the lives of those who serve and to ensure that when the military does go into action that they have every possible advantage against potential enemies, and not to give potential enemies additional information that is not necessary.
This information should simply not be published in any news outlet, and I would have to agree that this is very likely to be a deliberate leak with authorization from a very high level in the military chain of command to let potential enemies know America has nuclear weapons, and routinely make them available to junior officers (aka the pilot of this particular aircraft) and have them available at a moments notice to be delivered nearly anywhere in the world. If this is the message, then the USAF should consider that the message is received, at least by an ordinary American citizen.
If anybody reading this think it is a sign of gross incompetence on the part of the USAF, they are missing the point of what really happened. You shouldn't be hearing about things like this in the news, as it is about unit operations and routine operations at that. If every time a nuclear warhead is moved was published in the news media, you would hear about it every day As such, this isn't really "news", any more than even having the space shuttle be moved to the launch pad. And the USAF has far more than 4 bombers, nor does the USAF do only 3 flights per year with its bomber fleet. If anybody is showing a huge lack of judgement, it is on the part of the editors and reporters involved with this news story, not USAF personnel.
AMMO!
For those unfamiliar with Air Force traditions, IYAAYAS stands for If You Ain't Ammo, You Ain't Shit
Members of Air Force munitions squadrons, responsible for the storage, handling, and loading of weapons on USAF aircraft, are a notoriously independent bunch. Except when transporting and loading weapons on aircraft, they live in their own tightly guarded compounds (REALLY tight if storing nukes). Some say this is to limit access to the weapons, but many in the Air Force believe it's to limit exposure to the "special" breed of troop that spends his days counting BBs. This seclusion has given them their own separate identity, which they proudly proclaim with the above acronym as well as shouting AMMO! in unison whenever their squadron is mentioned.
Something tells we won't be hearing AMMO! yelled around Minot AFB for a while. . .
What?
Oops indeed, well it could have been worse. There could have been a mechanical failure or an accident or something like that.
I am glad Dick Cheney wasn't the pilot.
It is very much that nukes were flown, it is a treaty violation, and a biggie. It is the reason there is account ability in place to help ensure this doesn't happen.
;)
"...the fact remains that the Air Force didn't know where six of its nukes were for three hours."
I know the press likes to make it seem that way, but that is probably not true at all. Based on my experience I would say it isn't true at all.
They new they were on the missile. They new the missiles had been moved. If anyone went to look for them, they would have known immediately where they were.
Yes, of course the president is notified, because he will need to deal with the political ramifications of the treaty violation. Not bbecause people are 'panicking'. In my experience with nukes we don't panic, we quickly deal with the issue.
Sorry, but I feel I need to be clear The media is implying that the nation was in some sort of dangerous situation and someone could have been killed. Some sites are implying that this nearly lead to a nuclear explosion. Fortunately the main stream media has at least put the comments in saying detonation wasn't possible;which as you know is true.
"Disclaimer: I worked with nukes before, although not these."
meh, who hasn't?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We just told the enemy that B-52's are not routinely armed. That in order for a B-52 already in the air to respond, it would have to land and be armed, and take off again.
Doesn't anyone else recognize the potential for this information to be used as a weapon?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The only message that I can think is that the US is going to do B-52 runs into the Persian Gulf, to make the Iranians nervous and tempt one of there AA crews to get nervous, shoot at us, and provoke a fight. If the Iranians think that we are prepared to do bombing runs immediately, they MIGHT not care... but if they think that we might ACCIDENTALLY nuke them, that might affect things, no?
Does it change the security procedures in Iran if you think that provoke the US -> a few conventional weapons in sensitive areas changes to, we might nuke the hell out of you and blame it on paperwork snafus?
I dunno, but I can't imagine news media running this story without SOME clearance... They generally check before running something that might endanger national security. It's one thing to expose an arguably illegal CIA prison operation, and I think that the NY Times gave a heads up so that national security wouldn't be damaged (get sensitive stuff out before the story)... Our media LOVES Yellow Journalism and sensationalism, but blatantly undermining national security with this sort of stuff, not likely.
Alex
haha, no.
.. not even Cuba anymore.
This isn't America "saber-rattling", as it's called here as well. Position nuclear submarines is saber-rattling. This kind of saber-rattling would be used if we needed to remind are neighbors we have them, fortunately America doesn't need to do that with it's neighbors.
The US moves it's nuke, or pretend to move it's nukes, fairly often. Just using land based, or sea based, means. Back during the cold war, we did saber rattling with ICBM exercises as well.
"..potential enemies need to know that we can handle our nukes professionally."
of course. Having mutual assured destruction doesn't work if your enemies think your incompetent.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here's the big problem with the incident:
The missiles sat around for ten hours unguarded. One or all of the warheads could have been removed and diverted to anybody...
There is another subtle, but still important problem:
The flight crew had no idea they were transporting nukes.
This was a 'Pinnacle' event.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
how nuclear weapons worked, maybe they wouldn't get so worked up about this.
Unless a set of instructions are handed off to the weapon in the proper sequence,
it wouldn't matter what you did, the weapon would not go off.
They would have to punch in the PROPER code to arm the missile. Even if they were
practicing a "war game", the code they entered wouldn't be the proper code to
make it go off.
If the weapon were launched, and it flew a "mission", upon impact (most likely a test
range in the desert) the only thing that would happen is that it would bury itself
in the ground.
As with anything, fear is usually caused by humans lack of knowledge of a particular
subject. Once you understand how something works, it will usually take the fear
away. But, there are a lot of "peace lovers" who could understand 100% of anything
connected with the military, who, would be against anything associated with the
military. Funny though, if it wasn't for the sacrifices of the military over the
200+ years of the USA, they wouldn't be able to protest anything.
It'll still make a hell of a conventional blast. IIRC, Fat Man had several TONS of high explosive in it. So "not a threat" isn't exactly right -- just less of one.
How does "Boomers" translate to Ballistic Missile Submarine?
If anything they should be called "Ballmers"
He once arrived at school with a note from his father Elwy Yost explaining that "Graham is late for school because I had him stay up late to watch Citizen Kane"
Sounds like he was brought up well to me.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
I wonder what nukes-flying-over-your-head sounds like... oh wait.
If you were one of the great grammar Nazis, you'd recognize that he's using "would of" as a modal auxiliary. Although modal auxiliaries look like verbs and are part of the verb group, they actually are a word class of their own, not a subset of verbs. As a result, "would have" may transform (using Modern English rules) to "would of" or more commonly as "woulda", as well as other modal auxiliaries.
Furthermore, as a student of languages, one should recognize that language does not stagnate. It does not hold the same rules forever, lest we'd never have evolved from pre-proto English, to proto-English, to Old English, to Middle English, to Modern English. Language is always in a state of devolution or evolution depending on your perspective.
Now get off my lawn you young whippersnappers.
Now, picture the same scenario on bomber practice, only they strap nukes on by mistake. It really doesn't matter if the nukes never actually go off - if they break up on impact, it'll be worse than any terror "dirty bomb". There have been historic incidents of nukes going missing, being dropped on the wrong target, being involved in midair collisions, etc. There is plenty of historic data that suggests that a modern accident in a civilian area would be a total disaster.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't know if Cargo crews have the certifications and clearances to transport said weapons, bomber crews do.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
or at least it was.
The potential microgram lethality of Pu is similar to the 1-gallon lethality of H20. Possible, but not inevitable.
(From http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/)
The committed effective doses[9] and the increased probability of cancer death resulting from them have been studied extensively, as outlined in Appendix A. The estimated cancer fatality risk associated with exposure to weapons-grade plutonium is 12 cancer deaths per milligram inhaled, or 1 per 0.08 milligrams inhaled; and it is 0.0021 cancer deaths per milligram ingested,[10] or 1 per 480 milligrams ingested.[11] For perspective, an inhaled mass of about 0.0001 milligram would increase the cancer mortality from about 200 in 1000 (the risk of cancer mortality from all causes) to about 201.2 in 1000. This risk increase corresponds to a decrease in life expectancy of about 15 days; for comparison, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day reduces life expectancy by about 2250 days (more than six years).[12]
--
phunctor
The Davy Crockett nuclear-tipped RPG (efffectively) was man-portable and had a yield of about 0.044 kT. It was _said_ to be more dangerous to the enemy than to the operator.
--
phunctor
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Lemme get this straight. One of our planes, flew in our air space, and it was a bomber carrying bombs (ok, missiles with nukes, but same concept). Surely ordinance is misplaced fairly regularly. It's more important to keep track of nukes, but as I read in the paper this morning, these are apparently "advanced" warheads. Isn't the whole point of not using the gun-type nuke to avoid an unwanted detonation? So there's not a whole lot of danger from one of these things crashing (which probably happens more than we're allowed to know anyway).
It's funny because in game theory when you play "chicken" (e.g. Cuban missile crisis, Iran's nuke program) to win you have to be seen acting irrationally or even crazy while opening all the good cards you have.
Makes one wonder...
them to the Air Force base in question (Barksdale) because that is where the Iran war is being tasked out of for the Air Force.
See his article and resulting posts - some from knowledgeable people - here.
Money quotes:
"On September 6, 2007 - 7:12am thepeoplechoose said:
I find this hard to believe. That is, I agree with Larry that this isn't something that could occur very easily through oversight. The procedures that are established for weapons loads on aircraft are very rigid with all manner of checks. I find it hard to believe they were all overlooked. The number of screwups that would have to occur stretches the likelihood of probability to the breaking point. There are manuals and checklists for this type of thing that have to be rigidly followed and the process requires signatures for multiple discrete steps from qualified weapons teams etc. I just can't see where all the controls on this were violated. If this really happened as described we have some very big problems. And I know because I was an NCOIC for NAV/Weapons avionics computers in the USAF for 12 years. The workcenter / personnel I supervised serviced the on board computers that controlled the in flight release / launch of weaponry. I've been out for twenty years but it was very serious business then and it can't have changed in that sense. The screwup implies weapons load team and weapons load supervisor, ground crew personnel, line chief and air crew all screwed up. The sheer number of violations of discrete procedures that had to be violated is a stretch. And the aircraft was likely on alert status to have been loaded with said weapons. To make the transit to Barksdale it would first have to come off alert status. Coming off alert status automatically means the weapons would have to be off loaded. Flight (Wing) ops initiates the status change. Maintenance ops is informed and then has to dispatch a weapons team to off load the weapons payload. Until that happens the aircraft can't be released back to flight ops for flight. This entire process is controlled like crazy. It makes no sense. Statistically this is possible, but it is right up there with winning one of the multi-state lotteries. In fact, the number of controls probably makes it an even greater statistical improbability. One thing for sure. A lot of people will be standing tall in front of the 'old man' and they'll be hard pressed to answer his questions. If it even happened as stated."
Another poster offers another scenario:
"On September 6, 2007 - 8:52am Amyfw said:
I've never seen so many people who know so very, very little about nuclear weapons say so much of so very little consequence. I'd try to correct all the errors and misperceptions in these threads, but it would take all day and I have real work to do. Just a few comments related to a bunch of posts. First, the missiles in question, the Advanced Cruise missiles, are slated for retirement, and will be transported to Barksdale for that purpose. You can't tell by looking (from the outside) whether the missile is equipped with a warhead or not (so the bomber crew, even if it did a walk-around, could not tell). This is an error in the weapons-handling process, not an error of the bomber crew. This missile does not have a conventional variant (that would be the older, Air-launched cruise missile, which does look very different), so it was not a conventional/nuclear mix-up. Someone asked about the IMF Treaty. No such thing. Its the INF Treaty (Intermediate NUCLEAR Forces). It had nothing to do with air-launched cruise missiles, they are strategic, not intermediate, so its not relevant. As was noted, the warheads on the ACM are W-80s. Someone asked about the warhead size. Using the 15kt of Hiroshima to judge the size of this missile's warhead is irrelevant; we've long deployed warheads much larger than the Hiroshima warhead, and, yes, 140kt is the standard, unclassified size for the W-80. So there's no consp
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As I understand it, the error was that the nukes weren't fully disabled, so that they could not be activated.
What does Kerplakistan have to say about all of this?
[citation needed] It's not "some people" that claim Islamic science and mathematics were responsible for great advances. It's virtually every historian of science that claims that. Also... astrology? No. How about astronomy? Additionally, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-khwarizmi
Almost every scientific "advance" was in fact produced by Jews living in a state of slavery under muslim rulers. However, the borg-like islamic system is indeed good for spreading some knowledge to those in the proper positions.
From your link: "...was lost in the original Arabic.." talking of the work of the person in question. I guess it wasn't that important..
Islam has nothing to do with any advance. It's the religion and lifestyle of stagnancy and regression. Of course, it may happen that once per several hundred years, a genius is born. But intelligence gets no help from Islam.
So am I the only one who noticed the ACC's total command stand down for September 14? All things considered, isn't that kind of a bad idea?
I've had it with these motherfuckin nukes on this motherfuckin plane
The problem is, if this is true, and the loading crew cannot tell whether the the missile is live or not from the outside, how would they have found out so quickly at Barksdale that they had several extra firecrackers with no waybill? One would imagine that they would not notice until they actually go to decommission the missiles. (Unless one of the ground crew is clever enough to realize that a real missile weighs more... ?)
As you say, the screwup was obviously more than just pulling the missiles from the wrong stack and the load crew is likely not at fault, but I am also curious as to how exactly it was discovered, and, perhaps more to the point, whether other incidents may have gone undiscovered.