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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."
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?
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?
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.
They didn't even know these five warheads (not armed, and not able to be armed) were off the base in Minot until someone in Louisiana noticed that they were "hot" shots.
To lose track of one warhead - much less FIVE - is a very serious transgression.
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
It's not obvious to you?
You've GOT to know where these things are always.
You can't accidentally stick them on some transport.
If anything deserves a tonne of Red Tape and Bureaucracy, it's the storage and movement of Nukes. Surely.
I was reading this thread, for entertainment. Then I read this comment and my skin crawled.
So flying over other countries with nukes on board is okay, but its not back home?
*runs*
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh please.
The Japanese had it coming.
Period.
Japanese abuse of anyone non-Japanese was all but government policy. Japanese troops tied women to trees in Nanking and drove sharpened bamboo poles up their vaginas. American prisoners of war prayed to be bombed by their own forces to end their suffering.
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.
We dropped a couple bombs, killed 80,000, and they surrendered - but even then there was a plot by Japanese extremists in the Imperial Army to steal the tapes of the Emperor's surrender radio broadcast before they could be aired, as they wanted to keep fighting.
A "demonstration" of the atomic blast for the Japanese would merely have been suppressed by the Japanese military.
The Japanese got off easy. When a nation chooses to embark on wars of aggression and piracy, its citizens must bear the consequences. It's a lesson we in the US should learn, as we meekly accept a government that appears more corrupt with each coming day, but to argue that the use of nuclear weapons during WW2 is to ignore the historical realities of the time. The world was a big old slaughterhouse back then, and with a couple of big booms we ended it.
The lesson we should take from that time is how General MacArthur turned Japan into a thriving democracy within five years. If the Bush administration had been less concerned about how to maximize profit for civilian contractors and more interested in studying what MacArthur did for Japan and what the Marshall Plan did for Europe we wouldn't have such a mess in Iraq right now.
That having been said, they weren't in a condition that they would of detonated if the plane had crashed; 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.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
You know, Dr. Strangelove references aside... This does prove my hypothesis:
To err is human. To really fuck up, you need to work for the government.
Honestly, the Average Joe can get in trouble with the law for driving 47 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone.
But this? "Whoops. Looks like I accidentally put nuclear bombs in my plane." Did they ever figure out whose fault this was? I'm just trying to figure out if he'll be fired (low level employee) or given a Congressional medal (high ranking official).
I am European, but the answer seems simple to me: if USA has nukes it is not a threat to the USA. If allies of USA has nukes, it is not a big threat to the USA. If enemies of the USA has nukes on the other hand, it is a big treat to the USA. In other words it is in the USA's interest to have nukes, but deny their enemy to have nukes.
Except it is not so simple. It is not a foregone conclusion that it really is in the US's best interest to have nukes, and to deny them to anyone they don't like.
There are plenty of arguments that argue for everyone having nukes.
Given the US has nukes and no one else does, the US is both resented and feared. Worse the US is tempted to use them as leverage to further its own goals, which in the short term leads to 'benefits' to the US, but in the long term leads to things like terrorist attacks on US cities, and violent anti-americanism around the globe.
Clearly this wouldn't be in the US's best interest.
Now I'm not saying the current situation is the result of the US having nukes, per se, but it is the result of the US leveraging its economic and military superiority against the rest of the world.
And now, its economic superiority is crumbling, and the world is faced with a lone superpower that is increasingly desperate. I don't think that is in anyone's best interest.
Its eerily frightening. Bush/Cheney in particular have shown that congress, the courts, and so-called checks and balances are weaker than we might have hoped. Calling one's opponents terrorist sympathizers, perpetrating the pretense of war, shrouding everything as a national security issue, stuffing the supreme court with allies, and all the other political tricks when taken together... well... a "Hitler" could potentially do a lot of damage at the helm of the US before he was stopped; and its not clear exactly who would stop him.
Could the US elect a madman? Why not? Its happened elsewhere. And if history has shown us anything, its shown us that it tends to repeat itself.
Keep in mind, you are speculating.
Well, "rounding down" is more like it. Are you deliberately ignoring the months and years that preceded the events that drove their surrender?
I still cannot bear the thought of nuclear bombs being dropped on innocent civilians.
But... you're OK with the Japanese army sitting in various ports, factory towns, and other facilities and cities throughout Japan, and being "conventionally" bombed into oblivion, along with the civilians they're standing next to? How about the factories and shipping facilities (such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), staffed and supported by civilians, but with their output entirely directed to supporting the fight-til-the-end Japanese military? What technology, available in the 1940's, are you proposing we should have used in order to get Japan to surrender? The only other one available had ALREADY BEEN TRIED: to wit, massive conventional bombing, in advance of an on-the-ground invasion. Were you paying ANY attention to what happened on the countless Pacific Islands that had to be handled that way? The Japanese mainland would have been unbelievably worse, because a devoted Emprorer-obeying population would have largely done the same things that Japanese soldiers did in Okinawa or elsewhere: fight to the death.
You're confusing the fact that, owing to their surrender, far fewer Japanese soldiers and civilians died than would have in a bloody block-by-block invasion of the mainland with anyone feeling generous about that. That fewer of them died is just frosting on the cake. The CAKE was the end of the war, without having to send half a million US solidiers and marines into horrific urban struggle that would have made the insurgency in Iraq look like a football game in terms of collateral damage to non-combatants. This was 60 years ago! The conventional conquering of that ground would have been far, far worse for everyone involved. But the motivation for getting them to surrender was to save OUR people from having to do it in a vastly bloodier, more costly way. It's just luck for the average Japanese citizen that they didn't have to have every village burned down, every town square riddled with machine gun fire, and vastly more people caught up in horror that - because of a limited but violent solution in Hiroshima, and because the Japanese military thought maybe it was some sort of one-time stunt, Nagasaki - didn't have to happen.
And we keep talking about ALL THE JAPANESE lives we saved.
Actually, "we" are simply OBSERVING that fact. You're the one that's obsessed with preferring a conventional invasion of the mainland, and somehow preferring "standard" deaths of far more people. Which is pretty perverse, really, when you think about it. But you're not really thinking about it, obviously.
We shot to kill, not to make them surrender.
False dichotomy. We shot to kill because no other action, as had been amply demonstrated by the Japanese military over and over again, would cause them to surrender.
We wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor.
Gross simplification. We wanted to shut down the entire campaign that Japan had put into motion, of which things like Pearl Harbor, or the brutal rape of Nanking, were merely episodes. The military regime that authored those events and which was torching so much of the Pacific rim, needed to be stopped. And there was no fiercely effective UN (hah!) to somehow make them do so through angry letters and corrupt sanctions. Every minute that the Japanese continued with that campaign, untold thousands of people died. You clearly think it's rude to stop them using violence, but you are spectacularly silent on just what method you think would have actually worked more quickly, and with fewer deaths.
We wanted mass carnage and devastation.
Has your shrink ever talked to you about "projection?" Regardless, we DID want devastation, in the two limited places where we deployed
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.