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
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
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.
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?
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.
We are supposed to know where the weapons are at all times. They were not supposed to be transported. The Air Force was supposed to transport some conventional cruise missiles.
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?
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.
Having worked on relevant software, I can confirm that just the unclassified side of arming a cruise missile warhead involves multiple steps, some of which only happen after launch. For example, the onboard computer waits for a characteristic maneuver to happen before it goes to the next step in the arming process.
"Live" is not the word I'd use, except maybe as opposed to "dummy". The scary issue, as pointed out elsewhere, is that the inventory tracking broke down.
Didn't you read the label?
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
Actually, that is an interesting question. The warheads are not armed per se, that's true. But if they were properly loaded then the B52 would have controlled the arming, i.e. they would have gone live had they been fired. On the other hand, an "anonymous source" says that pilots didn't know the warheads were real. That is also a mystery because the only way the plane's systems would not know they had real warheads on the missiles is if the missiles were not properly connected into the plane's systems. I can also say that warheads destined for decommissioning are NOT transported mounted on missile boosters. They are very carefully packed in specialized shipping containers and transported on cargo planes (or special trucks or trains but usually cargo planes). In addition, the little bit of news we have isn't entirely clear if it was the warheads being decommissioned or the missile motors. I assume the warheads, so there are a lot of unanswered questions at this point.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
He's not claiming that it never happened before, just that it's never been reported before.
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.
WWII = 1939-1945
:)
The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress flight took place on April 15, 1952, almost 7 years after the end of WWII. This was a test flight of a prototype, not a production plane; the B-52 was . The B-52 has been modified, updated, and adapted to meet the changing needs for a large, long-range, high-level bomber. It was initially designed as an intercontinental nuclear strategic bomber, and has since been adapted for low-level flight, conventional bombing, launching cruise missiles, tactical attack, direct- and indirect-fire ground support, photographic reconnaissance, etc.
The airframes are indeed aging (the last B-52H airframe was completed in 1962), but it boils down to efficient use of resources and adaptation of existing equipment. It's such a superb aircraft that any possible improvements to be had with an all-new design would be so small as to make it not worth the expense of said new design. There is no finer long-range, fast-subsonic, jet-powered strategic bomber aircraft on the planet right now, nor is there likely to be in the near future.
There are other examples of military equipment that hasn't undergone a significant redesign in a long time due to lack of need. The current M4 Carbine that is issued to infantrymen in the Army and Marine Corps is simply a slight evolution of a design from 1956 - the AR-15, adopted by the US Air Force in 1961, re-designated as the M16 in 1962, and type classified Standard A in 1965, meaning it became the individual weapon of choice for US military personnel. The M1911 pistol was the standard sidearm of the US military for 74 years, from 1911 to 1985. The M60 general-purpose light machine gun has been around since 1957, and was largely based on a WWII German design, the MG42.
In short, just because something's been around for a while doesn't mean it's no longer useful
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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.
Oh please, they were just 6 nukes. My grandma handles more dangerous payloads everyday. Stop whining. Plus, traveling over the fly-over states the pilot probably wouldn't have noticed if he dropped any. Less cows, maybe. Only gripe I have with those fellas is they didn't mistakenly head up north and have an accident, ridding us of the friggin canadians once and for all. We'll never have an opportunity like this again. This could've been the answer to Celine Dion.
Anything after 1980 is classified.
That's at least 11, and probably 12 missing atomic weapons, just from the US arsenal.
Then there's a handful of them that aren't missing, but were either destroyed in an accident, the detonation failed, or were destructed in the air.
The recent incident pales in comparison.
"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.
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"
Moderators: WOOOOOOOOSH! That's the sound of sarcasm being accidentally flown over your head.
Come on mods... this was clearly tongue in cheek. Except the part about Celine Dion, of course. Nuclear annihilation just isn't enough in some cases.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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
And I was not even allowed to check in toothpaste.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice fear mongering but it's completely inaccurate. For starters the pilots would know what they are carrying and the days of 24/7 airborne nukes ended back in the 60s or 70s. It was too expensive, with too much room for error and quite redundant when we have a force of boomers that can't be detected/engaged/destroyed before launching.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They'd know they were carrying ordnance, and they'd know that the bombs might be nukes, but they wouldn't know for certain what was actually inside the casings.
For every nuke in our arsenal, there's a set of dummy weapons with exactly the same look and feel. The only people allowed near the vehicle while the ordnance is being loaded are the loaders themselves, and even they probably don't know whether the weapons are real or not.
It's a security measure. A load of nukes is both extremely valuable and extremely dangerous. If the Bad Guys knew they could get an arsenal by attacking a specific plane or by bending a few members of a specific flight crew, they'd try it. By the same token, if a few members of a flight crew managed to convince themselves it would be a good idea to convert a certain part of the planet to dirty glass, they might try that.
Running fake weapons most of the time eliminates the certainty of payoff in both cases. But an investigation and reprisals are damn well certain, so it just isn't worth attacking a plane or letting a few bombs fall on the off-chance that they might be real.
You're correct (as far as I know) that we stopped carrying live nukes at the end of the cold war, but that doesn't mean the drills with dummy weapons have ended. We really don't want to be at the low end of the learning curve if we end up needing nukes in a hurry.
In this case, it sounds like someone screwed up a requisition. Instead of calling for dummy weapons to be used in a practice flight, someone got real nukes instead. And yeah.. that's a case where the CO in charge of the base is in serious deep shit. We really don't want the people who take care of our nuclear arsenal to get confused about their inventory.
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.
To: new.guy@fortbrag.gov
Dude, I toldya five times already... the live ones are coded OMGWTFBBQ, and the fakies are ROFLCOPTER.
Quit fucking up or I'll suspend your ass with pay.
--1_1