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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."
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
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.
From the CNN story, "The crew was unaware that the plane was carrying nuclear weapons, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the extraordinary sensitivity and security surrounding the case."
Hard to take special safety measures when you're not even aware of what you're carrying.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.
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.
> 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?
Now *that's* +5 Funny.
Max.
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.
Barksdale, where they landed, is in fact where bombing missions in the Middle East are staged out of. Politerati can't decide whether this was a real leak by a concerned officer who wanted people to know that the U.S. was staging nukes for Iran; or a deliberate leak by the Bush Administration so that Iran would know.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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.
"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"
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
We can tell U.S. Plutonium from Soviet Plutonium from Chinese Plutonium. Rather easily, I gather.
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.
I was reading this thread, for entertainment. Then I read this comment and my skin crawled.
I'm with you on this one. I was listening to the news earlier and I was thinking the exact same thing.
However, I seriously doubt that nuclear weapons are staged in such a way, so it doesn't make sense that an officer would be worried about the use of the weapons. Secondly, I doubt that it's so easy to get a nuke on a plane that one can mistake a rack of nukes for a rack of anything else, so it was probably loaded by order; however, a hypothetical officer may be worried about leadership decisions that led the bombs to be put on the plan, and thought that the only way around the situation was to go to the press, otherwise an unsuitable leader would remain in a position of power, and the incident would be swept under the Air Force rug. That's plausible assessment.
This really does smell more like a political leak. The thing that bothers me most is that I'm not sure what end it's supposed to achieve.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
And I was not even allowed to check in toothpaste.
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.
Nonsense. Safety analysis of multiple weapons in an accident scenario has been part and parcel of nuclear safety since nukes got small enough to put more than one on a delivery vehicle. I spent the first 8 years of my career at Los Alamos doing just that. What Tom Clancy novel did you get your assertion from?
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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.
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