Nuclear Nose Cones Mistakenly Shipped to Taiwan

Reservoir Hill writes "The Pentagon announced that the United States had mistakenly shipped to Taiwan four electrical fuses designed for use on intercontinental ballistic missiles, but has since recovered them. The mistaken shipment to Taiwan did not include nuclear materials, although the fuses are linked to the triggering mechanism in the nose cone of a Minuteman nuclear missile. Taiwanese authorities notified U.S. officials of the mistake, but it was not clear when the notification was made. An examination of the site in Taiwan where the components had been stored after delivery indicated that they had not been tampered with. The fuses had been in four shipping containers sent in March 2005 from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., to a Defense Logisitics Agency warehouse at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. It was then in the logistics agency's control and was shipped to Taiwan "on or around" August 2006, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordering Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald to investigate the incident."

Comments

Re:Nosecones?

[jonnythan]

Not really.

The electronics and detonation systems used in nuclear bombs are very advanced, and very difficult to get right. A large portion of the time spent developing a nuclear weapon is devoted to the detonation electronics.

Mistakenly handing over a crate of said electronics would give a nation a significant shortcut toward developing their own nuclear weapons.

Re:Nosecones?

[Ellis D. Tripp]

I saw the story on TV news last night, and the items they showed looked like the stereotypical "nose cone", with a big wiring harness and connectors hanging out of the open end.

What I am curious about is exactly WHAT the electronics here consisted of. Are we talking about the system that senses altitude and triggers the detonation sequence (which would be serious enough), or was this the actual "X-unit" electronics package that fires all the separate detonators on the explosive lenses to compress the plutonium pit?

If the latter is actually what they shipped out (complete with the krytron switches, high energy capacitors, etc.), then some heads REALLY need to roll over this one. The media isn't being all that specific about what is actually involved here, either because the DoD isn't telling them, or because of the usual "dumbing down" of anything that might be considered too technical for Joe Sixpack to care about.

Re:Nosecones?

[orclevegam]

Nothing quite so fantastic as all that. First of all, China will be a self correcting problem. We outsource to them currently because they're going through a period of rapid industrialization that allows them to produce items who's quality if quickly approaching that of ours, but because of the rapid industrialization their industry controls haven't gone into place (which make for safer work environments and products, and also add a fair bit of overhead to the final cost) which allows for cheaper products. Once they achieve parity with the rest of the modern world the next step is to introduce the proper industry controls at which point costs will also achieve parity and it will no longer be economically advantageous to offshore to them.

Secondly, we knew of the mistake almost as soon as it happened. It's just that we only recently finished processing the paperwork. The next step is to file the paperwork that gets those fuses sent back over here. ETA is somewhere in 2015.