Air Force Bomber Mistakenly Carries Nukes
Maybe the conversation went something like this:
"Hey, have you seen my nukes?" ... "No, I haven't touched anything." ... "I just put them down here a minute ago." ... "Don't worry. They're probably under a pile of papers. They'll show up."
OK, well, maybe it didn't sound quite like that. There must have been some panic last week when Air Force officials realized that several cruise missiles with nuclear warheads had been, well, missing. The Military Times reports that they were mistakenly strapped onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Aug. 30, meaning for a few hours, they were unaccounted for.
Of course, the Air Force says the missiles were always under its control and that, because the bomber was flying over the United States, there was no chance of the missiles being seized by a hostile force. So the big question becomes, "But what if they crashed and took out half of some state with them?"
At no time was there a risk for a nuclear detonation, even if the B-52 crashed on its way to Barksdale, said Steve Fetter, a former Defense Department official who worked on nuclear weapons policy in 1993-94. A crash could ignite the high explosives associated with the warhead, and possibly cause a leak of the plutonium, but the warheads' elaborate safeguards would prevent a nuclear detonation from occurring, he said.
Right. Just like the safeguards that keep nuclear warheads from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think Don Shepperd, a retired Air Force major general and military analyst for CNN, was on the money when he said, "This is a major gaffe, and it's going to cause some heads to roll down the line."
One commander has already been fired.
4:05 PM ET | 09- 5-2007 | permalink
