The Military Times brings word of a screw-up in the United States Air Force that has already cost a squadron leader his command and sent shocked headlines around the Web.
On Aug. 30, a B-52 bomber took off from Minot Air Force base in North Dakota with between five and six nuclear warheads, the report says. They were supposed to be detached from cruise missiles before the flight.
The good news: the plane did not embark on some rogue mission straight out of TV’s “24,” instead landing safely and without the intervention of Jack Bauer at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
The bad news: the weapons were missing from Minot during the three-hour flight, and no alarms sounded. At first glance, that’s extremely scary — loose nukes! — but there was “never a danger to the American public,” according to one official quoted by the Military Times. Even if the bomber crashed, there would be no nuclear detonation:
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, [Steve Fetter, a former Defense Department official who worked on nuclear weapons policy in 1993-94,] said.
“The main risk would have been the way the Air Force responded to any problems with the flight because they would have handled it much differently if they would have known nuclear warheads were onboard,” he said.
The military immediately sent alerts up the chain of command, including President Bush and Gen. Peter Pace , the chairman of the joint chiefs, Agence France Presse said.
And the Air Force launched an immediate investigation “to find the cause of the mistake and figure out how it could have been prevented,” the Military Times said. It evidently faulted the squadron commander, as a fairly damning quote — “the Air Force has lost all confidence in his ability to handle nuclear weapons” — suggests in an NBC News report.
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