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The Strange Case Of The Israeli Attack On Syria That Did Or Did Not Happen

Or Why Middle East Analysts Tend To Get Institutionalized A Lot.

The term "fog of war" is often used by military analysts to excuse their mistakes during combat. Diplomatic "fog of war" is a first or even second degree polynomial of standard military "fog of war", and right now a huge bank of such fog is covering Israel, Syria, Turkey, and perhaps Iran. The purpose of this post is to try to blow away as much of this foggy FUD as possible and allow you, my erudite and influential readers, to figure out what is really going the heck on over there.

What We Know Happened (More Or Less)

There was an attack inside Syria by Israeli warplanes. ArmsControlWonk provides an excellent summary of early reports on the matter:

• This whole shebang began when Syria’s official media accused Israel of violating its airspace and dropping munitions. AP’s Albert Aji summed up the story aptly on September 7 observing: “It was unclear what happened. Syria stopped short of accusing Israel of purposely bombing its territory, and an Israeli spokesman said he could not comment on military operations.”

• On September 12 Mark Mazetti and Helene Cooper convince a Defense Department official to confirm that Israel conducted a strike. Although the story stated that “Officials in Washington said that the most likely targets of the raid were weapons caches that Israel’s government believes Iran has been sending the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah,” Mazetti and Cooper flashed a little leg, adding “One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea.” Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, “U.S. Confirms Israeli Strikes Hit Syrian Target Last Week,” September 12, 2007. Reuters, by the way, also got US officials to confirm the strike, stating that reports about the target are “confused.”

Wired Blogs' Danger Room has a very useful post about the capabilities of the Israeli attack force involved, namely:

The U.S.-supplied F-15I "Ra'am" fighters that carried out the alleged September 6 raid to destroy alleged Syrian nuclear cache were bought with raids on such facilities in mind, according to some reports. One of the keys to the bombers' success? Their APG-70 radars, with ground-mapping capability, plus a whole host of special Israeli mods:

The [Israeli air force] arsenal includes a 1,000 lb.–class penetrating bomb known as the PB 500A1. Additionally, Israel has sought to acquire two heavier penetrating warheads from the United States. In September 2004, Israel announced that it would purchase approximately 5,000 precision-guided munitions from the United States, including about 500 equipped with the 2,000 lb.–class BLU-109 penetrating warhead. More recently, Israel has received approval to purchase 100 precision-guided munitions equipped with the 5,000 lb.–class BLU-113 penetrating warhead.

This is an awful lot of firepower to use on a simple bunker or even a small building, as later reports will suggest is the case. What is not mentioned here is that these planes can also carry nuclear gravity bombs, retrofitted into the PGM casings. Israel is believed to have several thousand nuclear weapons of varying yields, from 5 kiloton "bunker busters" to megaton-class strategic weapons. This will become important later.

The Guardian chimes in with a very important tidbit garnered from the loose lips of the chief of Israeli Air Forces at a memorial service for airmen who fought the Lebanon War last year:

[The rumors] were sketchy, but one thing was absolutely clear. Far from being a minor incursion, the Israeli overflight of Syrian airspace through its ally, Turkey, was a far more major affair involving as many as eight aircraft, including Israel's most ultra-modern F-15s and F-16s equipped with Maverick missiles and 500lb bombs. Flying among the Israeli fighters at great height, The Observer can reveal, was an ELINT - an electronic intelligence gathering aircraft. (Boldface mine.)

It seems beyond the point of reason that an ELINT aircraft would be needed for a simply bombing run on a barely-defended target in poorly-armed Syria for heaven's sake. This would be the equivalent of using an entire American Carrier Wing to attack a gas station in Southern Iraq suspected of selling gasoline to insurgents.

The attack itself (now called Operation Orchard) has become an article on Wikipedia. How fast things happen now in the era of The Internet. Sigh.

The Competing Theories Of Why What Happened Happened

At this point there are two major theories explaining this weird attack. One is the "destroyed North Korean Nuclear Materials Site" theory, pushed by Rupert Murdoch's media empire. The other is the "destroyed shipment of advanced SCUD missiles" theory, being pushed by various members of the Arms Control and International Affairs communities. We'll look at both of these scenarios below, and discover why they are both, in all probability, Horse Puckey.

The "Attack On A Nuclear Facility" Scenario

The scenario now gaining favor in Washington and Tel Aviv is based on a set of very questionable leaks from persons of uncertain reliability reported in newspapers controlled by Rupert Murdoch. This is the "destroying a North Korean nuclear proliferation site" scenario. Many influential media combines are going with this story.

The Washington Post, for example, has settled on the nuclear scenario as its favorite. It has some problems reporting it, however. This article, from September 21, 2007, contains these interesting tidbits:

Ultimately, however, the United States is believed to have provided Israel with some corroboration of the original intelligence before Israel proceeded with the raid, which hit the Syrian facility in the dead of night to minimize possible casualties, the sources said.

The target of Israel's attack was said to be in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. A Middle East expert who interviewed one of the pilots involved said they operated under such strict operational security that the airmen flying air cover for the attack aircraft did not know the details of the mission. The pilots who conducted the attack were briefed only after they were in the air, he said. Syrian authorities said there were no casualties. (Boldface mine.)

The idea of Israel wanting to "minimize Syrian casualties" ranks right up there with "resigning to spend more time with my dog" and "I didn't inhale" in credibility terms. The more useful item is the indication of a possible location for the target, near the Turkish border. This allows us to examine what might be located in such an area.

The Grey Lady (the New York Times) gets into the act with her own accounting of the nuclear facility story. It contains one perhaps useful fact:

The Sept. 6 strike was carried out several days after a ship with North Korean cargo tracked by Israeli intelligence docked in a Syrian port, according to the current and former officials. The cargo was transferred to the site that Israel later attacked, the officials said. It is unclear exactly what the shipment contained. (Boldface mine.)

If true, then something was in the ship's cargo that Israel found intolerable. And if it was indeed nuclear materials of some kind, then Israel's actions were, if anything, restrained.

So putting the wisdom of the New York Times and the Washington Post together, this affair is unfortunate but reasonable. But wait! Wired Blog's Danger Room ran this piece on September 16, which contained two somewhat more outre concepts:

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

The raid was facilitated by intel from a satellite that was diverted from spying on Iran, the story claims. (Boldface mine.)

Now this is getting good. We are still apparently up by Turkey, but now we have Shaldag commandoes and a retasked satellite to boot. It is important to note that the Danger Room piece is quoting from an article in The Times Of London, as is this piece from Haaretz, a leading Israeli news combine. providing its own framing on the whole business. It tells a far more riveting tale, one right out of a Tom Clancy thriller:

The Sunday Times reported that diplomats in North Korea and China believe a number of North Koreans were killed in the strike, based on reports reaching Asian governments about conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials. The officials noted that ballistic missile technicians and military scientists had been working for some time with the Syrians.

According to the report, the Bush Administration was given Israeli intelligence suggesting North Korean personnel and nuclear-related material were at the Syrian site over the summer, but the administration demanded "clear evidence of nuclear-related activities before giving the operation its blessing."

As a result, the newspaper said, IDF commandos "almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms" seized samples of the nuclear material and took them back to Israel for testing. The sources confirmed that the samples were identified as being from North Korea.

According to the Sunday Times, the site - near Dayr az-Zawr - now lies in ruins following the IAF strike. (Boldface mine.)

(Guess who owns the Times? Rupert Murdoch! Wow, what a coinkydink!)

So much for the "dead of night to reduce casualties" bit. But is Dayr az-Zawr "in the north of Syria, near the Turkish border", as indicated in the Washington Post article? Well, here's a map from Google Earth:


Doesn't look like it to me! So one of these articles is wrong. The question is, which one? Let's continue examining the press coverage of this situation and perhaps we can find out.

The well-respected Iraq blogger Main and Central doesn't accept the nuclear story at all, and suggests that the whole thing is an effort to plant FUD in the mainstream media by our old friend Dick Cheney. Gee, what a shock! And there is a report from the Financial Times of London which actually provides a rationale for such an action, to wit:

The US official said the administration had made a strategic decision not to raise the issue more forcefully early on in the six-party talks – which include China, Japan, South Korea and Russia – to avoid scuppering the possibility of a successful outcome because of a ”Kelly” situation.

Negotiations between North Korea and the US broke down in late 2002 after James Kelly, the then top State Department official for east Asian affairs, confronted Pyongyang over its alleged uranium nuclear programme. Three months later, Pyongyang announced its withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. (Boldface mine.)

Everyone knows how touchy the NORK's are. Perhaps Dick Cheney thought he might get another free "Kelly Unit" out of the Israeli-Syrian contretemps. Thrifty, that Cheney fellow. It does, however, tend to support the idea that any kind of dangerous Syrian-NORK nuclear cooperation is total Horse Puckey.

ArmsControlWonk also has a recent summary post up in rejection of the "nukes in Syria" theory, describing the very modest Syrian nuclear program. Bottom line, they separate uranium (the un-enriched non-weapons-grade kind) from phosphate so it can be used for fertilizer, and they have a Chinese-made (yes you read that correctly) light-water reactor which can output a blazing 27 KW of electricity for eight hours a day before it has to be shut down (presumably to cool). This later facility has a couple of glove boxes for isotope manipulation but cannot be used for any kind of isotope extraction. All these facilities are open to inspection by the IAEA and have been known to everybody and their pet loofah in the Middle East since forever. Take home message: Borat has a more dangerous nuclear program than Syria.

ACW additionally has a very tasty writeup on the Syrian phosphate uranium extraction program at his blog. Along with nice wonky explanations for how impossible it is to effectively get enriched uranium from phosphates ("superphosphates site" indeed!), it also has a very important bit of geographical data to tell us in support of the "not a nuclear site" explanation for the "attack":

There has been some speculation regarding a Syrian plant in the city of Homs, built 20 years ago to extract uranium from phosphate (of which Syria has an ample supply). Yet Homs is 200 miles west of Dayr az Zawr, the city on the Euphrates reportedly closest to the site of the attack. More to the point, uranium extraction from phosphates is a commonplace activity (without it, phosphate is hazardous as fertilizer) and there is a vast gulf separating this kind of extraction from the enrichment process needed to turn uranium into something genuinely threatening. (Boldface mine.)

Here's a quick map of Homs in relation to Dayr az Zawr to make this point quite clear (courtesy Homs Tourist Information site).



So even if there had been some kind of "superphosphates site" involved in the "attack", it would reasonably be at Homs, not Dayr az-Zayr. (Note the spelling differences on the local map, by the way. Just adds to the fun of trying to understand anything in the Middle East!)

The "Attack On A SCUD Shipment" Scenario

So at this point the "NORK nuclear site" explanation just isn't standing up at all! So what does this leave us? Well, how about NORK's other major export (besides defectors and refugees that is!), namely SCUD missiles? Well, it just so happens there are some "explanations" of what happened based on that concept, too.

First, let's turn to the BBC. It ran a story on September 20, 2007 that suggested that the attack took place near the Turkish border at the town of Tall al-Abyad. It also notes there was an anti-aircraft missile engagement involved in the incident, and that witnesses reported that Israeli aircraft were forced to retire as a result. (Remember that Washington Post piece on September 21 said the same thing about location.) Let's have a quick peek at where Tall Al-Abyad is located courtesy of Google Earth again:


Two points stand out in this map. First, this town is literally right next to the Turkish border. Second, it is a heavy agricultural area with little or no military infrastructure nearby. So having it as the location for a nuclear plant or anything else seems far fetched at best. It might, however, be a holding location for missiles (purloined letter approach) or even a transshipment point if they were to be smuggled to Iran.

Note that the BBC piece doesn't suggest the SCUD theory directly. That starts with ArmsControlWonk again, to wit:

Did the Israeli’s hit a Scud shipment? That is what Chris Nelson suggested on 9/19:

In fact, as our headline, above, notes, we have absolutely solid information that the Israeli bombing raid on Syria was aimed at…and took out…missiles and/or weapons parts. Period.

All the stories being floated about Israeli intelligence sources hinting that it was a North Korean/Syrian nuclear weapons project, or site, are BS, albeit of varying motivation.

What remains under some debate is whether the missiles/parts can be 100% ascribed to N. Korea. Most unclassified evidence … points at Pyongyang. (Boldface mine.)

And, from 9/20:

So for what its worth, our best sources continue to maintain the intel, such as it is, confirms “missiles and/or weapons parts”, most likely from N. Korea, and possibly including a Russian radar installation (which might have been helping guard the site).

Now, before you start trying to find The Nelson Report on the Internet, forget it. It is an old school dead tree thing called a newsletter, published by a major lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. And you have to know someone to get a subscription, or so I'm told. But since all the wonks and wonkettes in Washington read it like their secular Bible, it is apparently pretty reliable.

Reverend Moon is even getting into this crazy mess, with a nice writeup on SpaceWar. He's supporting the "attack on a SCUD site" theory. Here's the money quote attributed internally to the Yonhap news agency in South Korea:

North Korea has trained Syrian missile engineers and the Arab nation has bartered farm products and computers for missiles from the Stalinist state, a report said Friday. The two countries have recently strengthened missile cooperation, with Syrian engineers staying in Pyongyang to acquire technology, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said. The barter system began in 1995 due to Syria's worsening financial woes, Yonhap said, quoting unidentified North Korea watchers. Syria has shipped cotton, food and computers to North Korea in return for buying short-range missiles, it said. The United States has accused North Korea of being a leading global proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. But the cash-strapped country has refused to stop missile exports, a major source of hard currency earnings. North Korea has sold about 100 missiles to Syria, Iran and other countries each year, Yonhap said. (Boldface mine.)

Well, that's one way to avoid the international banking anti-terrorist watchdogs, trade stuff for stuff. The NORK's are sufficiently hard up that this almost makes sense; however, it really has nothing to do with the reported "incident", being a rehash of already well-known information in arms control circles. It is technically against the operating U.N. resolutions on proliferation of missile technology, but so what and who cares? There are also operating U.N. resolutions that require Israel to disband itself. Don't hold your breath on that unless you're a fish.

If you sort through the previous accounts listed above, you'll find a number of them hint about a SCUD shipment as well. So is this the smoking gun for this weird incident? Not so much. Here's the major problem, and it is geographical again. First, let's assume that the "battle" really did take place near the Turkish border as suggested. Taking that as a given, we immediately run into the problem of what the SCUDs were doing there. Syria is not going to fire rockets into Turkey (Rule One in the Middle East is "Don't Screw With The Turks!") and that is about the only thing it could do with them there. The only two logical destinations for SCUD missiles in Syria are Iran and Lebanon. Let's first examine the Lebanon connection as illustrated in the map below:


As you can see from this simple but effective map of the region, putting the SCUDS up by Turkey is ridiculous on the face of it. The "battle" allegedly took place up at the upper right corner of the map where the Euphrates River enters Turkey. Lebanon (the "non" on the map ) is to the lower left corner. SCUDS are not small objects (even the more primitive ones); they have to be driven by large trucks at slow speeds and break down if you look at them funny. (The fact these were "built" by North Korea voids an warranty they may have had, big time.) If your long term destination of such weapons is Hezbollah (and that is the only possible consumer of such items, since Syria is not stupid enough to fire SCUDS into Israel itself), it makes no sense to drive them in the opposite direction for many hundreds of miles!

Now, the other possible (though unlikely) consumer of SCUDS would be Iran. Let's see if a smuggling route to Iran makes any sense in the context of the Turkish border scenario:


The small blue line right above the "R" in SYRIA is where the "battle" allegedly happened. Given the lousy roads in the whole area and the fact that a smuggling route would have to cross either Iraq through Kurdish Autonomy territory, or Turkey itself through the troubled (and militarily-invested) Kurdish Region, I cannot possibly believe that a land smuggling was in progress or contemplated for Iran. And shipment by sea makes no sense either; in that case, why not have the NORK ship dock at Iran directly? The Coalition of the Quagmired isn't stopping merchant shipping to Iran yet.

A More Reasonable Yet More Terrifying Scenario

Okay, at the end of the day both scenarios are, to put it bluntly, Horse Puckey. Given this fact, what in heck did happen up there that night? Your fearless and humble (yeah right!) blogger has a suggestion that you may find very unsettling, but also very had to disprove. It runs as follows, in a list format.

• We know the planes in this raid could be outfitted with tactical nuclear gravity bombs.
• We know an ELINT plane was with them on the raid. An ELINT plane would be required for operational security on any nuclear-armed mission.
  
• We know they were flying in Turkish airspace when the "battle" happened. Turkey is the logical route for an attack on Iran, but not for an attack on Syria.
  
• We know there is no reason to assume the target of their raid was in Syria, despite much FUD to the contrary, simply because Syria is so dirt poor it doesn't have anything worth attacking at this time with that level of firepower.
  
• We know that Israel has said it will destroy the Iran nuclear weapons facilities if it decides non-military options won't work to prevent Iranian development of a single working nuclear weapon (one year away is suggested repeatedly as the trigger point).
• We have reason to believe that the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has deep connections to the right wing of Israeli military forces and politicians like Bibi Netanyahu, and that he would be more than willing to press for an attack against Iran to further his ambitions.
  
• We have incomplete but worrisome evidence that an attempt to move U.S. nuclear weapons out of the authorized chain of command was only thwarted a week before in the Minot-Barksdale nuclear weapons fiasco.

What does this all add up to?

The actual events of September 6, 2007 may have been an interrupted Israeli raid on the Iranian nuclear weapons facilities using tactical nuclear weapons. This raid may not have been authorized by the top levels of the Israeli political system (or in other words, it may have been a rogue operation.)

Wow.

If you examine what we actually know, this scenario leaps out at you at once. The Israeli jets were sneaking through Turkey in the middle of the night when, for some reason, a SAM crew near the Turkish border detects them (perhaps due to excessive jamming from the ELINT) and lights them up with a SAM radar set, just in case they turn and enter Syrian airspace. The Israeli raid cannot tolerate this type of threat due to the nuclear weapons aboard; either under orders or on its own, one of the escort fighters attacks the SAM site and damages or destroys it. However, other SAM sites in the area are alerted and track the Israeli warplanes and fire on them. The Israeli planes, realizing operational secrecy has been lost, abort the mission and return to Israel. They cannot risk being shot down over Turkish soil with nuclear weapons. (A strong indication of the validity of this scenario is simple: extra fuel pods, of the type needed for a flight of 2000 kilometers or more, were found on Turkish territory after the "battle". Such pods would not only not be needed for an attack on Syria, but would take up valuable hard points and reduce the fighters' abilities to conduct operations significantly. This their presence strongly disproves any attack planned on Syrian targets.)

What makes it very possible that this was a rogue operation is the insistence by the Israeli government (through their usual leakage channels) that the raid was "planned for months" and "done in cooperation with the United States." This sort of remarks about a raid of this type are most unusual, and have the feel of the news conference expressing "complete confidence" in a subordinate right before he is fired.

We may never know what happened that night over Turkey near Syrian territory. But if the theory I have expressed is even close to correct, it is the second time we have averted a nuclear attack on Iran by "luck" (the Minot incident in the United States counts as the first time.) Luck runs out, ask any casino owner. Let's hope we find a peaceful solution to the problem of Iranian nuclear proliferation before our "luck" runs out as well.

A Second Update To The Strange Case Of The Six Misplaced Nuclear Weapons

Or The Great Unwashed Aren't Buying It!

It seems that the Washington Post article covered in my previous Update has generated a lot of interest among both the erudite, immaculate pundit set, and among the great, unwashed dirty fornicating hippie set. Interestingly, one major erudite pundit isn't swilling the kool aid after all, and may be approaching DFH status on this matter. Let's review the latest dispatches from the sanity front.

ArmsControlWonk is accepting the Post story at face value. (For a lovely illustration of the W80 warheads and Advanced Cruise Missiles involved in this imbroglio, go here.) He does fuss about it a bit, though:

Unfortunately, the Air Force investigation seems to be emphasizing individual mistakes if the airman, rather than the overall posture that puts nuclear weapons on missiles, and stores them in bunkers near bombers. (Boldface mine.)

Even ACW is not buying the storage aspects of the "explanation" but seems willing to view the other elements as credible. Normally I would trust his judgment on such matters, but in this case his expertise at the blue arrow level is being countered by the information we're getting from the ground pounders like Larry Johnson. He minces no words about this charlie-fox:

Well, if you buy the nonsense reported in the Washington Post, I have a bridge to sell you.

Sorry boys and girls, but that is nonsense. You do not walk into an ammo/weapons bunker and sort thru a bunch a cruise missiles like a college freshman searching their laundry basket in the dark for a pair of matching socks.

So let’s see: not only did the munitions custodian officer lose track of the warheads, but an additional two-man team failed to record the pertinent data, and the pilots did not inspect the weapons. And now we learn that nukes and conventional weapons are stored together willy-nilly? (Boldface mine.)

I don't think there is much I can add to the above, except "this whole "explanation" smells like Bull Puckey!"

It gets better! Note also a very detailed comment from one of his readers which backs up and even enhances several aspects that I emphasized in my previous Ratiocinations post:

In either case we have only seen some minor actions taking by the Department of Defense in an attempt to say; well, by accident we left a few nuc’s laying around on some missiles we were going to destroy and they accidentally got loaded onto a plane that by some coincidence happened to be going to a base other than the one it was assigned to (we rarely fly B-52’s assigned at one station to another station). B-52’s usually take off from their home base, fly their mission anywhere in the world by aerial refueling and then return to the base from which they departed. Often these flights take over 20 to 30 hours. (Boldface mine.)

Given the above, can anyone imagine the B-52 crew was not curious about this major change in flight protocols? So incurious that they "didn't bother" to inspect the weapons which they must have known could carry nuclear weapons? Can you say FUD? I thought you could!

We learn even more from this erudite commenter:

The United States has had nuclear weapons for over sixty years. Through out this time the tracking, storage and movement of these weapons has been performed without any type of security problem. The chain of custody procedures has been refined to the nith degree to insure that there will never be a mistake. The access to, movement of, and custody of these weapons is so tightly controlled, each serial numbered weapon has to be signed for when possession of it changes (from one person to another), then only after receiving a lawful order to do so. In order to load a nuclear weapon onto an aircraft the Weapon’s Depot Commander must receive a lawful order from above. The order is sent down (in writing) to one of the bomb shelter custodians and the weapon is signed out to a Loader. The Loader, loads the weapon onto an aircraft and will keep the weapon/aircraft under surveillance with the aircraft under armed guard by the Security Police in an isolated protected area until the Aircraft Commander performs his pre-flight inspection on the aircraft and signs a receipt for each of the weapons by serial number. Once delivered at their destination the Aircraft Commander would receive a receipt for the weapons by serial number from the receiving facility.

With all of the necessary orders and paperwork required just to move a nuclear weapon from one room in a storage facility to another, it can be stated with some sort of certainty that this was not a casual mistake as the Department of Defense has eluted [sic] to. (Boldface mine.)

The first paragraph indicates just how ludicrous the "official" explanation has to be. The meat of the comment, to this humble blogger, lies in the boldfaced portion of the second paragraph above. If this was a clandestine operation, then the only way it could have worked is that someone got inappropriate authorization (spoofing the chain of command as we computer jockeys call it) to move the weapons from one bunker to another, and in the process substituted "dummy" warheads for the real ones and painted and changed signage on the real warheads to make them look like dummies. These rogue operators would have then arranged to (a) store the repainted dummies as "live" nuclear weapons doing all the appropriate paperwork for same in their "new home", and (b) arranged to have the repainted live nukes stored in the bunker with the to-be-decommissioned ACM's as dummies. They then vanish, having done their end of the chain.

Next, an order is issued to stage the B-52 to Minot for this little trash haul mission. The loaders go to the appropriate bunker (the individuals running the entire rogue op would have seen to it that the right bunker and weapons were specified) and get what to all inspections (and they do perform the inspections) appear to be dummy weapons. Since no live weapons are involved, no one uses the nuclear procedures; this is not laxity, it is normal operating procedure. (It also does not require us to swallow the camel of live and dummy warheads stored on missiles together.) Next, the crew of the B-52 does inspect all six weapons, sees what appears to be dummy warheads, and is satisfied. They leave the dummies on their aircraft unguarded, and why not? These are to their knowledge just hunks of useless metal about to be scrapped.

The morning the B-52 then flies to Barksdale and the crew signs off the aircraft to ground control and goes to eat. (Note that this indicates that either Barksdale was the "home" of this BUFF or that the crew had not yet received staging orders to return to their home, wherever it might have been.) Again, with only dummy warheads on the rails as far as they know, this is not unreasonable. The airmen show up to start to unload and transport the ACM's some hours later (this is not a high priority task, since again it is just a "trash haul" of weapons about to be scrapped.) At this point, and nobody is explaining how, a transport airman saw something funny (maybe the paint wore off, or something we aren't being told for security reasons) and called in the cavalry.

Had he not done so, then the other end of the rogue op would have taken place almost certainly. Here is a wickedly simple scenario for how such an unauthorized operation might have proceeded:

• The ACM's would have been stored somewhere at Barksdale, not under nuclear security as there weren't any nukes around as far as anyone at Barksdale knew.
• Then, when the rogue operation was set to be concluded, an order would be received to do a "training flight" with a B-52 to Iraq and a "simulated ACM launch".
• The B-52 aircrew would have to be in on the rogue op since the BUFF chosen would have to have the ability to use and launch live nuclear warheads, but surely someone able to spoof the system to the degree we have de facto established must have taken place at Minot could attend to that detail. In all likelihood the airmen loading the weapons would have to be rogue operators as well.
• With the weapons loaded and set for maximum yield, the B-52 takes off, uses the refueling points for a great circle trip to Iraq, and does the "training mission". Except it would have been live fire, and Iran would have been effectively destroyed.
• The B-52 might have then been crashed with its airmen either suiciding or bailing out to be recovered and gotten home via the rogue operation's available support elements. The records of the "training flight" are sanitized from the Barksdale data as well just to be thorough.
  

In the end there are no "footprints" of the attack (remember that the ACM are "stealth" weapons and thus few if any radar traces would have been detected for after-attack forensics) and to the external world all that would be known is that six nuclear weapons blew up on Iranian soil near major targets like Natanz and major military bases. The fallout residue could be analyzed and compared to IAEA logs on where the plutonium came from; therefore we must assume the rogue operators took care of this detail in some way. In the end, however, the fait acompli is a dead Iran. Which would be the only reasonable goal for such a rogue operation. And the United States has close to perfect plausible deniability on the matter.

Notice how my above scenario requires only one impossibility: that someone could get unauthorized access to the nuclear weapons facility at Minot with instructions to move six W80 warheads from one bunker to another, and have access to them long enough to repaint them as dummy warheads. (We assume the dummy warheads painted as live ones were prepared ahead of time.) This would require (a) someone at the Pentagon with the proper access to issue the instructions so that they would pass muster at Minot, and (b) someone at Minot or the Pentagon able to supply rogue operators for the MP's "guarding" the live nukes during the transfer and for the Command and Control personnel handling the transfer locally. Surely this is not beyond the range of possibility if the Pentagon official running the rogue operation has enough juice (and if his sponsor is at the NCA level, he would have said juice.)

And as noted in my previous posting here, Secretary of Defense Gates is very well aware that something is amiss, or he would not have ordered the external review and publicized it to boot. Also, the fact that this entire mess was leaked in the first place smacks of a stonewalled investigation at Minot and probably the Pentagon as well, with some person of integrity (Gates himself?) authorizing the leaking. So we still have a long way to go before we hit the bottom of this terrifying little business.

Finally, what interests me here is that initially Talking Points Memo accepted the Post piece at face value. But now, as of today, they're highlighting Larry Johnson's Bullshit Call on it instead. Maybe Josh and the TPM crew are smelling the same refined aroma of FUD that this blogger's olfactory nerves have detected.

Please continue to hold. Sanity will resume eventually. We hope.

NB: My boss has pointed out that all the Minot rogue operators needed was the ability to switch the real nuclear warheads for the painted decoys. The repainting of the real weapons would then have been done out of the context of nuclear weapons security; if we assume the repainted dummies were pre-positioned, then all that was really needed was the length of time to swap the two transport containers (whatever they were) and of course the complicity of the MP guards and airmen doing the transfer. Given careful planning on the ground prior to the switch, what might actually be needed time-wise might have been less than a minute, if the transfer vehicle(s) could have been gotten out of sight without arousing suspicion.

The Strange Case Of The Vanishing United States Attack On Iran

Or Why Admiral Fallon Isn't On George W. Bush's Christmas Card List Anymore

George W. Bush (and his BFF Richard M. Cheney) really, really, really, really want to attack Iran. It has been on their wish list to Santa Claus for at least three years and perhaps longer. But there is this problem, you see; a nasty uniformed Grinch who keeps preventing Santa from delivering the shiny new war little Georgie and little Dickie want so badly. His name is Admiral William J. Fallon. Here is what he said recently when Santa Senate tried to give Georgie-Peorgie his Christmas War:

"This constant drum beat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful," Adm. William Fallon said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television, which made a partial transcript available Sunday.

"I expect that there will be no war and that is what we ought to be working for," said Fallon during the Friday interview at Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. "We should find ways through which we can bring countries to work together for the benefit of all .... It is not a good idea to be in a state of war. We ought to try and to do our utmost to create different conditions." (Boldface mine.)

What a nasty, nasty, bad man! Shame on him! Let's spend a little time reviewing what he is talking about, and then examining where the Christmas War is likely to end up under current circumstances. Finally, we'll take a look at an exciting new way little Dickie (or maybe even little Georgie!) have found to keep nasty Mr. Fallon-Grinch from stopping them getting their shiny present. (After all, they have been very, very good little boys!)

The Iran War: Where We've Been

Okay, lets go all the way back to early January, 2005. Mr. Bush, with the help of "the architect", had just won a landslide victory over the "Democrat Party" and now had "political capital" that he intended to spend. According to Sy Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, some of that capital went into starting the plans for a war with Iran:

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.” (Boldface mine.)

Ah, the heady days of 2005. Iraq was "just a few dead-enders", the insurgency was "winding down". And the military certainly had the capacity (on paper at least) to make such an attack. Yet it didn't happen. Why not? It took over two years for the reason to leak out; we can find the answer many places, but one of the more comprehensive ones is The Ward Report, which notes from CBS News and the Associated Press that General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pulled the plug on such planning in late 2006 based on the sheer inability of the U.S. military to do the job:

CJCOS Pace has sent a classified report to Congress via Sec Def Gates wherein he reports that the risks are "significant" that the US military would not be able to adequately respond to a third military Crisis. This report was prepared prior to the president's order of additional troops to Iraq.

This report is important because General Pace's assessment of "significant risk" triggers a statutory obligation on the part of the Sec Def's office to provide a mitigation plan to Congress on steps being taken to ramp-up military preparedness.

The political ramifications of the report are obvious at a time when the president desires to attack Iran while increasing troops in Iraq.

More importantly, this report was leaked by "senior pentagon officials" and represents yet another very public push-back by the military on any WH plans for Iran.

How can the POTUS launch an offensive attack on a sovereign nation when the CJCOS has reported that the military is at "significant" risk of not being able to respond to a military crisis to such a military crisis?

And remember, Iran is not Iraq. They have more advanced rockets and weapons and the ability to fight back. Iran also has at least one advanced weapons supplier in Russia. (Boldface mine.)

Other reports indicate that the CJCOS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff) flatly refused to support an attack on Iran as early as 2005 because the U.S. didn't have the troops, weapons, and money to support it. As noted above Iran is a rich nation with lots and lots of modern Soviet (Russian, sorry) air defense weapons and artillery and missiles and tanks and you name it. Any conventional ground attack (plans were apparently going along to make the attack from Azerbijan due to the impossibility of striking north across the mountainous border with Iraq) would meet with withering resistance even along the short route from the north into Tehran. This provided enough of a roadblock to slow the plan through 2005 and 2006, along with the sudden collapse of the Iraq situation. Then General Pace took over and issued the manifesto noted above, which killed the ground option on an Iran attack for good. (It also got General Pace fired, by the way.)

Now let's move forward to 2006, just after the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary Of Defense. Joe Klein of Time magazine provides a doubly-documented synopsis of a meeting in the secure conference center at the Pentagon (The Tank) concerning a possible attack on Iran on his blog:

Last December, as Rumsfeld was leaving, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in "The Tank," the secure room in the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs discuss classified matters of national security. Bush asked the Chiefs about the wisdom of a troop "surge" in Iraq. They were unanimously opposed. Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran's nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran's government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were--once again--unanimously opposed to taking that course of action. (Boldface mine.)

Note that we are now focussed on a possible air-only campaign against the Iranians, and again the JCOS gives it the Fickle Finger of Are You CRAZY? So now the Air Force, for strictly military reasons, refuses to deliver the shiny new war little Dickie and Little Georgie crave. How rude!

Well, the Army and the Air Force have crapped out on us, dagnabbit! Georgie and Dickie are holding their breath until they turn blue if they don't get their nice war by Christmas! The neocons searched frantically for a way to use the Navy to Git-R-Done, and found their go-to guy in Admiral William J. Fallon. He was put in charge of all combat operations in the Middle East (CENTCOM), and given plenty of aircraft carrier battle groups to play with. He played along happily, got the job, and went to work. Everybody was pleased; Georgie and Dickie started breathing again (they look really ugly when blue). The only problem that surfaced was this:

But Fallon, who was scheduled to become the CENTCOM chief Mar. 16, responded to the proposed plan by sending a strongly-worded message to the Defence Department in mid-February opposing any further U.S. naval buildup in the Persian Gulf as unwarranted.

“He asked why another aircraft carrier was needed in the Gulf and insisted there was no military requirement for it,” says the source, who obtained the gist of Fallon’s message from a Pentagon official who had read it.

Fallon’s refusal to support a further naval buildup in the Gulf reflected his firm opposition to an attack on Iran and an apparent readiness to put his career on the line to prevent it. A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch”.

Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, “You know what choices I have. I’m a professional.” Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, “There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box.” (Boldface mine.)

That rat bastard! How dare he talk back like that! Let's fire him! Oh wait, he has enough credentials to sink a carrier all by himself, and no fear of speaking out. Okay, let's leave him in place and work around him! For make no mistake, Admiral Fallon has been the roadblock that has prevented an Iran war up until today.

The Iran War: Where We're At Now

The current situation can best be summed up as "waiting for the other shoe to drop". Steve Clemons' Salon.com piece contains this fascinating Beltway Cocktail Weenie tidbit:

During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush's team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.

The 18 people at the party, including former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, then voted with a show of hands for either Brzezinski's or Scowcroft's position. Scowcroft got only two votes, including his own. Everyone else at the table shared Brzezinski's fear that a U.S. strike against Iran is around the corner. (Boldface mine.)

(For those not in the know, Scowcroft is one of the Bush family's most valued assets, right up there with James Baker III. Many, including myself, feel that he was the conduit of much of the information used to bring down Nixon via Mark Felt ("Deep Throat"); for years we referred joking to Scowcroft as "DT" even though we all knew someone else carried to dirty laundry to Woodward. Shorter Spook: Scowcroft is the smartest guy in the room about military matters and the Bush Family's long term intentions. Bet on him before anyone else.)

The problem presented by the probable development of a working nuclear weapon by Iran within the next few years is not lost on the military and political leaders of the one nation that is almost certain to be on the target list for that weapon, namely Israel. Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball, writing at Newsweek, present this bleak assessment of the situation from Israel's point of view:

The question may not be whether America is ready to attack, but whether Israel is. The Jewish state has cause for worry. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows regularly to destroy the country; former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered a moderate, warned in 2001 that Tehran could do away with Israel with just one nuclear bomb. In Tel Aviv last week, former deputy Defense minister Ephraim Sneh concurred. Sneh, a dovish member of Israel's Parliament and a retired brigadier general, took a NEWSWEEK reporter to the observation deck atop the 50-story Azrieli Center. "There is Haifa just over the horizon, Ben-Gurion airport over there, the Defense Ministry down below," he said, to show how small the country is. "You can see in this space the majority of our intellectual, economic, political assets are concentrated. One nuclear bomb is enough to wipe out Israel." (Boldface mine.)

It is important to remember that the speaker is one of the leading "doves" in Israeli politics. And yet even faced with such a danger, Israel's ability to pre-emptively attack the Iranian nuclear program is, well, questionable at best, as the Newsweek piece goes further to explain:

But can the Israelis destroy Iran's nuclear program? Gardiner, the war-gamer, says they would not only need to hit a dozen nuclear sites and scores of antiaircraft batteries; to prevent a devastating retaliation, they would have to knock out possibly hundreds of long-range missiles that can carry chemical warheads. Just getting to distant Iran will be tricky for Israel's squadrons of American-made F-15s and F-16s. Danny Yatom, who headed Mossad in the 1990s, says the planes would have to operate over Iran for days or weeks. Giora Eiland, Israel's former national-security adviser, now with Tel Aviv's Institute of National Security Studies, ticked off the drawbacks: "Effectiveness, doubtful. Danger of regional war. Hizbullah will immediately attack [from Lebanon], maybe even Syria." Yet Israelis across the political spectrum, including Eiland and Yatom, believe the risk incurred by inaction is far greater. "The military option is not the worst option," Yatom says. "The worst option is a nuclear Iran." (Boldface mine.)

This is sometimes known as being between a rock and a hard place. No wonder Israel is not eager to start such a conflict given its doubtful outcome.

And the United States' options in a conventional attack are equally limited. Steve Clemons refers to this in his Salon.com piece:

Bush knows that the American military is stretched and that bombing Iran would not be a casual exercise. Reprisals in the Gulf toward U.S. forces and Iran's ability to cut off supply lines to the 160,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq could seriously endanger the entire American military.

Bush can also see China and Russia waiting in the wings, not to promote conflict but to take advantage of self-destructive missteps that the United States takes that would give them more leverage over and control of global energy flows. Iran has the third-largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world and the second-largest undeveloped natural gas reserves.

Bush also knows that Iran controls "the temperature" of the terror networks it runs. Bombing Iran would blow the control gauge off, and Iran's terror networks could mobilize throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and even the United States. (Boldface mine.)

That is not a good list of options. No wonder General Scowcroft voted against there being a war with Iran!

The Iran War: Where We're Going

The schizophrenia continues into the future on Iran, as evidenced by this piece from Rupert Murdoch's Times of London:

THE United States Air Force has set up a highly confidential strategic planning group tasked with “fighting the next war” as tensions rise with Iran.

Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June.

It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Checkmate’s freethinking mission is “to provide planning inputs to warfighters that are strategically, operationally and tactically sound, logistically supportable and politically feasible”. Its remit is not specific to one country, according to defence sources, but its forward planning is thought relevant to any future air war against Iranian nuclear and military sites. It is also looking at possible threats from China and North Korea. (Boldface mine.)

Wow! Right out of Tom Clancy! Since we have the time on our hands and our military is so robust, let's plan for war with China too! (Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Sublime. We passed Ridiculous some time back. Please remove all carry on luggage except those containing nuclear devices, as those will be handled by the usual Barksdale baggage people. Thank you for flying Checkmate Insanity Airways!)


Yet at the end of the day, the "reactivation" of Checkmate signals just how dead set against the Iran war the U.S. military has become, as noted in the Times piece:

The US president faces strong opposition to military action, however, within his own joint chiefs of staff. “None of them think it is a good idea, but they will do it if they are told to,” said a senior defence source.

General John Abizaid, the former Centcom commander, said last week: “Every effort should be made to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but failing that, the world could live with a nuclear-armed Iran.” (Boldface mine.)

And while the old "do it if you're told" bit is stock Murdoch-spin, anyone who has ever dealt with the reality of the Pentagon-Congress-White House relationship ecology knows better than that. Any "do it now" order of this type would be leaked immediately, and if necessary a mass resignation of the JCOS would be more than enough to bring Congress in at a gallop. So even this schizophrenic situation isn't leading directly to war. Yet. (The Telegraph in Britain has a similar piece up as well.)

The neocon hawks pushing for the Iran war have their supporters in Congress as well. For example, just today the Lieberman-Kyl ammendment (note: PDF link) was under discussion in the United States Senate; it effectively legitimizes a full scale war with Iran. (Think Progress has taken the lead in publicizing this little bit of legislative bait and switch.) At the end of the day, however, this is nothing more than saber rattling to Mr. Bush political cover if he wants it. So far, there is little sign that he does.

Indeed, Mr. Bush's current blame sponge and sock puppet General Petraeus has gone so far as to suggest Iran's support for Iraqi insurgents is winding down. The Guardian in Britain notes this in the following article:

Hopes that a new war could still be avoided have also been boosted by Gen Petraeus's claim that Iran's covert Quds force alleged to be supporting Shia attacks on coalition forces had been pulled out of Iraq. If true, it could be that in the stand-off between the US and Iran, Iran has blinked first. (Boldface mine.)

The overall article is a rather shrill warning that war with Iran is imminent and must be avoided at all costs. But the fact that General Petraeus has gone on record with the above comment is noteworthy of just how reluctant the Pentagon continues to be in regards to an Iran war.

NB: Petraeus is the name of a classical centaur, famed for betraying their allies. Hmmmm.

Speaking of betraying your allies, anyone remember this war-drums-to-Iran piece by Alex Debat, well known military analyst and intellectual? Well, it turns out that Mr. Debat isn't any of those things at all. Oopsie!

Steve Clemons, writing at Salon.com, offers the most worrisome assessment of how a war with Iran could start despite all the forces working to stop it:

We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An "accidental war" would escalate quickly and "end run," as Wurmser put it, the president's diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict -- Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Boldface mine.)

And this leads us, gentle and questioning readers, to the deadly possibility that this "engineered provocation" has already been attempted not once, but twice, and has failed to happen only by what some call happenstance. I call this The Back Channel Option.

The Iran War: The Back Channel

There have been two disquieting incidents within the last month involving strange behaviors of military forces in the United States and in Israel. Each has its own Ratiocinations post or posts; let's examine a precis of each below and try to see how they may apply to the Vanishing Attack On Iran conundrum.

Before we go any further, let's review why the Army, Air Force, and Navy have all said HELL NO to an attack on Iran. The reasons are simple: the conventional weapons of the United States military are insufficient to destroy the ability of the Iranians to retaliate against both the U.S. and Israel, and possibly Iraq and Saudi Arabia as well.

Nobody said anything about nuclear weapons. Oh, wait a minute, yes they did, except it was Israel. From the venerable (well it used to be) Times of January 7, 2007:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. [NB: approximately one thousand tons of TNT] (Boldface mine.)

(This was one of the sources for my previous post here about The Strange Case Of The Israeli Attack On Syria That Did Or Didn't Happen.) Bottom line, the contingency plans exist in Israel, and also in the United States as well, as noted in this London Times piece:

The vice president is said to advocate the use of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear sites. His allies dispute this, but Mr Cheney is understood to be lobbying for air strikes if sites can be identified where Revolutionary Guard units are training Shia militias. (Boldface mine.)

So the nuclear card is in the hand but not on the table. Not yet. And there is good reason to think that if the military is opposed to a conventional strike, they would be utterly opposed to a nuclear strike. (Please see the upcoming post here The Strange Case Of The Vanishing Middle Eastern Country for reasons why they would be so adamantly opposed to any use of nuclear weapons in the region.)

But let's go a little further. The situation we may face is illustrated by a quote from Thomas De Quincey in his estimable Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts, to wit:

“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination”

The take home message here is that once you are willing to break one law, breaking the next one gets easier and easier, until laws have no meaning for one at all. It is terrifyingly possible, given their track record, that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are now in this position. If so, they might be willing to go around the normal checks and balances of the U.S. military and attempt a military strike using nuclear weapons on their own authority alone.

One such attempt may have already been made. See the post here entitled The Strange Case Of The Six Misplaced Nuclear Weapons and its First and Second Updates. This is an ongoing story, please keep tuned to this feed for more details.

Also, it is possible that having been blocked at Barksdale, Mr. Cheney may have attempted to begin the festivities using an unauthorized nuclear attack on Iran via Israel. See this post, The Strange Case of The Israeli Attack On Syria That Did Or Didn't Happen for details.

We live in dangerous times, my most esteemed readers. We must navigate them with extreme care. I hope to make my humble contribution by perhaps pointing out a few rocks in the waters and maybe spotting the spray from the waterfall before we go over it.

Good night and good luck.

An Update To The Strange Case Of The Six Misplaced Nuclear Warheads

Or the Washington Post that barked in the night (and then fell over in a stupor from the drugged kool-aid in its water bowl.)

It has been not quite two weeks since I published my first post on the Strange Case Of The Six Misplaced Nuclear Warheads. Several interesting things have happened during this interval, but none worthy of an update to the original post. Until tonight. At long last the Mainstream Media are being forced to acknowledge that this story has both merit and gravitas, that it represents a catastrophic breakdown in the command and control chain for United States nuclear weapons.

The estimable MSNBC web site has published a lengthy article entitled "The Saga Of A Bent Spear"; it is a repackaging of a Washington Post piece by Walter Pincus and John Warrick. I strongly encourage everyone reading this post to take the time now to read one or the other of these articles, since I can only quote brief snippets here and there is a wealth of information on this very worrisome situation in the meat of the pieces. Now that you've hopefully read these excellent journalistic exercises, let's examine what they have to say in some detail, shall we? (All quotes are from the Post article unless noted otherwise.)

Let's start with a summary of what the Minot AFB actually does as part of the Air Force infrastructure, namely:

The daily routine for many of Minot's crews is a cycle of scheduled maintenance for the base's 35 aging B-52H Stratofortress bombers -- mammoth, eight-engine workhorses, the newest of which left the assembly line more than 45 years ago. Workers also tend to 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles kept at the ready in silos scattered across neighboring cornfields, as well as hundreds of smaller nuclear bombs, warheads and vehicles stored in sod-covered bunkers called igloos. (Boldface mine.)

This matches what has been revealed publicly about how nuclear weapons are stored in secured compounds with fences, guards, dogs, etc. The underground aspect is obviously due to the absolutely lovely weather the personnel must endure in that frozen hell hole (local ditty: "Why Not Minot? Freezin's the Reason!")

Now for the first money quote of the article:

At 9:12 a.m. local time on Aug. 29, according to the account, ground crews in two trucks entered a gated compound at Minot known as the Weapons Storage Area and drove to an igloo where the cruise missiles were stored. The 21-foot missiles were already mounted on pylons, six apiece in clusters of three, for quick mounting to the wings of a B-52.

The AGM-129 is designed to carry silver W-80-1 nuclear warheads, which have a variable yield of between 5 and 150 kilotons. (A kiloton is equal to the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT.) The warheads were meant to have been removed from the missiles before shipment. In their place, crews were supposed to insert metal dummies of the same size and weight, but a different color, so the missiles could still be properly attached under the bomber's wings.

A munitions custodian officer is supposed to keep track of the nuclear warheads. In the case of cruise missiles, a stamp-size window on the missile's frame allows workers to peer inside to check whether the warheads within are silver. In many cases, a red ribbon or marker attached to the missile serves as an additional warning. Finally, before the missiles are moved, two-man teams are supposed to look at check sheets, bar codes and serial numbers denoting whether the missiles are armed.

Now, at this point everything seems to check out. The nuclear weapons are stored properly in a guarded compound, already in their delivery system so that if a rush attack were needed the weapons could be gotten onto the aircraft as fast as possible. (It is important to remember that Minot and similar bases are still part of the nuclear deterrent capacity of the United States. Their mission profiles for using the ACM's very likely involve incoming missile- or bomber-based nuclear strikes on the COTUS (COnTinental Unted States) which it is their duty to make a frightful reply against. Speed of deployment to allow the B-52's to get in the air and try to exact a toll on the attackers is a central component of the nuclear deterrence capacity. (Anyone wanting to see a badly-acted but frighteningly technically-accurate dramatization of this should check out By Dawn's Early Light from HBO films, from long before the days of The Sopranos or Rome. If you happen to have cable or satellite, you can use your DVR to get a copy since it pops up regularly as late night filler.) So there is nothing really odd so far here. Notice also the simple but effective security to make sure nuclear weapons are kept under command and control (the munitions custodian officer.) So far, so good, right?

Except for this:

Why the warheads were not noticed in this case is not publicly known. But once the missiles were certified as unarmed, a requirement for unique security precautions when nuclear warheads are moved -- such as the presence of specially armed security police, the approval of a senior base commander and a special tracking system -- evaporated. (Boldface and Italics mine.)

"evaporated". What a lovely Term Of Art. To coin a phrase, "WTF?"

And there's more:

Some Air Force veterans say the base's officers made an egregious mistake in allowing nuclear-warhead-equipped missiles and unarmed missiles to be stored in the same bunker, a practice that a spokesman last week confirmed is routine. Charles Curtis, a former deputy energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said, "We always relied on segregation of nuclear weapons from conventional ones." (Boldface and Italics mine.)

At this point things start to reek. There are three troubling aspects of the two paragraphs above. First, it goes against all published nuclear weapons command and control procedures to mix armed and unarmed weapons. The main reason is simple; if you are frantically trying to load a B-52 with nuclear retaliatory weapons as incoming warheads are about to vaporize your and your base, you don't want to have to fool around figuring out which weapons are nuclear and which are not. People don't make good decisions when they know they are about to die; let's not make their job any harder, okay? (That the base commander had the authority to change this is highly unlikely.) Second, even if this mashup scenario were somehow true, it makes the story less reasonable, not more. Because if it was known that mixed payloads of dummies and live weapons were possible, would not the loading crew and their munitions control officer be extra careful during the transfer? I would think so, and so would any reasonable person. Finally, it says the missiles were "certified as unarmed" and thus the security procedures were allowed to relax. Yet elsewhere the article indicates that the loading crew and their associates "never looked" and "grabbed weapons randomly". How can we assume they were "certified" according to appropriate procedures when the piece goes out of its way to portray these unfortunate Airmen as the nuclear version of the Keystone Kops? You can't have it both ways, guys!

Moving on now, we learn the following delicious tidbits:

The trucks hauled the missile pylons from the bunker into the bustle of normal air base traffic, onto Bomber Boulevard and M Street, before turning onto a tarmac apron where the missiles were loaded onto the B-52. The loading took eight hours because of unusual trouble attaching the pylon on the right side of the plane -- the one with the dummy warheads.

By 5:12 p.m., the B-52 was fully loaded. The plane then sat on the tarmac overnight without special guards, protected for 15 hours by only the base's exterior chain-link fence and roving security patrols.

Air Force rules required members of the jet's flight crew to examine all of the missiles and warheads before the plane took off. But in this instance, just one person examined only the six unarmed missiles and inexplicably skipped the armed missiles on the left, according to officials familiar with the probe.

The plane, which had flown to Minot for the mission and was not certified to carry nuclear weapons, departed the next morning for Louisiana. When the bomber landed at Barksdale at 11:23 a.m., the air crew signed out and left for lunch, according to the probe.

It would be another nine hours -- until 8:30 p.m. -- before a Barksdale ground crew turned up at the parked aircraft to begin removing the missiles. At 8:45, 15 minutes into the task, a separate missile transport crew arrived in trucks. One of these airmen noticed something unusual about the missiles. Within an hour, a skeptical supervisor had examined them and ordered them secured. (Boldface and Italics mine.)

Whew! There is so much meat on the bones of the above paragraphs I almost don't know where to start eating it! Perhaps a list is best:

• The non-nuclear pylon was damaged in some way, or otherwise not able to mate properly to the B-52's hard points. Eight hours was required to fix this little problem.
• The B-52 in question was not some local job dug out of storage, it was ordered to perform this "mission" and flown in for it. This may be crucial at a later date!
• The B-52 was not equipped to launch nuclear cruise missiles. This means critical avionics were either removed or had not been installed. This (if true, and I'll show why we must doubt virtually every "fact" in this piece below) means the tin foil hat scenarios of a Dr. Strangelove quality to the incident aren't accurate.
• Despite the weird installation problems and despite having been specially ordered to fly to Minot to do this little ACM haul bit, the aircrew "couldn't be bothered" to inspect all the missiles. They conveniently only inspected the six that were non-nuclear. Note the smear of the aircrew as well indicating that "only one member" did this. (Are you detecting the rich, fruity aroma of FUD? I am.)
• Just to add spice to the already boiling pot of impossibilities, we have the aircraft unguarded and unmanned for about 24 of the 36 hours this little plutonium kabuki play took to happen. In case we didn't feel unsafe before. Gee, thanks, guys!
• It was the missile transport crew who noticed that something was amiss, and even then their supervisor was "skeptical".

I now officially call Bullshit on this whole article. I might believe a Keystone Kops ground crew at Dante's Ninth Circle Of Hell Air Force Base (and if they don't call it that they should!), but adding in both an Elmer Fudd flight crew and a Sergeant Schultz ground crew at Barksdale puts my suspension of disbelief quotient way over the red line. At this point, the only "fact" I feel we may be sure of in the above list is that this particular B-52 was indeed ordered specially to do this ferry run, and I only do that because I have seen enough chatter on the military blogs and comment streams that confirms it.

Not content with feeding us the above horse hockey, the authors of this little journalistic gem want us to drink even more kool-aid, to wit:

Once the errant warheads were discovered, Air Force officers in Louisiana were alarmed enough to immediately notify the National Military Command Center, a highly secure area of the Pentagon that serves as the nerve center for U.S. nuclear war planning. Such "Bent Spear" events are ranked second in seriousness only to "Broken Arrow" incidents, which involve the loss, destruction or accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon. (Boldface and Italics mine.)

This is pure undiluted bull puckey. We have published newspaper accounts who are on the record with their sources that Minot imitated the Bent Spear long before Barksdale was able to find its ass with both hands and two mirrors, much less notice the near-megaton of boosted fission Hell parked perkily on its runways. (See the previous posts for links on this point.)

And so at the end of the day, we have the high probability that this whole writeup is nothing more than a kiss-ass FUD job sold to the gullible Post by the Air Force brass who don't want whatever actually happened that day (or days) to become publicly known.

What concerns me the most, however, is that even if we accept this smelly load of fertilizer as the cold-sober truth, we are no closer to learning how six nuclear weapons left the chain of command and could theoretically have vanished entirely if not for an alert crewman at Barksdale AFB than we were when we started, by its own admission. And I'm not the only one who feels this way? How do I know?

Because Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates has asked a retired Air Force General to conduct an independent investigation of the whole incident, and has made this decision public knowledge. It was carried on all the main news wire services such as Associated Press, UPI and Reuters, a link to one such article is here.

We still don't know what happened at Minot, nor do we know what might have happened at Barksdale. And despite assurances to the contrary, we have no real proof that there aren't additional missing warheads whose loss is being covered up for now. The odd complete stand down of all combat command aircraft on September 14, 2007 for "updated trailing" still reeks to Low Earth Orbit to me; I cannot help but feel the real purpose was something other than the announced one (gut feel, I grant you, but still.)

So the take home message for today, my gentle and erudite readers, is that we are as deep in the doo doo as we were 21 days ago. And the Mainstream Media is drinking the Air Force Kool-Aid a little too deeply for my taste.

So your humble blogger will continue to monitor the situation and keep you posted.

NB: For comic relief, please enjoy this post with some delightfully tin-foil-hattish explanations for not only this incident but several other oddities of recent memory, sent to me by a Firedoglake lurker. It is the most delicious admixture of truth, half truth, fiction, and sublime horseshit that I have read in years. I do truly salute the author; pity he's not in the "fiction" section.

A Brief Note About Comments

After some discussion it appears that the Kelgarries Blogswarm won't be able to support comments at this time due to sheer volume of material we need to work with to achieve our goals. Once we migrate to our own servers (scheduled for early 2009) we'll be able to support a full comments implementation.

Thanks for your interest, and enjoy the blog!

How To Subscribe To Ratiocinations As An RSS Feed In Internet Explorer 7

It has come to our attention that many readers of Ratiocinations would like to have the ability to know when new posts are available automatically. Fortunately, the internet and IE7 provide this feature very nicely.

Rather than duplicate postings and eat up space here at Blogspot, we have posted a very simple but quite effective Tutorial on the matter at our sister blog, Tutorials On Using Voltaic Difference Engines. Enjoy!