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:
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?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.
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.
