Thursday, June 5, 2008

No Room for "Oops" when Handling Nuclear Weapons: Top Two Air Force Leaders Resign

In a perfect world, nuclear fuses wouldn't have been accidentally sent to Taiwan, and an American bomber carrying cruise missiles with nuclear warheads between Minot and Barksdale Air Force Bases: flying from North Dakota to Louisiana. ("B-52 carried nuclear missiles over US by mistake: military" (Sep 5, 2007))

(The article said "loaded with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles" and reported this quote: " 'It is absolutely inexcusable that the Air Force lost track of these five nuclear warheads, even for a short period of time,' Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement." - whatever the exact count, the point is that those nukes weren't supposed to be flying cross-country.)

This isn't a perfect world: not even close.

But, two top Air Force bosses - the top civilian official and the top military officer - resigned. After being encouraged to do so by Defense Secretary Gates.

It's about time. Apparently, officers in the Air Force had been sloppy about following rules for about 10 years: a distinctly non-trivial issue for people dealing with nuclear weapons. There were other problems, too.

I'm generally not glad about anyone losing a job, but this is probably for the best. With two other people in charge, there's a chance to sort out the problems - and the pair of forced resignations should encourage everyone involved to take their jobs more seriously.

More, at:

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I read that they lost one ACM complete with it's nuke warhead, that the pilots were ordered to strike Iran but refused to do it.

Many of these men later died within a short span of time.

On the very same day Israeli hacked Syria's Air Defense computers and the zionists bombed a Syrian facility saying it was some WMD manuf facility!

For me it was a test to see if one can totally bypass the nuke command & control. A proof needed for a near future use.

I think next huge false flag will be before the end of the olympics, probably during it, to blame Iran-Syria then nuke them.

Brian H. Gill said...

911allo,

You could be right, but it's far-fetched.

A story like that could get started when (as seems to have happened here) people who are actually doing the work say one number, and a politico remembers another.

Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" deals with a similar, if lower-tech, scenario.

Conspiracy theories are intriguing, but don't have a good track record for accuracy.

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