The fact that nuclear weapons flew over the US…wow, I mean it’s not as if nuclear weapons weren’t flying over the US almost every single day for at least 4 decades (50s, 60s, 70s and 80s). There’s no story there.

The story is the screwup that resulted in 5 nukes being placed where they shouldn’t have been.

For the record, the warheads weren’t being decommed, the missiles were. What seems likely to have happened is that the missiles were part of the ready reserve, preloaded with ordnance for immediate deployment. They either forgot to remove the warheads or mixed up the ready missiles with 5 other ACMs that were supposed to have been delivered.

Well, yeah, nukes flying over the US per se are not THAT big a deal, but nukes flying over the US THAT THE CREW OF THE PLANE CARRYING THEM DID NOT KNOW WERE NUKES is something else altogether. The procedure for crash-landing a plane or making a plane lighter in the event of engine failure, to pick a couple of examples at random, might be very different for a plane carrying dummy cruise missiles and one carrying non-dummy nukes. We are told, and rightfully so, to be worried about the security of Russian nukes, Pakistani nukes, and so on, but I wonder how worried we should be about our own nukes? We built a hell of a lot of them, and apparently 5 of them can hop onto a B-52 without being noticed.

For the record, I don’t care about movement of armaments around the country, I care about why mini-nukes loaded cruise missiles are being moved around the country on Aug 30!!

Ok, so how do the ACM w/ nuke get mixed in with regular ACM?
How does one “forget” to remove a warhead?

Doesn’t someone with a little clipboard or something like check a box when the nucular stuff gets moved around the warehouse? I mean it’s not like this little ordinance couldn’t turn you into a 1 mile wide crater.

Screwups like this just don’t “happen”. This was an approved movement of five nukes to Louisisana. Why? Heck even the MSNBC correspondent said their is no way the pilot didn’t notice the weight discrepancy or the people who loaded them to the plane would have notice 5 of these are heavy as hell, and this other one is light.

Isn’t New Orleans where we load up the armada before sending it off to war? These warheads are the right size to take out a heavily fortified underground bunker facility and a cruise missile is a great way to deliver it accurately.

Is the real story that there are cruise missile nukes being loaded for delivery to our deployed military? It is timed just right with the rolling out of our “new product”…

From what I read, they already have the same nuke warhead ACM’s at the Louisiana AF base, so the theory that they need to move any there doesn’t work.

Also I believe they are designed to be dropped from B-52s. They probably could also be launched from ship, but why not just fly a B-52 over to Iran? That’s what they do for a living.

Maybe these were meant to go “missing” and so they came from some stockpile in Montana where they wouldn’t be missed. Though it could also be the missile disassembly was occurring in Louisiana and not Montana, so the shells were legitimately being repurposed there, and this was a case of forgetting to take the nuke out first.

I was trying to compare the weight of the 5 nukes compared to the 7 non-nuke loaded missiles.

But here’s some factoids on our nuke friends:

USAF To Retire Newest Nuke Missile
03/12/07 (as in SIX MONTHS ago)

Beginning next year, the U.S. Air Force will retire the most modern missile in its nuclear arsenal as part of a 2002 disarmament treaty with Russia.

The decision is expected to eliminate about 400 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) deployed with the B-52 fleet at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and Barksdale Air Force Base, La.

General Dynamics closed the production line in 1993 after only 460 missiles were delivered.

The decision to kill the missile was revealed by FAS Director Hans Kristensen, who questioned Air Force officials when he noticed the 2008 budget proposal did not include funds for the ACM

The And here

ACM is one of two nuclear cruise missiles in the U.S. arsenal, but the only nuclear cruise missile built with stealth technology to evade radar detection.

The Air Force has not decided what to do with the retired ACM airframes, but is exploring alternative uses such as converting them to carry conventional warheads or use in missile tests.

The Air Force also has an inventory of approximately 1,300 older Air Launched Cruise Missiles (AGM-86B), which also carry the 80-1 warhead.

The retired airframe is what was being flown to Louisiana base, but 5 of 7 happened to still have nukes installed.

The ACM has a longer range and greater accuracy than the ALCM. The ACM was designed with stealth features to permit use against heavily defended targets.

no, not the movie.
An exercise in what a SAC base (8th AF in my day, 2nd Bomb Wing) needed to do if a Buff had an accident with a hot weapon.
I expect it probably applied to missiles, too, but I never worked around the silos.

And FWIW, Barksdale’s clear across Louisiana from New Orleans. Both directions.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!— Xan

spooky sounding stuff, and scary fuckups, happen in the military all the time. mostly, it’s incompetence. most of the time, you never hear about it. there are so many cliches shared by servicepeople about fucked up, surreal, near miss moments in the military, it’s hard to recount them all.

who has any idea what’s “normal” in this day and age, when our military is slowly becoming an arm of the republican party’s theocratic wing of create our own reality types? not efficiency, i’ll bet.

still- it is a little unsettling to realize that it isn’t just those “drunk, sloppy, corrupt ex soviets” who can’t keep track of all the Footballs. don’t fall for that crap about our forces all being crack GI Joes and James Bonds. they aren’t.

…against, I dunno why I say this, maybe Iran, is it still nukular?

Does CNN report it as nuking Tehran if the D.o’D. won’t acknowledge it as a real nuke? And say if for example, someone decides to nuke us right back, is it the strike back on us “unprovoked” if Dear Leader won’t acknowledge our strike in the first place?

If planes can be flown into buildings without the D.o’D. knowing about it, can fission cruise missiles can be fired on Iran without them knowing about it either? Or for that matter, on America?

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

Oh, hell no. And I’ll tell you another secret.
The amount of paperwork to actually use one of those things? Yeah, Petraeus ain’t gonna want to have to do that. Man’s got 20 years in the service, if not more. He’ll want to retire, some damn day. Schwarzkopf didn’t wanna jack with the paperwork to nuke Saddam 15 years ago. How much you wanna bet any 0-9 or above is gonna wanna wade thru it now?

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!— Xan

Larry Johnson sez:

I called a old friend and retired B-52 pilot and asked him. What he told me offers one compelling case of circumstantial evidence. My buddy, let’s call him Jack D. Ripper, reminded me that the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site.

Then he told me something I had not heard before.

Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can’t imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations?

His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.

Not everyone in the Company digs the Cheneyburton WWIII schtick.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

From wikipedia:

The Pantex plant is America’s only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility and is charged with maintaining the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. The facility is located on a 16,000 acre (65 km²) site 17 miles (27 km) northeast of Amarillo, in Carson County, Texas. The plant is managed and operated for the United States Department of Energy by BWXT Pantex and Sandia National Laboratories. BWXT Pantex is a limited liability enterprise of BWX Technologies, Honeywell and Bechtel Corporation.

So my question is, you got 5 ACM that had their nukes taken out… Can they do this on base? Or does some specialist have to arm and disarm the cruise missles from the warheads?

The story about ACM with nukes in a jumping off point is a non-event. They already have them on base in Louisiana, so was this their way to get around doing paperwork? Freed up some off the book nukes that were already decom?

anymore.
The warheads (fissile material) have separate stock numbers and shelf life calculations.
PanTex receives warheads for disassembly and recycles the materials or packages them for “disposal” aka permanent storage someplace else.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!— Xan