Walter Pincus has the story on how those nuclear weapons got “mistakenly” loaded on that B-52 from Minot to Barksdale last month.
Tax cuts uber alles, indeed.
Draw downs in personnel and shifting priorities in the administration, so the Air Force no longer stores nuke-tipped missiles in separate bunkers.
Combat operations and support straining forces to the point where regular training and drills for actual movement of nuke-tipped missiles aren’t practicable in Air Combat Command.
It’s a wonder there haven’t been more overflights like 30AUG07 — is he trying to destroy the service he knows he’s guilty of deserting? He may succeed.
And now this lying cheating weasel of a yellow-bellied Yankee wartime deserter wants to cut spending and taxes more???
Andy Rooney said something that scared me spitless last night on 60 Minutes: “But the President’s back in the White House now, so everything should be fine.”
“Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” yeah, buddy.
“A war time President,” “the commander guy,” and “the decider.” Is it any wonder we’re hiring mercenaries from an outfit named “Blackwater”?
Blackwater has an older definition, too:
“a relatively recent term used to describe water containing fecal matter and urine
. It is also known as brown water, foul water, or sewage. It is distinct from greywater or sullage, the residues of washing processes.
Blackwater is heavily polluted and difficult to treat because of the high concentrations of mostly organic pollution. The term is commonly used on recreational vehicles where separate tanks collect blackwater and greywater wastes.”
This is the definition of blackwater used by campers, builders, municipal utilities, and code inspectors.
At long last, we have no shame.
Front page
More foil please
Here’s a wild scenario.
1. Bush administration claims that Iran has secretly developed nuclear weapons.
2. Bush administration claims that Iran is arming terrorist groups.
3. Bush administration claims that Iran has begun attacking American troops in Iraq, i.e. has declared war on the United States.
4. Nuclear weapon detonated on American (or possibly Iraqi) soil.
5. Bush administration claims that Iran built the nuclear weapon, supplied it to terrorists, and ordered the attack.
6. Bush administration attacks Iran, quite possibly with a nuclear strike.
Good thing that’s pure fantasy. In reality, it’s more like:
1. Bush administration claims that Iran has secretly developed nuclear weapons.
2. Bush administration claims that Iran is arming terrorist groups.
3. Bush administration claims that Iran has begun attacking American troops in Iraq, i.e. has declared war on the United States.
4. Nuclear weapon disappears while the entire Air Force mysteriously looks the other way.
5. Some decent and terrified individual alerts the media.
6. Bush administration realizes that their original plan is going to look highly questionable now.
Stay tuned, dear readers!
But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!
Naw, it's simpler than that, scarshapedstar!
Really and truly, this is a typical Friday-afternoon waytoowrong scenario.
1. Bush administration cuts taxes.
2. Bush administration declares war in Afghanistan.
3. Bush administration contracts out catching bin Laden.
4. Bush administration subcontractors let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora.
5. Bush administration cuts taxes.
6. Bush administration claims Saddam Hussein shelters Al Queda.
7. Bush administration DoD orders a forcewide RIF.
8. Bush administration cuts taxes.
9. Bush administration orders up “shock and awe” for Iraq.
10. Bush administration cuts taxes.
11. Stressed by reduced personnel, high workloads, ongoing combat operations, reprioritization of nuclear weapons handling, lack of current and ongoing training in proper nuclear procedure, and a lack of familiarity with the nuclear security, some enlisted kid looks through the postage-stamp-size window in the side of a missile, probably in a none-too-well-lit WSA bunker while working in a tearing hurry because it’s the last workday before a long weekend, and … sees no silver warhead, therefore relaxes because, hey, this ain’t the kind of missile about which getting all hot and bothered is de rigeur.
12. Kid calls out to NCOIC the convoy, “this pylon” or words to that effect.
13. NCOIC says “you sure?” and Kid says “yeah”. Or, because they’re thinking about the upcoming weekend, they’ve done this a jillion times and it’s always the same, NCOIC says, “okay” and relaxes: not nukes. No biggie. Standard procedures apply.
*that* point right there is where the whole thing fell into the toilet. If the NCOIC had checked the missile window as well, it would’ve been, “Shit, kid, this is the wrong stuff,” and they’d’ve moved on through the stacks until they found a pylon that did have the right kind of missiles attached. Right there on the WSA bunker floor is where all kinds of stuff went waytoowrong justthatfast.
13. Loaded pylons are put on transport vehicles and run out to a waiting Buff.
14. Loaded pylons are attached. Notice that one set of pylons actually had the right kind of missiles, and this pylon was difficult to attach. That would probably distract the loading crews.
15. Remember at this point the paperwork’s done and turned in to show that 12 non-nuke-tipped missiles are going to Barksdale aboard this B-52.
16. It’s casual Friday, boys; the airplane driver walks around, counts the noses of the missiles on the pylons, runs up the ladder and peeks in one window, and there’s no tell-tale nuke visual in there. So either the airplane driver assumes, as the paperwork says, and as the lack of nuke prep and familiarization training reinforces, that all the missiles on the plane are the same kind, or else he looks in the second window and SEES WHAT’S EXPECTED instead of what’s there.
17. Buff leaves Minot, flies to Barkdsale, crew calls it a day, unloading folks come out.
18. Unloading folks get the first batch of missiles, everything is hunky-dory.
19. Unloading folks start to take down 2nd batch of missiles, somebody in the crew goes, “hey, guys, this is waytoowrong, here,” and a frantic effort to figure out who to tell, and more importantly who you DON’T tell about this (admittedly rather spectacular) tacfubar, ensues.
20. Procedures that follow a waytoowrong event kick in.
Do I think the Minot weapons control officer ought to be courts-martialed? Naw, I think a letter of rep would do for him. I do think whoever didn’t double-check on the WSA floor ought to be sternly reminded that these toys they’re playing with aren’t just toys, and some seriously waytoowrong results followed their lack of acumen. But I also know that tired people screw up, shorthanded crews screw up, people see what they expect to see (you don’t expect to find a skunk in a wheel-well, so you reach in thinking it’s somebody’s watch cap, and you’re horribly surprised to discover that not only ain’t it a watch cap but now everything in the vicinity smells waytoowrong) and, in all known human endeavors, sooner or later, stuff goes wrong.
Sarah, did you see the item at TMP?
The one here, by somebody named Larry Johnson, with whom I am not familiar but he must be a regular there; TPM has gotten too big to follow everything any more.
However this Johnson fellow was not that impressed with the Pincus “simple error” version of the story:
Then he reprints a long piece he said was an email from “a friend and former B-52 pilot” opining about the matter. Thought you might like to check over the kerning on this, as it were… :)
I did read that. I do think he's
pushing for something that might have been accurate a few years ago.
There is a process for handling nuclear weapons that is extremely different from the process for handling conventional weapons. If — and I have no reason to doubt that this is so — those processes aren’t being practiced regularly, and there’s no protocol for regular drilling using those processes, then the “routine” used absent the triggers for those processes would more than likely take precedent.
Which I believe it did on 29AUG07 at Minot.
Here’s why:
NOBODY at Minot signed out nuclear weapons.
NOBODY notified the pilot that there were nuclear warheads aboard the aircraft.
Those two things convince me that, as Occam’s Razor would indicate, we’re not looking for nuclear theft here.
We are looking at somewhat less than exemplary behavior and we are looking, for sure and for certain, at indicators of stress on the Air Force I don’t want to think too hard about.
FWIW this commenter at TPM has details that mesh with my memories of what had to happen when an actual weapon was going aboard an aircraft — and the commenter indicates that this didn’t happen in this case, which creates a stronger impression that the basic tacfu happened while the weapons were in the WSA.
What really chaps me is that sometime after 01JAN01, GWB changed policy (or Rumsfeld did with his approval) and consolidated storage of non-nuclear-armed missiles with nuclear-armed ones in the same WSA. That is just way, way, way, waytoowrong. It used to be one of the fundamental safeguards of SAC that you never, never, ever mixed non-nuclear and nuclear materials or transport systems; the WSA impoundments had a common fence, but there were separate bunkers at the very least, and usually the “hot” weapons storage area was separated from the “conventional” weapons storage area by physical barriers (inner ring fences, extra personnel on patrol, and a variety of other stuff I can’t give details for: I didn’t have the proper clearance to go beyond the fence and talk to the gate guards — yes, that was separate from the one I had that let me walk around the [armed] aircraft out on the ramp or up at the hardstands — if you were in the flight that had a WSA duty station, your ID so indicated, and you needed to have that ID worn visibly whenever you were on/around a SAC flightline, the WSA, any alert force facility, or the base hospital).
Barksdale Loose Nukes Report Coming
CNN reports a source claiming a report on the misplaced nukes will go to SecDef Gates tomorrow, with maybe an announcement to follow - just in time for the Friday PM news dump.
Surely the CinC will step up and take responsibility for creating the circumstances that led to this screwup.