Grave error in handling of missiles bound for graveyard

Washington Post:

Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.

The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane's wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.

That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.

The episode, serious enough to trigger a rare "Bent Spear" nuclear incident report that raced through the chain of command to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Bush, provoked new questions inside and outside the Pentagon about the adequacy of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguards while the military's attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.

The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge.

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A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation's early results show.

The incident came on the heels of multiple warnings -- some of which went to the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the National Security Council -- of security problems at Air Force installations where nuclear weapons are kept. The risks are not that warheads might be accidentally detonated, but that sloppy procedures could leave room for theft or damage to a warhead, disseminating its toxic nuclear materials.

A former National Security Council staff member with detailed knowledge described the event as something that people in the White House "have been assured never could happen." What occurred on Aug. 29-30, the former official said, was "a breakdown at a number of levels involving flight crew, munitions, storage and tracking procedures -- faults that never were to line up on a single day."

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There is much more.

Expect to see this event worked into the plot of 24. It appears that routine and trust conspired to lead to multiple failures. An airman in the crew that was to remove the missiles from the B-52 noticed they looked different and after about an hour a "skeptical supervisor" ordered them secured.

I have seen the B-52 practicing touch and go landings at Barksdale on several occasions as I drove by the base on Interstate 20 near Bossier City. They are an awesome sight. When I was in Vietnam I got to see feel the powerful explosions from B-52 conventional explosions as they did "Arclight" strikes designed to deny area to the North Vietnamese Army as it tried to infiltrate into South Vietnam.

The B-52 pilots and crew never got much of a chance to see the results of their work, most of which was done at night. Most flew out of Guam. When I was later medivaced to the Naval hospital on Guam, I got a chance to visit with some of the officers flying the planes, who were eager to hear from some one who had actually seen the results of their strikes.

The planes had also been used for something approaching close air support in the siege at Khe Sanh during the Tet offensive. When I was sent on a "Top Secret" mission to Khe Sanh in the summer of 1968 much of the landscape around the base looked like a moos scape as a result of their efforts. Their attacks helped break the back of the siege.

The B-52 has been a good investment for the Air Force for over 50 years, but it has never been used for its intended purpose of launching nuclear weapons on an enemy. That will probably still be true when it reaches the end of its useful service.