US...Fast and Loose With Nukes

[PatrickHenry]

Can we all agree that nuclear weapons are EXTREMELY dangerous?

Are you aware that there are established procedures for the military handling of these deadly devices of mass destruction?

So how come six armed nukes flew across the nation without authorization?
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7158
Military servicemen qualified to speak on the subject will confirm that there is a stringent nuclear weapons handling procedure. There is a rigorous, almost inflexible, chain of command in regards to the handling of nuclear weapons and not just any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine is allowed to handle nuclear weapons. Only servicemen specialized in specific handling and loading procedures, are perm certified to handle, access and load nuclear warheads.

Every service personnel that moves or even touches these weapons must sign a tracking paper and has total accountability for their movement. There is good reason for the paperwork behind moving these weapons. The military officers that order the movement of nuclear weapons, including base commanders, must also fill out paper forms.

In other words, unauthorized removal of nuclear weapons would be virtually impossible to accomplish unless the chain of command were bypassed, involving, in this case, the deliberate tampering of the paperwork and tracking procedures.

The strategic bombers that carried the nuclear weapons also could not fly with their loaded nuclear weaponry without the authorization of senior military officials and the base commander. The go-ahead authorization of senior military officials must be transmitted to the servicemen that upload the nuclear weapons. Without this authorization no flights can take place.

In the case of the missing nukes, orders were given and flight permission was granted. Once again, any competent and eligible U.S. Air Force member can certify that this is the standard procedure.

There are two important questions to be answered in relation to the "lost" nukes incident:

1. Who gave the order to arm the W80-1 thermonuclear warheads on the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs)? At what level in the military hierarchy did this order originate? How was the order transmitted down the command chain?

2. If this was not a procedural error, what was the underlying military-political objective sought by those who gave the orders?

The Nuclear Management Information Systems “interface with each other and provide [the U.S. Department of Defence] with the ability to track the location of nuclear weapons and components from cradle-to-grave [meaning from when they are made to when they are decommissioned].” [12]

The Military Times also makes an omission that exposes the official narrative as false and indicates that the event was not just a mistake: “The Defense Department uses a computerized tracking program to keep tabs on each one of its nuclear warheads, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. For the six warheads to make it onto the B-52, each one would have had to be signed out of its storage bunker and transported to the bomber.” [13]

This is where the chain of command in regards to military officers falls into play. If any of the stocked inventories of nuclear weapons are moved to an authorized location they will be noticed and tracked by the DTRA and will require the relevant authorization. There is also a code system involved that is tied to the chain of command.

The fact that the incident only apparently became known to the U.S. Air Force when military personnel reported it, suggests that either the nuclear weapons were ordered to be moved or that the electronic tracking devices had been removed or tampered with. This scenario would need the involvement of individuals with expertise in military electronics or for those responsible for the monitoring of nuclear weapons to look the other way or both.

The U.S. Air Force has publicly stated that it has made a “mistake,” which is very unusual and almost unprecedented for a military organization that tries to continually assure the American public of their safety.

The fact that seventy or more military personnel have been punished in the case of the “lost” nuclear weapons does not mean, however, that the senior commanding officers responsible for having carried out the special operation will be identified and punished.

Quite the opposite. The investigation could indeed result in a camouflage of the chain of command, where lower-ranking military personnel are accused and court-martialed, with a view to ultimately protecting those in high office who have committed an act of treason.

What's really going on here? These orders came from the top of the chain of command.

[jafar00]

Can we all agree that nuclear weapons are EXTREMELY dangerous?


Totally.


Are you aware that there are established procedures for the military handling of these deadly devices of mass destruction?


Indeed there are. They are designed to stop them falling into the wrong hands.


So how come six armed nukes flew across the nation without authorization?


Maybe the plan was to let them disappear and fall into the "wrong" hands and be used for a false flag? That's my theory and I'm sticking by it. You just can't trust those shady US govt types these days.

[PatrickHenry]

It makes me sad to agree with you on this, jafar.

I live far from proposed false flag attack sites, but I would never want to see a nuke go off in a city...

[crimzonsol]

Maybe I missed something, but what happened?

[PatrickHenry]

Maybe I missed something, but what happened?

Maybe you were napping when the story broke, crimzonsol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incid ent
Between 08:00 and 09:00 on August 29, 2007 a group of USAF airmen entered one of the weapons storage bunkers at Minot to prepare AGM-129 missiles for transport to Barksdale. That day's missile transport, the sixth of 12 scheduled ferry missions, was to have consisted of 12 AGM-129s, installed with training warheads, with six missiles per pylon and one pylon mounted under each wing of a Barksdale-assigned B-52 aircraft. When the airmen entered the bunker, the missiles were already installed on the underwing pylons and the nuclear warheads in the missiles were supposed to have been already replaced with the dummy training warheads. In this case, however, six of the missiles still carried nuclear warheads. A later investigation found that the reason for the error was that the formal electronic scheduling system for tracking the missiles "had been subverted in favor of an informal process that did not identify this pylon as prepared for the flight."[7] The airmen assigned to handle the missiles used an outdated paper schedule that contained incorrect information on the status of the missiles.[8]

Although the airmen in the weapons storage began to inspect the missiles, an early-arriving transport crew hooked-up the pylons and towed them away without inspecting or ensuring that the missiles had been inspected or cleared for removal. The munitions control center failed to verify that the pylon had received proper clearance and inspection and approved the pylon for loading on the B-52 aircraft at 09:25. The munitions loading crew at the aircraft then failed to inspect the missiles to ensure that they all contained dummy warheads, done by looking through a small glass porthole on the missiles, before loading them on the aircraft. After taking eight hours to attach the pylons to the aircraft, the aircraft with the missiles loaded then remained parked overnight at Minot for 15 hours without special guard as required for nuclear weapons.[9]

On the morning of August 30, one of the transport aircraft's flight officers, a Barksdale-assigned B-52 instructor radar navigator (name unknown), only closely inspected the six missiles on the right wing, which were all properly uploaded with training warheads, before signing the manifest listing the cargo as a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The B-52 command pilot did not do a final verification check before preparing to depart Minot.[10]

The B-52 departed Minot at 08:40 and landed at Barksdale at 11:23 on August 30. The aircraft remained parked and without special guard until 20:30, when a munitions team arrived to remove the missiles. After a member of the munitions crew noticed something unusual about some of the missiles, at 22:00 a "skeptical" supervisor finally determined that nuclear warheads were present and ordered them secured and the incident reported, 36 hours after the missiles were removed from the bunker at Minot.[11]

The incident was reported to the National Military Command Center as a Bent Spear incident, which indicates a nuclear weapon incident that is of significant concern, but does not involve the immediate threat of nuclear war (Pinnacle - Nucflash) or the accidental detonation of or severe damage to a nuclear weapon (Pinnacle - Broken Arrow). The incident would also not qualify as a Pinnacle - Empty Quiver incident, since the weapons were not technically "lost" at any point, having never left US Air Force custody. Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General T. Michael Moseley quickly called the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on August 31 to inform him about the incident. Gates requested daily updates regarding the investigation and informed President Bush about the incident.[12] The incident was the first of its kind in 40 years in the United States and was later described by the media as "one of the worst breaches in U.S. nuclear weapons security in decades".[13]
[hr]I think Dave Lindorff has some very good questions and suspicions: http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff11012007.html

There is something deeply disturbing about the Air Force's official report on the Aug-29-30 "bent spear" incident that saw six nuclear warheads get mounted on six Advanced Cruise Missiles and improperly removed from a nuclear weapons storage bunker at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, then get improperly loaded on a B-52, and then get improperly flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana-a report that attributed the whole thing to a "mistake."

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52's wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems-automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

While the Air Force report doesn't mention any of this, what it means is that if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone-and actually at least two people, since it's long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem-had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.

Since the Air Force report does not explain how this hurdle to unauthorized removal of the six nukes could have been surmounted by "mistake," the report has to be considered a whitewash, at best, or a cover-up.

Incredibly, to date, there has been no demand for public hearings into this frightening incident.

Congress appears ready and willing to accept the Air Force whitewash at face value: It was an accident. It won't happen again.

That is not good enough!

We need honest answers to some hard questions. Among them:

* Who disabled the alarm systems on those weapons and on the bunker itself?

* Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?

* Who authorized them to perform this operation?

* Who moved the armed weapons out of the Bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)

* Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?

* Was there targeting information in the missile's guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?

* What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper Military Times?

* Why hasn't the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle "accidents" involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force "investigation" didn't even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the magazine American Conservative, found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

The Secretary of Defense appears to have been upset about this incident. Secretary Robert Gates ordered an unprecedented stand-down of all air bases in mid-September to check out and account for the entire nuclear inventory, and a general was dispatched immediately to Minot after the discovery of the wayward nukes on August 30 to investigate what had happened. Following a subsequent Air Force investigation, 70 people at Minot and Barksdale AFBs were removed from their posts and decertified from handling nuclear weapons, including five officers, one of them the Minot base commander.

* But a base commander does not have the authority to order nuclear weapons to be loaded on a plane and flown. So who issued that order and why has no one at a senior level in Washington been sacked?

There is speculation that the order may have come via an alternate chain of command.

Vice President Dick Cheney is known to be pressing within the administration for a war with Iran, to be launched before the end President Bush's second term of office. According to some reports, Cheney has even, on his own authority (or lack thereof), urged Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, in hopes that Iran might retaliate, thus drawing the US into a war.

Could the nation's war-mongering VP have used his neo-con contacts in the Defense Department or some of the Armageddon-believers in the Air Force to bypass the official chain of command and spring those nukes from their bunker?

Was there a plan to use one or more of those nukes-W80-1 warheads that can be calibrated to detonate with an explosive power ranging anywhere from 150 kilotons down to just 5 kilotons-against Iran? The Advanced Cruise Missile, a stealth weapon almost impossible to spot on radar, is designed to be launched from a remote location by a B-52, and then to fly close to the ground to its target, using terrain maps and GPS guidance. It is also designed to penetrate hardened sites, such as Iran's nuclear processing and research facilities.

Or was there a plan for a so-called "false-flag incident, "where a small nuke-made to resemble a primitive weapon of the type a fledgling nuclear power might construct-might be detonated at a US target abroad, or even within the US?

[crimzonsol]

Ok... I still do not get the poin. Missiles were moved. So what? Nothing happened.


Maybe you were napping when the story broke, crimzonsol

I think I was....not my fault I'm a teenager.

[Truth_and_Power]

Flying a nuclear missle across the country is like filling a martini glass to the rim with red wine and walking across the dining room carpet, to put it in terms a teenager will definitely understand. It's dangerous, not to be done without good reason. Doing anything with nuclear weapons requires tons of sign-offs, forms to be filled out, tags to be removed, added, re-removed, dyed green, re-added, switches double double checked, etc. Imagine you're going to let your five year old play with your 45 magnum.. how many times would you check to be sure it's not loaded?

The fact that this happened is a bad sign. The fact that 70 people are being disciplined is not necessarily indicative of a treasonous plot, as far as i know. That could very well be the number of people who had to not do their jobs for all 81 red white and green tags to have been ignored, skipped, left unsigned, etc.

[crimzonsol]

I know its dangerous, but since nothing happened why is it wo important? It is being delt with, if it was not being addressed it would have been something to talk about.

[PatrickHenry]

Sol.

It wasn't the flunkies that did this.

They had orders from traitors at the top.

[apdst]

They had orders from traitors at the top.

Who were they?

If there were orders to deploy the weapons, then why were they going to Barksdale AFB and not headed out of the country? It only makes sense that nukes go Barksdale, since it's the primary nuclear weapon storage facility for the United States Military.[/quote]

[PatrickHenry]

They had orders from traitors at the top.

Who were they?Well, that's what those questioning the official story wanna know...

If there were orders to deploy the weapons, then why were they going to Barksdale AFB and not headed out of the country? It only makes sense that nukes go Barksdale, since it's the primary nuclear weapon storage facility for the United States Military.
You mean that anybody on the base can just run into the Nuke Storage bunker, get a few for the road and take 'em out for a spin?

[Truth_and_Power]

They had orders from traitors at the top.

Who were they?

If there were orders to deploy the weapons, then why were they going to Barksdale AFB and not headed out of the country? It only makes sense that nukes go Barksdale, since it's the primary nuclear weapon storage facility for the United States Military.
[/quote]

But they weren't supposed to go there, apparently it was a mistake. When we think of domestic nuclear attacks we always think of large civilian populations. What happens if they manage to nuke a nuke stockpile. Does all that uranium go up at once? What would a nuclear explosion fueled by 1000's of nukes do?

[December]

The USA is the only country which used the nuclear weapons which killed HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people.

The USA had used WMD number of times.
How many countries did America bomb AFTER the end of WWII?

[Mark L Hamburger]

The USA is the only country which used the nuclear weapons which killed HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people.

The USA had used WMD number of times.
How many countries did America bomb AFTER the end of WWII?


ummmm... zero. Only two nuclear weapons have ever been used in warfare, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both in WWII

[jafar00]

The USA is the only country which used the nuclear weapons which killed HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people.

The USA had used WMD number of times.
How many countries did America bomb AFTER the end of WWII?


ummmm... zero. Only two nuclear weapons have ever been used in warfare, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both in WWII


The statement said WMDs not just nukes. There are other WMDs such as chemical weapons, and DU weapons that the US has and still are using in warfare. One could argue that DU is a nuclear weapon. While not having the blast power of a nuclear bomb, DU still spreads deadly radiation that affects military personnel and local civilians alike for many years after tanks and soldiers have passed by.[hr]
But they weren't supposed to go there, apparently it was a mistake. When we think of domestic nuclear attacks we always think of large civilian populations. What happens if they manage to nuke a nuke stockpile. Does all that uranium go up at once? What would a nuclear explosion fueled by 1000's of nukes do?


As far as I understand it, a nuclear explosion doesn't occur unless enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium is smashed together to create a critical mass enough to cause an uncontrolled chain reaction resulting in explosion. Unless the other nukes were set off by the first nuke, I imagine you would just get an increase in deadly fallout from the first bomb rather than multiple explosions since the others would just be blown to bits or vapourised before being able to read critical mass themselves.
Still, it would be one hell of a show for sure.

[Truth_and_Power]

Yeah I wonder if they would get set off though.. how closely they are stored to one another, how quickly the energies involved dissipate. You're probalby right though.[hr]
The USA is the only country which used the nuclear weapons which killed HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people.

The USA had used WMD number of times.
How many countries did America bomb AFTER the end of WWII?


This just in: December faults the US.

[Mark L Hamburger]

Can you provide an example of the US using any CNBR weapons since the end of WWII? Only chemical, nuclear, biological, and radiological weapons are WMD's.