The saga of a ‘Bent Spear’ (How did nuclear missiles fly over the US?)

[deminks]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20926465/

By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
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.

(end snip)

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Am still calling bullshit on this

Didn't "notice"?

There is something terribly wrong with this incident.

The "explanation" (excuse) doesn't wash with me.

[low_phreaq]

6. Yeah, me too.

I was just talking to somebody who works air munitions. Said the nukes are shiny and you know when you are handling them. Said it could have been a covert movement, and maybe it was a civilian contractor who blabbed.

[struggle4progress]

8. Yep: armed nuclear missiles stacked carelessly with unarmed missiles? Not a chance in hell.

[notadmblnd]

2. That's their stroy and their sticking to it

[burythehatchet]

13. typical MO. Damage control. Tell the part of the story that

is now provable.

[in_cog_ni_to]

3. I can't get the thought of "what would have happened had they CRASHED with those bombs on board?"

out of my head......:scared: 10 Hiroshima bombs? :scared:

From what I understand, from reading people like Larry Johnson, there's no way those bombs were "accidentally" put on that plane. Something was going on.

[DefenseLawyer]

4. Reminds me of a scene from Animal House

Otter: We'll swear that you were doing a great job taking care of your brother's nuclear bombs... but you parked them out back last night, and in the morning they were gone!

Flounder: Will that work?

Otter: It's gotta work better than the truth...

[Snarkoleptic]

5. Mebbe * ordered them shipped to Eye-Ran?

[OneBlueSky]

7. aw, c'mon . . . it's only six little nukes . . . I mean, how much damage could they do? . . .

:sarcasm:

[struggle4progress]

9. You can make book this is a cover story for a broader scandal.

[formercia]

10. Nuclear armed missiles are distinctly colored

and have markings that no conventional weapon has.

There is no way a pilot could do a preflight check of the aircraft and not notice, unless the warheads had been purposely repainted to look like dummies. Either way, it was a deliberate act on someone's part. This had to be a group effort.

[Zywiec]

12. Did you read the article?

The missiles look the same - a stamp-size window on the missile's frame allows workers to peer inside to check whether the warheads within are silver.

[formercia]

17. That article is bullshit propaganda. n/t

[emanymton]

11. Trust Us. We Know What We Are Doing. It Is Not Like ...

.
you've been lied to before. Is It?

Even if you accept totally the cover story, does it not show that these group of yahoos do not deserve to be watching over anything of importance? The nuclear weapon command and control systems throughout the military are specifically designed to prevent this kind of oops.

So I am paranoid. But this whole story is not believable. 'Lie to me once, shame on you. Lie to me twice, shame on me.'
.

[trumad]

14. Exactly---

A bunch of Nukes sitting with conventional weapons...PLEASE!

Shit---- In my garage I separate the dangerous chemicals, Gas for the mower, bug spray, etc.... from the non-lethal items. Common sense kind of things you know.
What this article states is that the lethals were right there with the non-lethals. That's a huge leap of faith.

<snip>
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.<snip>

Wouldn't these Nukes have been in the er Nuke storage facility?

[Zywiec]

15. They're stored in the same bunker

from the article "Some Air Force veterans say the base's officers made an egregious mistake in allowing nuclear-warhead-equipped missiles and unarmed missiles to be stored in the same bunker, a practice that a spokesman last week confirmed is ROUTINE."

[Junkdrawer]

16. Is the official report out yet, or is this being floated to see what will fly?

Here's one paragraph that pegged my Bullshit meter:

A munitions custodian officer is supposed to keep track of the nuclear warheads. In the case of cruise missiles, a stamp-size window on the missile's frame allows workers to peer inside to check whether the warheads within are silver. In many cases, a red ribbon or marker attached to the missile serves as an additional warning. Finally, before the missiles are moved, two-man teams are supposed to look at check sheets, bar codes and serial numbers denoting whether the missiles are armed.


So we are to believe that the only difference between a nuclear cruise missile and a dummy is the color of the warhead as see though a "stamp-sized window"??? And the the red tag is only there "In many cases"????

[mistertrickster]

18. Totally agree with the many previous posts. This official story is bogus.

Bush is moving missiles around for a nuclear strike somewhere. This is just the one we found out about . . .

[Thothmes]

19. Sometimes a screw up is just a screw up.