You can't simply "accidentally" load nukes onto a B-52 bomber and fly them to another base. Furthermore, how the hell did this get out?

Nuclear Warheads mistakenly flown on B-52

http://tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/sep/05/staging_nuke_for_iran

and

Arms Control Wonk

...moving nukes around, but why would one seek to pre-position them at Barksdale? Why would one not launch the strike directly from one's home base? Seems to me that that increases surety over the weapon, for pretty much zero cost.

FWIW, Hans Kristensen thinks it's simply stupidity. I'm inclined to agree, not least because of the specific weapons involved.

"The spectacle of this great nation which does not know its own mind is as humiliating as it is dangerous." ~ Walter Lippmann

Does not matter:

Iran Nukes are bad nukes: They could make Jews glow in the dark.
US nukes are good nukes: They make Japs & could make Muslims glow in the dark.

Do not fear the good nukes! You must only fear the bad nukes.

are interesting
http://www.militarytimes.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1559956

as is Tina's link about locking lasers onto airborn missiles:
http://agonist.org/20070905/bmd_watch_abl_beam_control_tested

there's one still missing? happy times
and did they outsource the removal of warheads?

if they were moving them...there have to be numerous nukes on the ships stationed in the middle east not counting the ones that are in Israel.

"One" never is enough is it? Two are better...why stop at two...let's have thousands of them! And no way that now several countries have them, that everyone else in the world wants to get theirs! And have them they will since the nuclear proliferation treaty was abandoned. Guess which country tore the agreement up!

George Bush's latest scheme to have countries that sell uranimum reprocess the fuel and store the waste in their country as a method for the United States to control the spread of nuclear weapons is downright stupid! The cat's out of the bag and it isn't gonna be stuffed back in. I ain't gonna permit my government to have me turn bright green...sorry, but the bombs will have to snuff me out. Sooner or later, one of those mushroom clouds is going to be created accidentally because thousands of bombs were created capable to blowing the world up! Transporting six of them 'accidentally' doesn't bode well for 'anyone's' prospect of survival! Disarmament...that's a joke!

Let's all go back to think about Dr. Strangelove for a sec here. Seems relevant! Military commander Jack T. Ripper goes nuts and launches all the nuclear bombers, in hopes that the rest of the Pentagon will go along with it: 'total committment'. The 'rational system' of only letting the President hit the button turns out to be fragmented, riddled with unreliable features (like how the callback radio fails, etc). The fear of nuclear annihilation enables the one-man 'Ripper faction' to seize the power structure.

I read a funny scenario in ex-Iran Contra moneylaundering guy Al Martin's book 'The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider' dubbed Operation Sledgehammer, linked to Rex-84, Continuity of Government and Oliver North's National Programs Office. Martin claims that Ollie and the rightwing guys were willing to consider a 'limited nuclear exchange' with the USSR as a pretext for total domestic tyranny. On the Soviet side, the hardliners smelled imperial disintegration around the corner, so some of them would have *favored* such a war as a last-ditch effort to reinforce their fusty old elite circle's domination.

Ollie would have dropped all the liberals etc. into "civilian inmate labor facilities" and so forth. This was Operation Sledgehammer. Maybe its just another funny myth, but seriously Ollie was a pretty inventive guy.

The third nugget I'll put in: well hey, hypothetically if '9/11 was staged by the evil mysterious Cheney faction', then the odd story about how the Secret Service received on 9/11 a weird transmission of various secret code words, including the secret words for the nuclear football. This has been overlooked by most 9/11 conspiracy theorists (if it indeed occurred) but for the tinfoil crowd it suggests that the supermegaEvilFaction put a gun to Bush's head by letting him know they could mess with America's nuclear stockpile.

Finally, well, if you've been watching the apocalyptic TV series Jericho, the tinfoil theory I'm speculating about basically forms its main conspiracy storyline (Spoiler Alert...... : a Homeland Security-faction-sponsored self-nuking). That's probably why this one popped into my head! Nothing quite makes ya paranoid like nukes, right folks?!

--
Hongpong.com

Over at Raw Story, the comments on one article included a report on a "bin Laden" trade of 65000 option contracts on S&P700 due 21 September. One can only wonder, if the report is true, why someone would risk over a billion dollars betting the S&P is going to drop over 50% this month unless a cataclysmic event is in store. And use of nuclear weapons on Iran with resulting retaliation from them (and possibly others) could certainly cause significant drops in the markets.
I quite agree with previous posts doubting that the event was an accident or screwup. What an amazing coincidence that Bush43 & gang are obviously planning an attack on Iran and "accidentally" a nuke-armed B52 arrives at the primary staging base for Mideast operations. I don't buy it.
First, decommissioned cruise missiles would have been shipped, absent warheads which are strictly signature and movement controlled, via cargo aircraft in bulk; not a few (with warheads) attached to B52 external weapons pylons.
Second, nuclear warheads have strict guarding and movement protection and accountability requirements and are clearly marked with nuclear symbols. Accountability has to be transferred from the transport group to ground crew to air crew prior to takeoff. Third, pilots do walk arounds of their aircraft before flights and nuclear warheads, hanging out in the open on weapons pylons without a weapons load authorization and accountability transfer to the air crew, would have been a GLARING and OBVIOUS DISCREPANCY!
The logical result of this progression is that the flight of the nuke-armed B52 to Barksdale was intentional and the "accidental" spiel was developed (after cooler heads in the military blew the whistle to the military newspaper) to conceal the fact that the Bush43 gang had ordered nuclear weapons deployed to the Iran war theater. Wonder how many other nuke-armed B52's went unnoticed and are now staged at Diego Garcia, Guam or similar forward bases?
Apparently the Bush43 gang believes the military warning that conventional weapons will not effectively take out Iran's nuclear program or defang its military sufficiently to render our carrier groups safe. And they intend to attack anyway and use nuclear weapons...
After all, they need another war to complete their control of us.

David Bier
CADRE Intel Mgr
techadvisor@helloworld.com
http://groups.google.com/group/publicintel

a) The laws:

1. With Bush in charge, things are never at rock bottom, but can always get worse.

2. When you think we've hit rock bottom, see #1 above.

These are not my original thoughts, so I must offer a generalized hat-tip to Left Blogistan.

b) The nukes:

All this said, and given Seymour Hersh's articles over the past year or so in the New Yorker, my tinfoil-hat theory is that the intention was to stage a nuclear tipped cruise missile for targetting in Iran, and someone on the inside spilled it. Whether that would stop the original project, I would not opine. Fascinating how all the press accounts refer to the weapons loading and transport as a 'mistake.' I don't find that plausible.

Incidentally, as a radiofrequency specialist, I have replaced all my tinfoil hats (I own several) with copper sheeting -- better conductivity and ergo better shielding.

Good judgement is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgement.

Org Theory and the Barksdale Bombs
posted 33 minutes ago under nuclear-weapons by jeffrey

I do not find compelling the speculation, suggested by Larry Johnson and others, that the nuclear-armed Advanced Cruise Missiles that mistakenly ended up at Barksdale Air Force Base were being staged for an attack on Iran.

Pilots, crews and all those associated with handling nuclear weapons do make mistakes, as a casual reading of Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons will demonstrate. Indeed, the fact that the bombs sat on the tarmac for ten hours because no one quite believed that such an accident could happen will make excellent fodder for organizational theorists:

much more w/links

Arms Control Wonk

I am Jay T. Baldwin, President of Americans to Preserve the American Dream and Democracy. www.apadd.com
I am also a blue collar worker driving an 18 wheeler, and running my one man pest control business. My wife is a vetran teacher for Dade county schools in Miami. She just opened her second job as a personal floral decorator. It should not take the two of us working four fulltime jobs to just get by from paycheck to paycheck, when two jobs 8 hours, 5 days a week used to give us the American dream and democracy. I am even considereing a third job to keep our head above water.THIS IS NOT AMERICA AS FAR AS ME< MY WIFE AND THREE CHILDREN ARE CONCERNED!!! It is an American nightmare! we work harder longer hours more jobs and we are still sinking faster than we can tread financial water. We do not live extravagantly! We just get by with the basics at $70,000 joint income! No parties, No eating out! No unneccesary travel in the car because of gasoline prices. I used to live one block from the beach when my wife and Imarried in 1989. We always had two new cars, and a small boat. We were saving for our future as I worked full time as a truck driver and she was a student, working a part time job. We lived good then. Now it is a different story.
Ironically, the bosses at the various place I worked at over the years say the American Dream couldnt be sweeter as they constantly gave themselves massive raises, bonusses, etc. What planet do they live on??????? It is not the one the rest of us proletariat worker classes live on!
APADD is my way of lashing out in pure rage and anger toward the power elite. It is a little guy's BIG STICK approach to get back at the wealthy for the grief them and their manipulated plutocatic economy has ruined our live. It is an anti-propaganda lesson how we can rise up and throw their pie right back in their faces, and hold their economy hostage until they pay us back all they took with interest!!!!! Or we will rise up and revolt, overthrowing them and their empires. Then we can re-distribute their power, wealth, and recources back into society. Then once again the middleclass will be the harbinger of freedom, democracy,and the American Dream. Then all opportunity for the poor will be returned to them so they can also have a practical means to obtain the Dream.
I wrote two books also to assist in the revolution! Book I Delight of the Overclass Demise of the Middleclass. Book II Revolt Against The Plutocracy!
PEOPLE OF THE AGONIST< Please go tomy website and download your own copies of the United Declaration of Virtues. Get them in the mail to your President, Senator or Congressman.

Please write or call Jay T.Baldwin 11350 SW 45 St. Miami, Florida, 33165. (305) 553-1933 or cell (305) 484-0643 www.apadd.com

OK, it's true, arithmetic has never been my forte. Nevertheless, I'm puzzled by a small discrepancy in recent news reporting. No, make that a huge discrepancy. A ginormous discrepancy, in fact. How many nuclear weapons were "accidentally" ferried around the US a week ago and, more importantly, how many were eventually recovered?

The Washington Post" reported. on September 6, that "An Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the heartland last week with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles attached to its wings. The pilots and crew evidently had no clue what they were carrying. Nor did the munitions crew that accidentally loaded the missiles. No one noticed that six nuclear warheads were missing for more than 12 hours."

Also, on Sept 6, the Financial Times reported "The US Air Force is investigating how a bomber inadvertently carried five nuclear weapons across the US last month before the air force discovered the weapons were missing."

Reuters earlier appears to have come down on the sice of six missing nukes, but later hedged their bets on the number of nukes involved.. Reuters

"A U.S. bomber mistakenly flew with at least five nuclear warheads over the United States last week, but the Air Force on Wednesday said the flight never threatened public safety.

A quick Google returns a pretty even split between five or six missing nuclear warheads. Which was it? At the end of the day, how many were recovered? Is there stil one out there somewhere?

This whole accidental nuke transport story is exceedingly peculiar, imo

The US has a globally advertised nuclear standdown on September 14, and one missing nuke of up to 150 kilotons capacity. (By the way that's 10 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.)

Ahhh. It's probably nothing.......

Who effectively stood down on 9/11? (I'm not good with acronyms.)

Here's a projection of what a 150 kiloton nuke can do. Hopefully somebody has figured out whether one is till missing. Surely somebody with authority is capable of counting past five. (PS: Would a plane take off with 3 missiles attached to one wing and 2 on the other?)

NY

In Canada, we require a min. of 10 signatures in various log books to ship any munition by air, and since we are talking about nuclear ordinance here, that would require about 8 more. So what do we now have on our hands?

Sabre-Ratting? Maybe. It doesn’t hurt, but then it never amounts to much either unless it’s backed up. Four years of huffing and puffing @ Kim Jong Il have only emboldened him to force the US to finally capitulate on most of their original demands. So no.

Ineptitude? - at least 24 signatures, in a variety of log books, on two different bases spread across the country, all officially sanctioned by their commanding officers. These are air force personnel, at all levels. I don’t think so.

Perimeter or Operations Test? Awfully expensive way to test operational procedure. The PSYOPS mouthpieces are in damage control mode though, so that argument is untenable.

Covert Operation? Very possible. A covert operation to strike Iran (think NicaraguaEl Salvador 70’s) without the official sanction or oversight of Gates’ office, perhaps either to shield him, or rogue elements [* this has all the hallmarks of Cheney’s paw prints]. [Remember: TWO bases involved here, so at least one person at the level of Lt. Commander or higher calling the shots. Conceivable? Yes. Practicable? Definitely.

The most tenable scenario though, is a setup by Cheney to ‘lose’ some nukes for a definite hit, either domestically, or internationally; but in either case, a false-flag operation. Why? Because Cheney needs a poster-boy and a poster-incident to galvanize the populace around his plan to nuke Iran, and a false flag operation on American soil may do the trick. It’s a pretty big gamble to kill that many estimated civilians to galvanize support - however the Democrat Congress under Peolsi might as well be Republican, and she is doing absolutely nada that the citizenry voted them in on.

A) The nukes were left on the tarmack for up to 12 hours, fully crated and completely un-guarded, i.e. for immediate load and dispersal.

B) They were fully activated and mounted in flight, no doubt to verify their operational capability.

BTW, has anyone noticed that the US MIL has pulled all stops to look for Fossett? That makes for a nice humanitarian, black hawk down, hollywood twist, but the reality is that they have never done this in their entire history: pull out the stops for civilian search and rescue operations: not even on 911. No, they are looking for something ‘bigger’.

Remember that the original story was ‘5' nukes’; the revised figure is now ‘6', but I believe we still have only ‘5' accounted for. It would appear one is missing.”Houston, we have problem…”.

Ironically the only way back to a sane (i.e. Ron Paul) US foreign policy may rest with Vladimir Putin. The Russian Bear is fully awake as of late and he is understandably, none too pleased.

Washington Post, By Joby Warrick & Walter Pincus, September 23

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.

[4-page WaPo article continues at the link].

U.S. ties missile mix-up to reduced nuclear focus
Tue Feb 12, 2008 1:36pm EST

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Air Force mistakenly flew nuclear weapons across the United States last year as a result of eroding discipline spawned by a diminished strategic focus on nuclear weapons, officials said on Tuesday.

A panel of Air Force and independent investigators told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the increased importance of conventional combat missions since the 1991 Gulf War has undermined nuclear-related training and experience.

"The turning point of this diminished focus began when aircraft came off nuclear alert status," three Air Force officers headed by deputy Air Force chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Daniel Darnell, said in a written report to the panel.

"Training in nuclear procedures became less frequent without the daily activity required by nuclear alert conditions coupled with the expanded commitments of dual-tasked units," they said.

In one of the U.S. military's worst nuclear mix-ups, six nuclear missiles were mistakenly loaded on an Air Force B-52 and flown 1,400 miles from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

"No one knew where they were, or even missed them, for over 36 hours," Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's Democratic chairman, said at a public hearing on Air Force nuclear security.

The Air Force says the war heads were not armed and were never in danger of detonating.

But Levin disputed assertions by the Air Force and his Republican colleagues that the weapons posed no danger to the public, saying a crash could have caused a plutonium leak like one that occurred during a B-52 crash in Spain in the 1960s.

more

237 nuke handling deficiencies cited since 2001

By Michael Hoffman - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Feb 12, 2008 20:29:30 EST

Since 2001, the Air Force’s Air Combat Command has suffered 237 different “safety deficiencies” known in the nuclear community as Dull Swords while maintaining its nuclear stockpile, according to safety records.

The service defines a Dull Sword as a “safety deficiency not included in the accident or incident categories.”

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, issued a Freedom of Information Act request for all ACC Bent Spear and Dull Sword incidents from June 1992 — when the ACC took over the nuclear mission from Strategic Air Command — to Sept. 27, 2007, when he made the request.

The response he received went only as far back as June 2001 because the ACC Safety database no longer has any records of Dull Sword incidents from 1992 to 2001, said Maj. Thomas Crosson, an ACC spokesman. Air Force officials could not explain why those incidents got deleted from the database.

Dull Sword is a term used by the Defense Department to describe a nuclear incident like Bent Spear, Broken Arrow and Nucflash. A Nucflash, which is a nuclear weapons accident that could create the risk of war, is the most extreme. A Broken Arrow is an accident that is not expected to cause war. A Bent Spear is typified by a “significant incident” involving nuclear weapons, according to Air Force Policy Directive 91-1.

The list of Dull Sword records provided by the Air Force includes a short description of what failed each time, ranging from failures in the Personal Reliability Program — which is used to determine the airmen who can handle nuclear weapons — to broken towing vehicles used to transport the warheads from the storage units to the bombers, to unexplained problems with the equipment designed to carry the nuclear weapons on the aircraft.

The 509th Bomb Wing which operates the B-2 Spirit bomber at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., alone recorded 111 of the 237 safety deficiencies, by far the most for one wing. Meanwhile, the 5th Bomb Wing, the one responsible for mistakenly loading the six nuclear warheads had 45 incidents and the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale had 50.

The highest number of Dull Swords occurred in 2006 with 63 incidents recorded, compared with 2002 and 2001, when only five and one respectively were listed.

No Bent Spear events — or “significant incidents” involving a nuclear weapon — could be found in the database, even though last August’s accident when a B-52 Stratofortress bomber mistakenly flew six nuclear warheads from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., is called a Bent Spear by service officials.

Today, Air Force leaders will testify before the Senate Armed Service’s Committee and address nuclear security in response to last August’s accident, which has led to plenty of hand wringing throughout the Air Force over how the nuclear program could degrade to such a state where six warheads could be mistakenly loaded.

Minot airmen with the 5th Bomb Wing loaded a dozen AGM-129 cruise missiles to the wings of a B-52 on the morning of Aug. 29 without realizing six of the missiles were loaded with nuclear warheads. The B-52 sat on the runway without special nuclear guard until it took off the next morning and landed at Barksdale when an airman with the 2nd Bomb Wing discovered the mistake nearly 36 hours after it was made.

Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne launched a Blue Ribbon Review soon after the incident was briefed to President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The results of that review headed by Maj. Gen. Polly Peyer, director of resource integration in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, Installations, and Mission Support, will be released today and briefed to Congress by Peyer. Officials who have seen the report said it contains recommendations on how to improve the Air Force's nuclear program.

bit more