incident investigation. “If the IRN had accomplished a full and complete weapons preflight, the IRN should have discovered the nuclear warheads.” He did not.
The bomber, named, interestingly,
Happily, the nukes did get back to land without incident. They then sat unguarded on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for another nine hours before the ground crew there discovered that its command had accidentally acquired six new nuclear warheads, and they decided they’d better get them in a safe place, under guard. All told, six nuclear warheads were misplaced for a day and a half.
Here was the good news, according to the testimony of Air Force generals at the Senate Armed Services Committee on the occasion of presenting findings from the blue-ribbon review of the incident: “During the incident there was never any unsafe condition, and the incident was promptly reported to our national leadership including the Secretary of Defense and the President. These weapons were secure and always in the hands of America’s Airmen.”
“General,” the chairman of that Senate committee responded, “I’m a little taken aback by your statement that warheads were—there was never a safety issue and they were always under the control of American pilots. Did the pilots know they had nuclear weapons on board?”
“Sir, they did not.”
“So when you say they were under the control of the pilots, not knowing that you have nuclear weapons on board makes a difference, doesn’t it?”
“Yes sir, it does. The intent behind that statement is to make it clear that they never migrated off the aircraft anywhere else.”
Migrated?
As for whether or not an accident involving
“I’m not talking about detonation,” the chairman said. “I’m talking about could the plutonium be released inadvertently if this weapon were smashed into the ground from fifteen thousand feet.”
“That piece,” said the general, “I would not know.”
It was left to the senator to remind the Air Force that the United States was still cleaning up pieces of Spain forty years after the Palomares accident.
One of the first things the Air Force did in the aftermath of the Minot-to-Barksdale debacle was to institute no-warning inspections, and the first one they ran was on the 2nd Bomb Wing. Thirty-one inspectors (including six civilian augmentees) were detailed to assess the Barksdale nuclear team, and they spent ten months’ worth of man-days doing it. (That was the assessment that turned up the wing fungus.) Barksdale’s first inspector-assigned task was to stick a pylon full of cruise missiles onto a Stratofortress bomber and ready the bomber for a combat mission. The first try failed because the $450,000 bomb hoists kept malfunctioning and the electrical generators crapped out three times. After fourteen hours and two separate “mating/demating” operations, the loading crew decided to give up and start from scratch. The second try was delayed when the loading team parked the weapons bay over uneven pavement and the bomb hoist could not gain proper purchase, and then delayed again when the bomb hoist “boogie wheel” failed. The second mating attempt was aborted after fifteen hours. On the fourth attempt—after only a minor lift-arm malfunction—the Barksdale technicians managed to generate a combat-ready mission.
The 2nd Bomb Wing received a rating of Excellent from the inspectors in the following areas:
• Weapons Maintenance Technical Operations
• Storage and Maintenance Facilities
• Motor Vehicle Operations
• Safety
They had to settle for a Satisfactory in Loading and Mating. The inspectors did give extra-credit points to the loading and mating team for gamely fighting through the failure of six weapons load trailers, five power generators, a power-controller-unit trailer malfunction, and a range of unfortunate tire-pressure issues. “The weapons loading community overcame numerous equipment malfunctions,” the inspectors reported. They also commented favorably on the loading community’s “strong two-person concept adherence,” its “cohesive squadron teamwork,” and its “highly effective communication.” The inspectors did ding the loading and mating team for not prepositioning chocks to keep the loading trailers from accidentally bashing into the bomber, and suggested that they get some foam cutouts in the weapons expediter truck to keep the enabling switches and data cartridge safe during transport. But they gave Team Barksdale a thumbs-up for successfully preparing one bombing run… after three failed attempts… at somewhere past the thirty-hour mark.
“It’s very, very difficult to believe they could receive a passing grade on any kind of inspection when they were unable to generate a single successful nuclear sortie until the fourth attempt,” one weapons expert told the pseudonymous blogger (and former airman) “Nate Hale,” after reading the report that Hale had jimmied free from the Pentagon through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Hale quoted a second retired Air Force weaponeer, who was more to the point: “Tell me this is a joke.”
Still and all, the Air Force and the Pentagon decided the whole Minot-to-Barksdale mishap could be a lemons-into-lemonade moment. Apparently we needed some renewed attention to our nuclear-handling skills—we just hadn’t known it. That seemed all the more true when, a few months later, we discovered that we had erroneously shipped to Taiwan four nose-cone fuzes designed to trigger nuclear explosions in lieu of the helicopter battery packs Taiwan had requested, and that it had taken a year and a half to discover the accidental switcheroo. So the Air Force and the Pentagon embarked on some serious soul-searching, which took the form of a mess of incident investigations and blue-ribbon reviews and task-force studies to see how our atomic hair trigger was faring in the twenty-first century.
When all the investigations and reviews and task-force studies were completed, the consensus was clear: they all found erosion and degradation and a general web of sloth and anxiety within our nation’s nuclear mission. The root cause? Lack of self-esteem. The men and women handling the nukes were suffering a debilitating lack of pride. Their promotion rates, it was noted, were well behind the service average. We had to remind them in big ways and small that they were important to us, that the “pursuit of the nuclear zero-defect culture” and “generating a culture of nuclear excellence” wasn’t just hot air. What the program needed was resources: better pay, new layers of high-level managers dedicated to the nuclear mission, upgraded computer systems for tracking all the nuclear nuts and bolts, a commitment to more (and more serious) nuclear-training exercises, and of course, you know, a bigger program to upgrade and modernize the hardware. Money! “Definitely,” the logistician Air Force general told the Senate’s key nuclear oversight committee, “a re-look at recapitalizing that.”
Do I hear nine trillion?
Even though there’s been a lot of blue-ribbon hand-wringing about how best to sustain and rejuvenate our big, leaky, can’t-quite-keep-track-of-our-warheads nuclear-bomb infrastructure, our worries about it haven’t caused us to re-ask the big question of
An attack with one of the nuclear weapons we’ve got now would cause an explosion about ten times the size of the one at Hiroshima. Can you imagine us setting off two such bombs now? How about five of them?
