BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) – A B-52 bomber was mistakenly loaded with five nuclear warheads during a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The bomber carried advanced cruise missiles as part of a Defense Department program to retire 400 of the missiles, the Military Times said, quoting three officers who spoke on condition they remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.
The officers said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were mounted onto pylons under the bomber’s wings for the Aug. 30 flight from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the newspaper said Wednesday.
A Minot Air Force Base spokeswoman, Sgt. Marelise Wood, referred questions by The Associated Press to the Air Force secretary’s office in Washington. A spokesman there was out of the office Wednesday morning and not immediately available for comment.
An Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Ed Thomas, told the Military Times that the weapons were in Air Force control at all times and the missiles were safely transferred.
Air Force policy does not permit officials to say whether nuclear warheads were involved, Thomas said.
However, he said all nuclear weapons at Minot were accounted for.
“Air Force standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling,” Thomas said. “The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public.”
He said an investigation was launched and the crews involved in loading the missiles were decertified pending corrective action or training.
I am not even going to go there on the chain of command and all the heads that are going to roll…
There is really NO excuse that I can think of for NOT knowing you’re loading nukes, I have no problem with B-52′s flying nuke loaded either, it’s what they do, but to do it accidentally??
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Being a grunt I can only speculate, but there has got to be a lot of people involved with the ‘hands on’ part getting that sort of thing loaded up.
And no one caught it before the bomber took off.
Simply amazing…
Okay. Permit me, if I might, for stating what I consider to be the obvious. Because, naturally, I come from an entirely different generation than the ones now.
My first response: why would we EVER acknowledge what aircraft were carrying nukes, and where, and when?
Why and/or how would this somehow become Public Knowledge?
But, Fred, did they do this unknowingly — or did it somehow get LEAKED?
Instead of A, I would suspect B.
I go back to my original Conspiracy Theorist Algorithm:
There ARE no conspiracies. Because, essentially, two Hells Angels can keep a secret when one is dead.
BZ
Which means the USAF was doing what it was told when it was told and, that, somehow, the information got LEAKED.
It is the LEAKER that should be lined up against a wall and shot.
BZ
This isn’t the first time the USAF has ‘mislaid’ some nukes. However its the first time I’ve ever seen it in the news. In addition there are at least two ‘lost nukes’. One is in a swamp in SC and another in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain and those are just the one’s I know of.
Nukes are like anything else, familiarity breeds contempt and contempt breeds carelessness. I know most people have seen a weapon fire after it was ‘unloaded’ and someone was cleaning it. That’s how it works with nukes as well.
The only time nuclear armed aircraft are suppose to be in the skies over the US are when they are flying to targets overseas. B-52′s haven’t flown with nuclear weapons on board since the 1960′s when the lost one in the Atlantic Ocean by Spain. They B-52′s only sat ground alert until Bush-1 stood down the alert force around 1991. I worked nuclear armed bombers for 13 years at two different SAC bases and NEVER did I see one fly with nukes on board. We knew if we saw a nuclear armed alert aircraft take off, the only thing left to do was kiss your butt good-by because WWIII just started and we were already targeted.
Somebody just plain screwed up big time in this. I can’t fathom nukes just being transported to the aircraft without anyone knowing what was going on. Their was no leaker on this, only complacency and stupidity.
BobF, thanks for that one, I knew there would be some ‘Zoomie’ come by that knew what was REALLY going on, thanks man, it IS appreciated…
I sit corrected. Doesn’t speak well of the US Air Farce, does it?
BZ