Free Republic

Conditions that led to August incident in states could reoccur, expert says RAF LAKENHEATH, England — A nuclear weapons expert said the Air Force’s response to a recent mishandling of nuclear weapons raises questions about the security of America’s arsenal worldwide, including at several installations in Europe. “[Maj.] Gen. [Richard] Newton said everything [in North Dakota] was done to Air Force regulations,” said Philip Coyle, a senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, an independent Pentagon watchdog group. “The problem I had with that was the same conditions could exist at other Air Force bases around the world.”...

WASHINGTON -- -- 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...

BISMARCK, N.D. - 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...

An Air Force B-52 bomber flew across the central United States last week with six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads that were mistakenly attached to the airplane's wing, defense officials said yesterday. The Stratofortress bomber, based at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, was transporting a dozen Advanced Cruise Missiles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on Aug. 30. But crews inadvertently loaded half of them with nuclear warheads attached.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007 · Last updated 7:15 p.m. PT Air Force scraps stealth missile fleet By ROBERT BURNS AP MILITARY WRITER WASHINGTON -- The Air Force said Wednesday it will retire the most modern cruise missile in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a "stealth" weapon developed in the 1980s with the ability to evade detection by Soviet radars. Known as the Advanced Cruise Missile, the weapon is carried by the B-52 bomber and was designed to attack heavily defended sites. It is the most capable among a variety of air-launched nuclear weapons built during the Cold War that remain in...