Posted on 09/24/2007 8:00:15 PM PDT by Red Steel
Dunno.........never saw a combat AC fly with live noooooks cept once during and elephant walk aka alert launch exercise when a BUFF was too far down the runway before abort code was given by tower to safely stop so he took off and went around the pattern and landed.
Wing king aka Group Commander lost his job on that little incident ....even though the pilots did their job .
I have not a clue as to what, who or why ....just why it ain’t no lone band of wild wing nuts mistake that this occurred.
I’d wager the only thing that was not where it was supposd to be is the information that things were where they were...The rest is smoke and mirrors.
Buff’s went off airborne alert several years before 1967.
LOL Delayed reaction?
“...while the military’s attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And there is the motivation for this bed time story.
Thanks! I needed that!
Thanks for the info. As an Air Force weenie I didn’t know the Navy used that term.
A broken arrow is an accidental event that involves nuclear weapons or nuclear components but does not create the risk of nuclear war.
Broken arrow is also a type of code word that has been used to request close air support from all available aircraft when a ground position is in extreme danger of being overrun by enemy troops. This type of code word was last used in Operation Iraqi Freedom (April 2007) and is a plot element in movies such as We Were Soldiers.
Got that from Wikipedia just to clarify for myself.
“Use hostages maybe?”
Standing orders to those that guard “special weapons” storage and transfer is that hostages are to be ignored.
I think that if this truly was an ‘intentional’ as opposed to an ‘accident’ that the intended recipient is Vladimir Putin. Putin has been pushing his Bear bombers close to NATO airspace on recon flights.
The ‘message’ could be: “Don’t Eff with a USAF bomber because he might be carrying nukes.”
Putin flies his bombers near our assets in order to show potential client states like Iran and North Korea that Russia offers an alternative counter-balance to the U.S.
Loading nukes onto a B-52 means nothing to Russia in that context.
However, nuclear-armed, flying B-52’s *do* mean something to North Korea and Syria and Iran...as does Israel’s open statement that Damascus will be wiped out if Syria uses chems or nukes.
Both statements by the U.S. with visible nukes on the B-52 as well as Israel’s diplomatic punch were coordinated messages.
...and the lack of “spontaneous” protests by the easily incited crowds in the target countries shows that the leadership in question “got” the message.
From my SAC days, I recall incidents being classified in several ways: NUCFLASH, BROKEN ARROW, EMPTY QUIVER, BENT SPEAR, DULL SWORD, and ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION.
I added that last one. ;)
I dunno who ordered it. How high up does it have to go to put live nukes on a plane? And who leaked the “accident” story to the press? Strategery.
That would be the old Blytheville AFB, AR...my stomping grounds from 1982-1985. I spent a bit of time out on the Alert Pad. ;)
Do we not have some sort of “gentleman’s agreement” with the Russians about not having strategic nuclear forces on ‘alert status’? I think we do. I also think that it’s a joke, but that’s another argument.
This could be a way of maintaining the agreement without scrapping it entirely.
Sounds logical to me.
Let’s put it this way; whoever had the idea to order nukes on a plane, and whoever had the idea to leak the accident story, it had to be approved from The Top, IMHO.
Draw a line from Minot to Barksdale on the map and keep going south.....does it extend too or cross Venezuela ?
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