How warheads made an unplanned flight (B-52 flight Minot to Barksdale AGM-129 Snafu)

WaPo via LA Times ^ | September 23, 2007 | Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus

[Red Steel]

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 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 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown 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 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.

The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on

[Squantos]

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.

[Smokin' Joe]

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.

[starlifter]

Buff’s went off airborne alert several years before 1967.

[Gondring]

Welcome to FR.

LOL Delayed reaction?

[ryan71]

“...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.

[wrench]

"As others have pointed out, what really happened here was that a message was sent. There was no accident. Someone was reminded that we can and will put nukes on planes."

The message may have been that our military is trained and has the ability to carry out their mission even in the event of a traumatic breakdown in the chain of command. ie, had the original 9/11 attack destroyed the pentagon, whitehouse, and congress, the mission of defending the country and prosecuting the attackers would initially be carried out on the local level at every base. Then, the real response would come when command and control was once again co-ordinated.

It was a demonstration and a reminder of what we can and will do.

[bmwcyle]

In the Navy we paint different colors on our types of missiles. The colors define type it was and there were no mistake unless they are not painted properly. I also knew what I was loading into a submarine.

[Incorrigible]

Thanks! I needed that!

[pfflier]

Thanks for the info. As an Air Force weenie I didn’t know the Navy used that term.

[wastedyears]

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.

[EEDUDE]

“Use hostages maybe?”

Standing orders to those that guard “special weapons” storage and transfer is that hostages are to be ignored.

[Tallguy]

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.”

[Southack]

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.

[Half Vast Conspiracy]

If an incident did occur it is called a Broken Arrow.

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. ;)

[Sender]

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.

[TankerKC]

I remember visiting a friend in Arkansas - Fayatteville?? back in 1986 or so.

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. ;)

[Tallguy]

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.

[Sender]

Sounds logical to me.

[Sender]

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.

[Squantos]

Draw a line from Minot to Barksdale on the map and keep going south.....does it extend too or cross Venezuela ?