I wonder when the first nuke will detonate and where now that it so easy to find a ready insertion point in Ukraine and Russia for something along those lines. Anybody at all could do it. Elon Musk dropped $44 billion to buy a media platform of little value so how much could some disaffected rat sell an atomic weapon for in this world? I know it sounds like something involving Dirk Pitt and the merry band from NUMA but it is more real now than it ever was and to be honest, waging a full out proxy war directly against Russia is really one of the stupidest things any country could do in the history of the world and nowadays it really only takes one disaffected idiot to bring back the man with the tall hat that hasn't been seen since Nagasaki in 1945. That's a long time to keep the genie bottled up if the CIA and FBI are the people responsible for preventing this sort of thing because they obviously aren't up to the task.
I'd have a little more faith in the safeguards around such weapons if I didn't know that one day a few Air Force types walked into a nuclear weapons magazine and walked out with half a dozen missiles, loaded them on their bomber and flew to another air force where a senior sergeant saw the markings on the exposed ordnance hanging from the wings and knew instantly that they were nuclear weapons.
On 29 August 2007, six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each loaded with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, were mistakenly loaded onto a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52H heavy bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and transported to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Srsly, now is not the time to live in first rank American cities or second rank European cities. There are a lot of people, tribes, nations, terrorists and Iran who hate them to death.
4 comments:
Unfortunately it was not just a few. To my count there were 6 different groups of people that failed to do there job. There were failures from the breakout crew to Munitions Control to Line Delivery to the loaders, weapons safety, and the aircrew just at the Minot end of things.
I remember talking to Wynne back when he was head of RDT&E at the Pentagon. He seemed reasonable to me but then I found myself getting on a C-5 at NASNI to head over to the PG again and hearing that the SECDEF fired him and the AFCOS for not taking this as deadly serious and something for which a lot of people had to be held accountable and punished severely. When I got back and went home to Alameda County a friend of mine doing the BRAC shutdown on Alameda NAS walked me through the old nuclear weapons magazine by the runway. The Marine guard shack and barracks next to it a fallen testament to how seriously we used to take nuclear weapon security and safety.
In the incident at Minot I am no longer sure of the "punishments" other than the Maintenance Squadron CC (he was responsible for the munitions guys) being relieved and some non-judicial punishment. That was well after I retired and talking with other former munitions troops we were all wondering why nobody was making little rocks out of big rocks at the military resort in beautiful Leavenworth Kansas.
To be honest I don't really think the SECDEF lopped off the AF heads over the nukes. I think he was burned severely by their lack of zeal and total unwillingness to quadruple the number of armed drones over Afghanistan and Iraq overnight. They just blew off the President's order like they didn't work for the man.
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