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2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident

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2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident

A B-52H bomber departs Minot Air Force Base
DateAugust 29 – 30, 2007
LocationMinot Air Force Base, North Dakota and Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana
Result Six nuclear warheads mishandled and not properly secured for approximately 36 hours
AGM-129 missiles are loaded on a B-52 bomber at Minot.
USAF Colonel Bruce Emig, commander of the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot Air Force Base at the time of the incident was relieved of command.
USAF Colonel Cynthia Lundell, commander of the 5th Maintenance Group at Minot Air Force Base, N.D. at the time of the incident was relieved of command.

The 2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident was an incident at Minot Air Force Base and Barksdale Air Force Base on August 29 – 30, 2007 in which six "live" AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles (each armed with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead) were mistakenly loaded on a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52H heavy bomber in place of six unarmed AGM-129 missiles that were awaiting transport from Minot to Barksdale for disposal. The live missiles were not reported missing and remained mounted to the aircraft at both Minot and Barksdale for a period of 36 hours. During this period, the warheads were not protected by the various mandatory security precautions required for nuclear weapons.

Background

Minot Air Force Base is the home of the 5th Bomb Wing, which according to the USAF's statement on the wing's mission, serves with its B-52 bombers as part of the USAF's conventional and strategic combat force. The "strategic" portion of the 5th's mission consists of the ability to deliver nuclear weapons against potential targets worldwide. Thus, Minot Air Force Base stores and maintains a ready arsenal of nuclear bombs, nuclear warheads, and associated delivery systems, including, as of August 2007, the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile.

The AGM-129 was fielded in 1987 as a stealthy cruise missile platform to deliver the W80-3 variable yield nuclear warhead. Although originally designed to equip the B-1 bomber, it was later decided that the AGM-129 would only be carried by the B-52, mounted on external pylons on the wings.

In March 2007, the USAF decided to retire its AGM-129 complement in order to help comply with international arms-control treaties. In order to do so, the USAF began to transport its AGM-129s stored at Minot by B-52s to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for ultimate disposal. By August 29, 2007 more than 200 AGM-129s had been shipped from Minot to Barksdale in this manner.

Incident

Around 08:00 to 09:00 on August 29, a group of USAF airmen entered one of the weapons storage bunkers at Minot to prepare AGM-129 missiles for transport to Barksdale that day. That day's scheduled missile transport was to have consisted of 12 AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles, installed with training warheads, with six missiles per pylon and one pylon mounted under each wing of a Barksdale-assigned B-52 transport aircraft. When the airmen entered the bunker the missiles were already installed on the underwing pylons and the nuclear warheads in the missiles were supposed to have been already replaced with the dummy training warheads. In this case, however, six of the missiles still carried nuclear warheads. A later investigation found that the reason for the error was that the formal system for tracking the missiles "had been subverted in favor of an informal process that did not identify this pylon as prepared for the flight." Thus, the airmen failed to adequately inspect the missiles that were attached to pylons in the weapons storage area.

Although the airmen in the weapons storage began to inspect the missiles, at the same time a transport crew hooked-up the pylons and towed them away without ensuring that the missiles had been inspected or cleared for removal. The loading crew that uploaded the pylon to the B-52 aircraft did not verify that training shapes were installed apparently trusting everyone before them. After taking eight hours to attach the pylons to the aircraft, the aircraft with the missiles loaded then remained parked overnight at Minot for 15 hours without special guard as required for nuclear weapons.

The flight officer who conducted the next morning's inspection at Minot before takeoff only closely inspected the six missiles on the right wing, which were all properly uploaded with training warheads, before signing the manifest listing the cargo as a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. Finally, the pilot did not do a final verification check.

The B-52 departed Minot and landed at Barksdale at 11:23 on August 30. The aircraft remained parked and without special guard until 20:30, when a munitions team arrived to remove the missiles. After a member of the munitions crew noticed something unusual about some of the missiles, at 22:00 a "skeptical" supervisor finally determined that nuclear warheads were present and ordered them secured and the incident reported, 36-hours after the missiles were removed from the bunker at Minot.

The incident was reported to the National Military Command Center as a Bent Spear incident, which indicates a nuclear weapon incident that is of significant concern, but does not involve the immediate threat of nuclear war (Pinnacle - Nucflash) or the accidental detonation of or severe damage to a nuclear weapon (Pinnacle - Broken Arrow). The incident would also not qualify as a Pinnacle - Empty Quiver incident, since the weapons were not technically "lost" at any point, having never left US Air Force custody. Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General T. Michael Moseley quickly called the Secretary of Defense on August 31st to inform him about the incident and the Secretary requested daily updates regarding the investigation. The Secretary also informed President Bush. The incident was the first of its kind in 40 years in the United States.

Response by the U.S. government

The USAF at first decided to conceal the incident, in part due to the USAF policy not to comment on the storage or movement of nuclear weapons and to an apparent belief that the incident wouldn't generate much public concern. In fact, the DoD Broken Spear incident report reportedly contained the passage, "No press interest anticipated." Details of the incident, however, were leaked by unknown DoD officials to the Military Times newspaper, which published a small article on the incident on September 5.

In response, in a September 5 2007 news briefing in the Pentagon by Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, it was stated that at no time the public was in any danger and that military personnel had custody of the weapons at all times. The USAF announced that within days of the incident, the USAF relieved the Minot munitions squadron commander and disciplined several airmen. USAF Major General Doug Raaberg was assigned to lead an investigation into the incident. The DoD announced that a Pentagon-appointed scientific advisory panel would study the mishap as part of a larger review of procedures for handling nuclear weapons.

On October 19, 2007, the USAF investigation report findings were announced, concluding that, "there has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards at Minot Air Force Base and at Barksdale Air Force Base" and that "...a limited number of airmen at both locations failed to follow procedures." The commander of the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot, Colonel Bruce Emig, the commander of the 5th Maintenance Group at Minot, Colonel Cynthia Lundell, and the commander of the Barksdale Operations Group "receieved administrative action" and were relieved of their commands and reassigned. Additionally, a number of personnel, including the entire 5th Bomb Wing, were stripped of their certification to handle sensitive weaponry. The inspector general offices of all USAF major commands that handle nuclear weapons were directed to conduct immediate "unlimited nuclear surety inspections at every nuclear-capable unit."

Maj. Gen. Dick Newton, assistant deputy chief of staff for operations, said that the Air Combat Command commander had referred the matter to USAF Lieutenant General Seip, commander of the 12th Air Force, as a court-martial convening authority to determine if additional charges or actions would be taken against any of the personnel involved in the incident. Retired USAF General Larry Welch was asked to lead the Pentagon-appointed scientific advisory panel that would study the mishap as part of a larger review of procedures and policies for handling nuclear weapons. In addition, the USAF chartered a "Blue Ribbon Review" chaired by USAF Major General Polly Peyer to "make recommendations as to how we can improve the Air Force's capability to safely and securely perform our nuclear weapons responsibility." Furthermore, the U.S. Congress requested that the DoD and U.S. Department of Energy conduct a bottom-up review of nuclear procedures.

Controversy: Possible cover-up for an averted strike on Iran

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As this is mostly based on interviews there is trouble providing concrete citations which would satiate wikinazis.

Journalist Wayne Madsen speculated that, based on information provided by unidentified U.S. and foreign intelligence sources, the incident was neither a mistake nor an error, but rather an internal rebellion among intelligence and military officials to avert nuclear war with Iran under Project Checkmate, which was meant to be a U.S. nuclear strike on Iranian centrifuge sites. The Project was reportedly going to be carried out in conjunction with the Israeli September 6, 2007 air strike on Syria , which occurred one week after the nuclear weapons incident. After discovering the true target of the nuclear weapons, information was leaked which caused a rebellion among military and intelligence officials regarding the plan to place and/or use nuclear warheads in the middle east, according to Madsen. The rebellion led to the Project being scrapped.

Ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, replaced October 1, 2007 by Admiral Michael Mullen, was heavily involved in encouraging Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to take the nuclear option off the table with regards to attacking Iran according to the following New Yorker article.

In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The huge complex includes large underground facilities built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in the ground and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand centrifuges. “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ ” At the time, a number of retired officers, including two Army major generals who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and Charles Swannack, Jr., had begun speaking out against the Administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This period is known to many in the Pentagon as “the April Revolution.”{

“An event like this doesn’t get papered over very quickly,” the former official added. “The bad feelings over the nuclear option are still felt. The civilian hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the brass, and the brass feel they were tricked into it”—the nuclear planning—“by being asked to provide all options in the planning papers.”


Admiral William Fallon, , head of CENTCOM, supposedly refused to allow a third carrier to be placed in the Persian Gulf, and claimed there would be no war with Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM.

There is speculation from counter-terrorism expert and ex-CIA officer Larry C. Johnson that someone associated with the mission leaked information that the plane was carrying nuclear weapons and that Barksdale Air Force Base was planning to be used as a staging ground to travel to the middle east with the weapons.

Dana Priest, intelligence reporter for the Washington Post had this to say about a potential war with Iran.

"History seems to be repeating it self as the drumbeat for war with Iran, based on accusations not backed up by any facts, intensifies. Do you think the Bush administration will launch a war (perhaps sending only the bombers) against Iran and if they do what are the likely consequences for the Middle East?

Dana Priest reported, "Frankly, I think the military would revolt and there would be no pilots to fly those missions. This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief, said yesterday. That the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Beside, it's not the "war" or "bombing" part that's difficult; it's the morning after and all the days after that. Haven't we learned that (again) from Iraq?"

Criticisms of the official story include (according to partisan activist Dave Lindorff) :

  • Who disabled the alarm systems on those weapons and on the bunker itself?
  • Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?
  • Who authorized them to perform this operation?
  • Who moved the armed weapons out of the Bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)
  • Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?
  • Was there targeting information in the missile's guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?
  • What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper Military Times?
  • Why hasn't the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle "accidents" involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force "investigation" didn't even mention these incidents, and as I disclosed in my article, none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

Lindorff's criticisms can be summed up as follows:

"The problem....is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic anti-theft systems—automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

We’re asked to believe that some low-ranking ground crew personnel at Minot AFB simply walked out of a nuclear weapons bunker with six nuclear armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, not knowing what they were carrying, and labored for eight hours to mount those missiles and their launch pylon on the wing of a B-52 strategic bomber without ever noticing that they were armed with nuclear weapons. We’re asked to believe that none of those electronic alarms and motion sensors built into the system went off during that whole process."

There is also speculation that several high ranking generals will resign if a preemptive strike on Iran occurs.

Nuclear weapons policy

In 1968 after several accidents with airborne nuclear weapons, the Air Force banned the transport of nuclear weapons by air.

See also: Palomares hydrogen bombs incident

Terminology

See also: United States military nuclear incident terminology

According to the United States nuclear incident terminology, the incident was reported to the National Command Authority as a "Bent Spear" incident, which is less serious than a Pinnacle - Broken Arrow or Pinnacle - Empty Quiver incident. There was no damage to the warheads and they were never actually "lost" by the Empty Quiver definition (having never left US Air Force custody).

References

Notes

  1. USAF, Minot Air Force Base 5th Bomb Wing Mission
  2. Warrick, Missteps in the Bunker.
  3. Parsch, Andreas, AGM-129
  4. USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton"
  5. Parsch, Andreas, AGM-129, Warrick, Missteps in the Bunker.
  6. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker", USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton"
  7. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker", USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton"
  8. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker"
  9. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker"
  10. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=47320
  11. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker"
  12. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker"
  13. Warrick, "Missteps in the Bunker", USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton"
  14. USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton"
  15. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/19/loose.nukes/index.html, USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton
  16. USDoD, "DoD Press Briefing with Maj. Gen. Newton"
  17. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_CHECKMATE
  18. http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october182007/iran_nukes_101807.php
  19. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/10/060710fa_fact?currentPage=2
  20. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/28/military_iran/
  21. http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=37738
  22. http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=37738
  23. http://tpmcafe.com/user/ljohnson
  24. http://tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/sep/05/staging_nuke_for_iran
  25. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/09/26/DI2007092601556.html
  26. http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/103107Lindorff.shtml
  27. http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/103107Lindorff.shtml
  28. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1434540.ece

Books

  • Gibson, James N. (2000). Nuclear Weapons of the United States: An Illustrated History. Schiffer Publishing. ISBN 0764300636. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Web

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