AIR FORCE INVESTIGATES MISTAKEN TRANSPORT OF NUCLEAR WARHEADS
Six nuclear warheads on cruise missiles were mistakenly carried on a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana last week, prompting a major investigation, military officials have confirmed.
Ref. https://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/05/loose.nukes/index.html
When you consider how a nuclear bomb works I really do not see this as an issue, but apparently it was as they immediately called the President about it when the mistake was detected.
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ACC orders commandwide standdown Friday By Bruce Rolfsen - Staff writer Posted : Monday Sep 10, 2007 17:38:42 EDT On Sept. 14, flight lines will be very quiet at Air Combat Command bases. The entire command - about 100,000 active-duty airmen - is standing down training flights and many other operations as part of a command-wide safety day. Command boss Gen. Ronald Keys ordered the Sept. 14 safety standdown in the wake of the Aug. 30 nuclear incident at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., in which six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were loaded onto a B-52H and then flown to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., without anyone on the ground or bomber realizing the nuclear weapons were on the plane. It was not until the B-52H was parked at Barksdale that ground crews discovered the cruise missiles were carrying real warheads. ...Just how serious Keys takes the lapse of regulations at Minot is reflected in the fact that the safety stand-down is the first commandwide safety day in recent memory. In the past, the command has singled out specific types of aircraft for safety days and in 1997 the Department of Defense held a departmentwide safety review day. |
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Airmen punished for nuclear error
The US Air Force disciplines 70 airmen after a B-52 flew across the US loaded with nuclear missiles.
Ref. https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/a...cas/7053898.stm
Conspiracy theorists are whispering that this plane was actually heading for Iran - and then called back. Now the Powers That Be have to cover their tracks by creating an "error" of sufficient magnitude and "punish those responsible for it."
I'm not saying I agree with that, or believe it. But it's an interesting theory to read about.
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The government has been quick to say that the flight, which violated a number of long-standing orders regarding shipment of nuclear weapons in US airspace, was a "mistake." But was it a mistake? The biggest question is why a B-52 armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles would fly to Barksdale AFB. If, as reported, the weapons were being transported to be decommissioned, which supposedly is the destination for 400 of these doomsday weapons, then they should have been destined for Kirtland AFB in New Mexico, near the Pantex plant outside Amarillo, TX, where they would be dismantled. As Michael Salla writes in a disturbing piece in Saturday's edition of OpEdNews, the weapons should also not have been flown at all on a B-52, as there have been standing orders for 40 years against such flights over US soil, following several accidents in which bombs or nuclear-armed rockets were lost because "broken arrow" incidents including inadvertent bomb drops or crashes. A second order, issued in 1991 at the end of the Cold War by George Bush's father, barred the loading of nuclear weapons on any bomber. Any pilot would have known this, as would any ground support people loading the missiles on the B-52. According to Salla, if these five cruise missiles were really being transported by air to Texas for decommissioning, they should have been disarmed and flown in specially designed transport planes that are built to resist nuclear leakage in the event of a crash. They would never be transported under the wings of a B-52. What makes the incident even more suspicious is that Barksdale AFB is a staging area for B-52s being sent to the Middle East for combat duty. As the website GlobalSecurity.org reports: "Barksdale Air Force Base is headquarters for the 2d Bomb Wing, Eighth Air Force and 917th Wing. The 2d Bomb Wing provides global combat capability and trains all B-52 combat crews." |
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I am sure that the United States already has plans(leftover from the Cold War) to Nuke several countries (Russia, China, North Korea). I wouldn't be surprised if plans were in the works for Iran too.
But I do not think that this mistake had anything to do with that. I think it was just a stupid human error.
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