The nuclear weapons oops: "We are not talking about paintball cartridges or pellet gun ammo"

remember this...?

Last month, six W80-1 nuclear-armed AGM-129 advanced cruise missiles were flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana and sat on the tarmac for 10 hours undetected.

Press reports initially cited the Air Force mistake of flying nuclear weapons over the United States in violation of Air Force standing orders and international treaties, while completely missing the more important major issues, such as how six nuclear cruise missiles got loose to begin with.

well, check this...

from the ft. worth star-telegram via raw story...

Robert Stormer of Chicago is a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, serving with the Navy's Supervisor of Salvage, and was a specialist in weapons retrieval. He is a marine engineer and marine salvage specialist.

lt. commander stormer has some very important questions...

1 Why, and for what ostensible purpose, were these nuclear weapons taken to Barksdale?

2 How long was it before the error was discovered?

3 How many mistakes and errors were made, and how many needed to be made, for this to happen?

4 How many and which security protocols were overlooked?

5 How many and which safety procedures were bypassed or ignored?

6 How many other nuclear command and control non-observations of procedure have there been?

7 What is Congress going to do to better oversee U.S. nuclear command and control?

8 How does this incident relate to concern for reliability of control over nuclear weapons and nuclear materials in Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere?

9 Does the Bush administration, as some news reports suggest, have plans to attack Iran with nuclear weapons?

10 If this was an accident, have we degraded our military to a point where we are now making critical mistakes with our nuclear arsenal? If so, how do we correct this?

he concludes with these thoughts...

Yes, heads must roll and careers will end. But let's make sure that this includes the ranks from general officers to noncommissioned ones.

Or is this to be the Air Force version of the Abu Ghraib investigation?

from the moment this story broke, i've felt that it may well be THE smoking gun that brings the house of cards tumbling down... yes, i've said that before about other things and have been wrong, not necessarily wrong about the seriousness or the criminality of the issues in question, just wrong about if or how soon they would blow up in bushco's face... you gotta admit, there's SOMETHING really rotten lurking under this one...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet