News to AP: Nukes Fly on Bombers

I'm still dumbfounded by AP's cluelessness about the military and national security. Note the headline "Nuclear Bombs Mistakenly Flown Over US" I saw another one announce "Nuclear Bombs Flown Across Five States". Read the article and see if you get the same impression I did - the AP thinks the "mistake" was nukes were flown over the U.S. by a B-52. Gee if we had a policy of not flying nukes over the United States, wouldn't it have made it hard to fly them to the Soviet Union? Maybe the AP thinks we taxi the aircraft to the Canadian border and then take off.

AP here's a lead for you: NOBODY KNEW THE NUKES WERE ON THE B-52s!

And that is the mistake. We are supposed to have positive control of our nuclear weapons. We are supposed to know where they all at all times. The story here is six of them went unaccounted for over three hours. The reason the Air Force is scrambling is to find out how they "lost" the weapons, not that they were flown on a B-52.

The Deseret News did preserve the essence of the problem when they relayed the Military Times story:

The Defense Department uses a computerized tracking program to keep tabs on each one of its nuclear warheads, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. For the six warheads to make it onto the B-52, each one would have had to be signed out of its storage bunker and transported to the bomber. Diligent safety protocols would have to have been ignored to load the warheads onto the plane, he said.

"I just can't imagine how all of this happened," said Philip Coyle, a senior adviser on nuclear weapons at the Center for Defense Information. "The procedures are so rigid; this is the last thing that's supposed to happen."

Either our nuclear safeguarding procedures didn't work or someone didn't follow them. This is the story. If AP thinks its because nukes happen to fly on bombers, they are about fifty years late.

Originally posted in UNCoRRELATED Sept 6, 2007