Posted on 10/20/2007 7:46:25 PM PDT by PotatoHeadMick
The United States' "disturbing" safety standards for its nuclear weapons came under fire last night after 70 US Air Force personnel were disciplined over an "unprecedented" security failure.
Three colonels, a lieutenant colonel and 66 other staff were punished after a B-52 bomber was mistakenly flown 1,200 miles across the America loaded with nuclear-armed missiles. It is regarded as the worst nuclear weapons security breach in the US for at least 40 years.
The four officers were relieved of their commands following an investigation that found widespread disregard for the rules on handling weapons – in this case each warheads had up to 15 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The disciplinary action was announced yesterday after a six-week inquiry. Six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were on the bomber's wings when it was flown from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. Gen Eugene Habiger, a former head of US Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear bombers, said: "I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing."
The Democratic congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, of California, who is also the chairwoman of the House of Representatives Armed Services strategic forces sub-committee, said she believed the air force had done a thorough investigation, but the findings were "a warning sign that there has been degradation" of attitudes toward the handling of the weapons.
Hans Kristensen, of the Federation of American Scientists, was among those sceptical that the flight in August represented an isolated incident. He said a decline in air force standards for nuclear weapons maintenance and security had been documented by the government a decade ago. In recent years, he said, Minot and Barksdale have received poor marks during inspections routinely required for certification. There have been at least two official reports in the past decade, in 1998 and 2003, which expressed safety concerns at the handling of nuclear weapons in the US.
In the latest incident, the missiles were taken on the correct journey but the warheads, intended for decommissioning, should have been removed first. The incident is embarrassing for the US but it raises safety issues for Britain and other nuclear-power nations.
At the time of the incident, on August 29 and 30, it was considered serious enough for President George W. Bush and Robert Gates, the defence secretary, to be informed. Maj Gen Richard Newton, the deputy chief of staff for the air force, announced the results of the inquiry and said there had been an "erosion of adherence to weapons-handing standards. They did not follow the formal scheduling processes that would have allowed them to do the proper maintenance and handling of those weapons."
Gen Newton said the "unprecedented string of procedural errors" had begun when airmen had failed to conduct a required inspection of the missiles before they were loaded on to the wing of the B-52 at Minot. Experts have said that if the B-52 had crashed, there would not have been a nuclear explosion. However, there could have been a danger of plutonium leakage from the W80-1 warheads, which have an adjustable yield of five to 150 kilotons.
Michael Wynne, the Air Force secretary, said: "This was an unacceptable mistake and a clear deviation from our exacting standards. We hold ourselves accountable to the American people and want to ensure proper corrective action has been taken." Mr Wynne and Gen Newton insisted the case was an isolated incident and that the current procedures for handling nuclear weapons were sound.
The political embarrassment lies in the administration's repeatedly aired concerns about nuclear proliferation. Washington has made no secret of its worries about the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons are the "crown jewels" in the US arsenal, and are meant to be protected by many safety procedures. The military is not supposed to lose track of them, even for a few hours.
The cruise missiles have a range of about 2,000 miles and are designed to hit precision targets well behind an enemy's lines.
Air force officials insisted that the warheads were not activated and pose no threat to the public. The missiles, however, sat on a runway in Louisiana for nine hours before anybody noticed that the warheads were in them.
Complacency will kill a career, especially in the military.
-Traveler
“Gen Newton said the “unprecedented string of procedural errors” had begun when airmen had failed to conduct a required inspection of the missiles before they were loaded on to the wing of the B-52 at Minot.
You’re supposed to look at the missiles you’re loading? Don’t they make the nuclear warhead kind of obvious?
And it should.
My guess would be that there are multiple operable clusters, and some can be left undeployed.
Amen! No argument from me.
No, they're behind a dome full of guidance instrunents.
Oh Yea, There’s a “window” to look through if it’s RED it’s the real thing. How the devil these “Gomers” miss it is beyond comprehension.
The way is to regulate the amount of “boosting” in the primary, fission part of the device. All warheads in the US inventory are thermonuclear devices; eg, hydrogen bombs. In these devices, an “ordinary” fission-fueled nuclear explosion a la Nagasaki spherical implosion device furnishes neutrons, X-rays, and temperatures necesssary to ignite a fusion reaction in the “secondary” part of the warhead. The fission reaction is also “boosted” by injecting tritium or tritium/deuterium gas into the core instantly before the fission device ignites. This gas(es), and only a very small amount of them, massively increases the neutron flux from the fission reaction. In a couple of the “Castle” series tests in the mid 50’s, the yields were roughly double what was expected due to the enhanced effects of this boosting. (Castle Romeo, Castle Bravo)
Additionally, some of the last fission-only tests performed in Nevada used boosted cores and it was found that the yields could be enhanced by roughly 10 times, to the low-mid 400kt range, using this technique. By using this technique, the initial fission reactions could be made much smaller, more robust and reliable, and smaller amounts of Pu could be used, which means that warheads could be made smaller.
So the simple way to adjust the yield of a thermonuclear device is to reduce or regulate the amount(s) of tritium injected into the fissioning core of the primary. From my readings on this, if there is not enough boosting to even ignite the fusion reaction in the first place, then the total yield will only be from the fissioning primary and there will be no fusion reaction at all. This technique could also be used on a pure-fission device but I don’t think the US uses any of those at present.
All of the above information, by the way, is freely available from numerous DOE sites; eg, is not classified.
Well, it may be one way to get yourself transfered from Minot AFB.
The biggest “blunder” was allowing someone to leak this story to the traitorous MSM!
“which have an adjustable yield of five to 150 kilotons.”
Adjustable yield? That’s new to me, didn’t know such weapons existed....it must be by using either less or more of what is likely the D-T fusion fuel used in the second stage.. but someone more knowledgable that me probably knows better...
“Blunder” is a interesting term. When the event happened within a day or so there were multiple news reports of this. The folks that did this “leaking” have not been heard from since according to Sean Morton. At that time there was the discrepancy of either 5 or 6 missles dleivered to Barksdale AFB. Recall that there was stand down the weekend after Labor Day and that was reported at the time.
Wait a minute, the orders had to come from someone. There are not 70 decision makers in any military group.
How could 70 be to blame?
Both the hue and cry and punishments seem odd and excessive.
The U.S. Air Force: Too often they seem to be little more than a few Knights in Shiny Armor, staffed, supported and pampered by a million apathetic city clerks, bus drivers, union mechanics and stevedores, and a Microsoft help desk.
By situating varying amount of tritium at the core. It is called “Dial-a-yield.” Was first tested in 1951 with the Item device, and was then refered to as “boosting”. Good way to increase yield without adding heavy fissile material.
The Castle Bravo test went big, not because of boosting, but because they missed one of the reactions of the Lithium second stage fuel.
It's also available from author Tom Clancy in his 1992 novel "The Sum Of All Fears" where an Islamists group get hold of an Israeli nuke at a '67 war crash site and uses it at an east coast football stadium.
The book explains it quite well as the bomb 'fizzles', and the yield is reduced dramatically.
This is the BOOK, not the POS movie of the same name that was so PC'ed up as to be nearly unwatchable.
The USAF screwed the pooch on this, and I am so glad to see heads rolling in lieu of some political cover up. To punish 70 means that every person in line, from the airman who rolled it our of storage to the pilot who missed the load on preflight and every supervisor along the entire chain got busted.
It's the only proper response.
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