Airforce "misplaces" nukes for three hours

I am sure that most of you have heard by now of the snafu of Minot crews loading five nukes on a B52 and the powers to be "loosing track" of them for a three hour period. Not only is it suprising to me that 5 weapons could have been issued with no tracking, but the crew's statement that " we were unaware they were on the aircraft" is completly absurd.

reply to post by mizzu

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New one on me. You have a link to some kind of documentation of this? Well, stranger things have happened anyway....

Hi, could you please post a link?

Thanks

www.kfyrtv.com...

Actually they were supposed to be removed at Minot as part of an ongoing decomissioning effort for about 400 ACMs. Apparently the confusion is over why they weren't removed, and so far the incident has resulted in at least one officer being removed from duty and several AF members losing their nuke status.

As for the crew's statement ... [lol] It'd be kinda hard not to notice 5 nukes hanging from the wing pylons. no?



[edit: to add]
A more informative link:
www.armytimes.com...

[edit on 5-9-2007 by 12m8keall2c]

According to the MSN article i read the war heads were attached to cruise missiles. Could this just have been a simple mistake? Or is this how the next "terrorist" attack will happen?? Are there any theories out there?
www.msnbc.msn.com...

It looks to me like it was a mistake. They were supposed to take the missiles onboard but the warheads were supposed to be removed beforehand, and that wasn't done.

I guess any mishap dealing with nuclear weapons should be considered serious, but I don't think there was ever any real danger to the public here.

bbc news

these mistakes can cost a lot sometimes.. it's difficult to imagine how is it possible to mix this thing up. maybe they simply transported them with purpose, and this is just to sign it off as a mistake.. who knows

A mistake! This is by far the most dumb excuse ive heard of. Who is gunna believe that this guy was relieved of duty due to a mistake. There has to be reason for action. Do people think they are going to disclose the real reason they did it? To call this a common mistake is just so we can sit back and take it up the pucker again. Us as Americans cant afford anymore mistakes by military or govenment, plain and simple.

The crew I believe. Most AF missiles can have the warheads removed and it looks just like the normal missile. One of my old supervisors told me in Vietnam they took a bunch of old missiles without warheads and stuck them on broke fighters to look like they had more birds on alert than they really did.

To the crew they looked like just empty missiles, and they can't open them up to look for warheads. Though missiles without warheads are required to have blue stripes painted on them, but there's alot of "required" stuff in the military that falls through the cracks. According to the aircraft forms, they were just empty rounds to carry.

Actually, sounds like a cover
for a Red Cell exercise.

Would they go to this extreme ?
Who knows. They want it as
real as they can get it.

Reference :

Red Cell

Regards,
Lex