More Questions About the Minot Nukes

More Questions About the Minot Nukes

By Dave Lindorff

Created Nov 6 2007 - 8:52am

The Pentagon has been stonewalling on my requests for answers to key

questions. For two weeks a public affairs office has been declining to

respond to my question about whether the six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles

flown by B-52 from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB were programmed for specific

targets, and if so what theose targets were, or even whether the team that

investigated the incident checked to see if they were targeted.

The Air Force and Pentagon have also declined to explain whether US nuclear

weapons in storage in US bunkers have been provided with the same alarm and

motion-detection sensors that the National Nuclear Security Agency helped to

install on the nukes being stored on Russian bases.

Clearly if such devices are standard on US nukes, as several Air Force

active and retired personnel have assured me is the case, then there is no

way that those weapons could have been removed from the Minot bunker by

"mistake" as claimed the Air Force's official report on the incident.

The Pentagon has also refused to state whether the missiles were fueled up

or not.

Finally, there is another big question that has not even been asked.

Supposedly the reason the B-52 was flying to Barksdale with 12 missiles is

that they are part of a total of 400 of these things, all of which have been

declared obsolete and slated for destruction. But if all those Advanced

Cruise Missiles are obsolete, then there is simply no reason for having any

of them fitted with nuclear warheads. If they're obsolete, none of them

would be on stand-by status. No one at Minot would ever be mounting a nuke

on a cruise missile. Note that the Air Force is not claiming that the

initial mounting of six warheads onto six missiles was a "mistake." Only

that nobody in the subsequent chain of events was alerted to the fact that

the warheads had been mounted. But why would warheads have been mounted on

obsolete weapons in the first place?

Meanwhile, I have no knowledge as to the accuracy of this, but one Air Force

vet tells me that the Advanced Cruise Missiles that were nuclear armed and

mounted on a launch pylon on the B-52 in question would have been

electronically linked to the plane automatically (which has the capability

to program and re-program the targeting of the missiles), and that therefore

the pilot of the plane would have instantly seen on his instrument console

that he had nukes on board that flight. He also told me that the idea that

the pilot would only have checked out the missiles mounted on one wing--by

chance the wing that had the six missiles with dummy warheads--instead of

both pylons and all 12 missiles as required, which is the claim of the Air

Force report, is ludicrous. As he notes, pilots on these aging

Stratofortresses see the pre-flight check as a life-or-death matter.

Anything wrong on these planes can mean loss of the plane and even loss of

the lives of the entire crew and of people on the ground. That would include

the secure mounting of the missile cargo.

As a former semi-trailer driver myself, I know that those checks of all the

main systems--air brakes, trailer linkage, tire pressure, lights, etc.--are

not taken lightly. Before you head out on the road with a trailer truck, you

check out all the critical systems, because you know your life depends on

their working properly. Surely this would be much more true with a strategic

bomber, especially when it is carrying 12 missiles under its wings.

There is another question, raised by an Air Force vet in a comment below,

which also bears investigation. The Air Force is claiming that the B-52 was

supposedly ferrying 12 unarmed cruise missiles to Barksdale for disassembly.

But a B-52, an antique aircraft which requires a big crew, demands enormous

amounts of sevicing and repair and wastes a prodigious amount of fuel, is a

terribly inefficient way to ferry these weapons to a graveyard. It would be

infinitely cheaper to truck the missile bodies overland, or to stack and

ship them in cargo planes, and in fact it simply defies belief that the Air

Force would be doing this with Stratofortresses.

The more you look at this story, the more obvious it is that the Air Force

claim that this was all just a big "mistake" has to be a blatant cover-up of

the truth.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson