Those Minot Nukes

[donsu]

http://counterpunch.com/lindorff11052007.html


More Questions Than Answers
Those Minot Nukes


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?
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think the pentagon will tell?

[nashville_brook]

1. kick, etc...

[TheWraith]

2. For f--ks sake, have any of these tin-foil hat types actually read the available info?

Nobody had to mount warheads on the missiles. They were already there. Not all of the ACMs have been de-loaded, and for that matter not all of them are scheduled for decomissioning.

"Stonewalling on my requests for answers"... bullshit. I can claim that the White House is stonewalling on my requests to know whether George Bush has a pumpkin for a head, but the fact that I'm not a notable enough person to get my questions addressed doesn't translate as "stonewalling."

And actually, they HAVE enunciated on the alarm systems. However, that doesn't mean much when a crew is authorized to remove neutered ACMs from the same bunker where the loaded ones are stored.

"But why would warheads have been mounted on obsolete weapons in the first place?"

Because they were never removed. The crew was supposed to pick up six dead ones out of the bunker, and they picked up live ones instead.

[Didereaux]

3. Here's the answer...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12461951@N03/1381545132/

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