Remeber Remember August 30??

It just doesn't have the same ring to it as the fifth of November... V would be disappointed.

The following is a story that has seen a little press over here and it came up in two lectures today so I thought I'd shed some light on it.

As some of you may know, six nuclear warheads were flown from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana on the 30th of August. In main stream media, the event has passed over as a mishap, lapse in security. First, many officers in the chain of command are involved with removing from storage and activation of nuclear warheads and special conditions must be met for transit as the air transport of unprotected nuclear warheads has been banned since 1968 (see "Palomares Incident" and "B-52 Crash at Thule Air Base"). The event has been deemed, by the pentagon, as an error in routine transfer. Previous to 1991 this would have been a plausible explanation. During the cold war, bombers, as a matter or protocol, were continuously armed with nuclear weapons. With the end of the Cold War, then president, George H. W. Bush ordered all nuclear weapons be reomoved from aircraft and stored in secure facilities nearby so as to prevent an incident like that of August, 30th. The pentagon counters that the warheads were bound for decommissioning, yet W-80 warheads, like the six transported on the 30th, are decommissioned at Kirkland AFB in New Mexico, not Louisiana (here, warheads are separated from their delivery mechanisms and are sent by train to the Department of Energy's Pantex decommissioning facility across the border in Texas).

It is interesting to note the following: Barksdale AFB in Louisiana is openly known to be the staging grounds for the majority of the Air Force's operations bound for Iraq. It has also been made public that the pentagon has conceived a 3 day blitz offense that identifies 1200 targets for destruction in Iran. Media here speculates that the warheads, small in their payload (W-80s have an adjustable yield of between 5 and 150 kilotons. To put this into perspective, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a yield of 13 and 20 kilotons respectively and the US's largest tested warhead [Castle Bravo, 1954] had a yield of 15,000 kilotons), were meant to be adjusted to a small yield and dropped on a strategic position in Iran, after which media would conclude there was a mishap at one of Iran's nuclear facilities (The speculated target is Natanz, a plant 200 miles south of Tehran allegedly used for uranium enrichment) giving a pretext for the 3 day air blitz plan. Wow, that was quite a sentence...

This brings the argument back to how it happened, and why it wasn't followed through with. Media say that in order to covertly execute such a maneuver, orders must come directly from the executive office. Barring you the details, in the event of what is called a "National Special Security Event," the secret service is allowed to circumvent the normal chain of command and deliver executive orders to anyone they see fit. This explains how it happened in the first place. However, since May of 2006, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, namely General Pace have convinced administration officials not use to the weapons at all, much less through the conventional chain of command. Like I said previously, with the declaration of a Special Security Event, the traditional chain of command can be skipped. General Pace's apprehensions are shared my many top military brass and to many, the exposure of the incident is seen as what's known as a Push Back; an organized disobedience of orders by military officials.

Interesting timing considering the troop surge as well.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much of the story I buy, but it is, however, extremely thought provoking and something to gravely consider.