10.18.2007

Let this be a lesson to you, Bunky

Although some details are not yet publicly known, officials familiar with the investigation say the problem originated at Minot when a pylon carrying six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was mistaken for one carrying unarmed missiles.

(Washington Post)

So see, they had these nukes lying around up there in Minot and some guy picked up a few and bolted them onto an airplane by mistake and they got flown from Minot - that's in North Dakota, which is up there on the top - to Louisiana - which is on the bottom - by mistake. Six of them, to be exact. Which constituted, according to some guys who used to be in the Air Force, "one of the worst breaches in U.S. nuclear weapons security in decades." Not ever, mind you, and not the, but one of the worst in a while, anyway. As the result of which - well, nobody seems to be sure yet but maybe - a couple of guys might get fired and a few others get letters of reprimand, which is sort of like a slap on the wrist without the slapping part. So, hey. The Air Force, according to some guy who merits quote marks in the Post, is "getting back to the roots of accountability." No word on where it's getting back from - presumably some branch, or possibly even a leaf.

The Air Force says there was "little risk" of something really bad happening like, you know, blowing up Kansas or Iowa. "Little," of course, is an elusive concept when you're talking nukes. So I don't know, I'm just saying here, maybe you ought to dig the hole a little deeper, JIC.

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