So the USAF took half-dozen nukes on an inadvertent roadtrip across the US heartland
careless that, but shit happens
no harm, no foul, as they say
The interesting question is why the 5th Bomb wing is shipping Air Launched Cruise Missiles to the 2nd Bomb wing?
The missiles are being decommissioned, notes the WaPo article, but that is subtly misleading.
The bulk of the ALCM inventory is armed with nukes, but the use of ALCMs in the last decade has been standoff conventional precision bombing by launch from B-52Hs, after the ALCM-B is converted to an ALCM-C - "C" for "Conventional".
There are, still, a lot of nuclear ALCMs, but the inventory of conventional ALCMs is low, because they turned out to be rather useful, and got used a lot.
In fact Barksdale AFB has the record for longest bombing sorties, when they launced on Iraq directly out of their home base (Minot bombers forward base to Guam on 72 hour notice if they are called on, at least that seems to be how they have operated in recent years).
So, Minot is a nuke base, and is sending surplus ALCMs to be converted to conventional missiles at Barksdale. And they were sloppy, for some reason, loading missiles onto ferry flights - how sloppy, or hurried, do you have to be, to not realise that a missile has a live nuke in the nose! And not just one - full load of six!
Take it easy, folks. No rush?
UPDATE:
see No Quarters for more
Here is Air Force Times on the incident
Further, if the missile was the AGM-129, rather than the ALCM-B (AGM-86) then it may be a different scenario. The former is more recent, there are fewer in inventory, and they are stealthed.
They might be converted to conventional tasks, but I have not heard for sure that variant is. PPPS Wiki reports some AGM-129s may have been converted to conventional variants - which suggests that the decommissioning being done at Barksdale is conversion to conventional warheads. Maybe.
Ah, here we go
"The Air Force currently maintains an arsenal of 1,140 AGM-86 Air Launched Cruise Missiles and 460 newer and stealthy AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles. The B-52 is the only platform for these missiles.
Recent plans call for USAF to retire all of its ACMs and cut the ALCM fleet by more than 500 missiles, leaving 528 nuclear cruise missiles. Maj. Gen. Roger W. Burg, director of strategic security, said the ALCM force would be consolidated at Minot AFB, N.D., and all excess cruise missile bodies would be destroyed.
"These cruise missile force structure changes are part of a balanced force reduction that supports both Presidential direction" and the Moscow Treaty requirement to get below 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons by 2012, he said.
Burg explained that the ACM was singled out for elimination partly because it has reliability issues and higher maintenance costs.
The B-52 is also USAF's primary conventional cruise missile delivery platform. The Air Force has a "very limited number" of CALCMs, said Campbell, which "in some scenarios will go very quickly," but current cruise missile inventories meet operations plan requirements. (emphasis mine)
The option of converting decommissioned ALCMs to non-nuclear CALCMs "will be evaluated," said Burg, but "we're talking about technology that is 25 years old." Furthermore, additional conversions are not in the budget.
The prospective CALCM successor, the Joint-Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, has run into serious reliability problems, however, and JASSM's future is far from certain."
This is from August 2007.
And why would they ferry them to Barksdale if they are being destroyed when decommissioned? And the ALCM inventory is being consolidated at Minot, not Barksdale.
There is still some concern this is worse than a procedure screw up.
PPPS: Very non-committal USAF statement on the incident here at FAS site
I call bullshit.
Lots of reasons to transfer weapons, and they evaluate which transport method?
BS!
They're not even pretending it was decommissioning anymore, and there are very few circumstances in which ferrying on a B-52 is an expeditious way of transferring weapons.
I still don't like this.
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Over at TPMcafe, Larry Johnson cares to discuss this cruise nukes transport issue. He remarks that Barksdale is being currently used as a starting point for long range missions in the middle east.
It does amaze me that you are regularly able to scrap up info like this, from primarily public information.
Cheers to Steinn, watching the skies and the depths for the rest of the physics community!
Yeah, the discussion on this one is interesting. There are a basically only two scenarios - either they meant to move live nukes, and someone blew the whistle on it; or they didn't and they screwed up by leaving live warheads on missiles that were due to be moved empty.
The former is scary, the latter is a screwup.
But, if it is a screwup, then why are they moving air launched cruise missiles - the article makes it clear it is for decommissioning, but the bulk (not all) of the ALCMs are decommissioned by conversion to conventionally armed ALCMs.
The conventional ALCMs are in short supply because so many were used, and the new ones are slow in procurement
So, fair enough - but when they take the warheads out of the nuke ALCMs, they should ship the units destined for conversion as cargo, by road, or containerised on C-5 or C-17 cargo planes. Using B-52s as ferry planes only makes sense if they are in a hurry, and the cargo planes are not available.
Which implies Barksdale needs (a lot) of ALCMs conventionally armed missiles now, which is also worrying.
Or they're doing something unbelievably screwy, like using ferry flights as training missions, so the B-52s are supposed to take blank missiles to Barksdale and thence they get leisurely decommissioned, but they do dry long launch runs before dropping them off. Then the only question is how nuke armed missiles got taken out of storage with the warheads on and loaded on the plane and flown, despite what should have been several "are you sure you want to do that" tags popping up.
Weird shit.
The Larry Johnson thing has gone floppy; after all, the bomber from Minot could fly straight to the Middle East from there without going through Barksdale (or vice versa), and both sites contain both bombs and B52s. (2nd and 52nd Bomb Wings)
Yeah, but all the ACMs were to be consolidated at Minot.
There are some conventional ALCMs in inventory, but if the public record of stocks is accurate, only about 200 are left. Which is just enough for a single squadron strike.
If the JSSAM problem rumours are true, they may want reliable ACMs for first wave strikes, to take out air defences and CCC - and there happen to be 400 ACMs about to be denuked and decommissioned at Minot, but not at Barksdale any more. (?)
Be an interesting way to use them up, and we know the USAF has thought about converting the ACMs, same way they converted a lot of the ALCMs.
Speculative, and innocuous if isolated, but slightly worrying in context.