Open Mic News

The noise of an engine can become a calming thing after a few decades working with it. The paint-chipped blades of an elderly combine harvester, flailing their way through golden ripe grain under a crystal blue sky, throwing up the seeds that’ll be ground into flour for market and to make the bread to feed a family.
At the feilds edge the farmer comes to a stop for a momment and sighs. It really is a beutiful day in Kansas. He takes a relaxed swig of his coffee from it’s old enameled flask and looks skyward, thanking the god of his choice for such simple wonders. A few birds fly past, siloetted against that blue sky with a flutter of song. And up and behind them, a vapour trail creeps lasily across the sky, heading south.
As he restarts the combine and gets into finishing his job, surely the last thing on his mind is that far overhead weapons of power inconceivable to him are shooting at hundreds of miles per hour. Six nuclear missiles, silent, unoticed and flying over his head by some terrible mistake.
The setup sounds like the most tragic scenarios of the Cold War. A millitary mistake that could spark a final mommentary global war, with innoccents blissfully unaware until after the fact.

However, this happened last week.

Six nuclear warheads, attatched to cruise missles, were loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown 1500miles across Americas heartland for decomisioning.

It’s only 1500miles though, right? And they’re old ones, so they wouldn’t work right anyway. Wrong for starters. There is no safety with aging nuclear weapons. They’re being decomisioned because they’re getting to the end of their reliable lifetime. Noone wants to try and break one up when the detonators are so old they’d trigger if you farted in the same room as them.

Well, they were in a plane, so they were pretty safe, right?
Wrong again. Cruise missles are big bastards. That B-52 took off with three nuclear cruise missles attatched to each wing. For all the reports words of “we didn’t know what we were carrying” I say there’s no way you can take off without knowing you’re carrying six cruise missles, regardless of their payload.

Perhaps today we’ve gotten a bit blasé about nukes, but the millitary hasn’t. Some of my Flist here know the proceedures involved in handling nuclear weapons. Just gaining access to where they’re stored takes a mountain of paperwork, signed by higher-ups. Then there’s getting further permissions to sign out all the tools, keys, dollies and lifts to just get them out of their storage racks, let alone leave the building with them.
At every stage here, the people who are checking your paperwork have permission to shoot to kill.
No one is exempt, and those handling them are kept with weapons trained on them for the entirety. Even those handling the paperwork have to have someone else with them at all times, and if it leaves their possesion for even a fraction of a second, it’s all gotta be done again.

Remember for a momment here that the type of cruise missle made to be carried by the B52 has a W80 variable-yeild nuclear warhead of between 5 to 150Kilotonnes.

Hiroshima’s “Little Boy” was 12-15Kt, for a sense of scale.

So somehow, six independantly flight-capable nuclear weapons with a combined yeild of nine hundred kilotonnes were not only signed out, removed and loaded onto the wing-mounts of a long-range bomber, but was done while in full knowledge that this was wrong, and against an international nuclear-weapons treaty from the cold war, against flying nuclear weapons. And all this aparently without the knowledge of the President of the United States.

Frankly it’s one theft of precious bodily fluids away from Dr Strangelove. Especially with Russian PM Putin doing the Cold War style long-distance bomber recons again.

I’m not naming sources, as they made their own heads-up friends only, but they know who they are and they have my thanks. They also offered up a link for the Department of Energy manual on the handling of nuclear explosives. PDF here.

So now you know.

Edging away into another subject though, how many people will find out about this? I’m under the impression that CBS at least stopped reporting on nuclear testing since they were bought up by General Electric. Who build nukes.

I’d like to know how and if this story proliferates in the US.

I’d also like to know where these missiles are now. Seems Barksdale Air Force Base is a staging area for US middle-east operations.
Can’t help but wonder if some long-sought WMDs are about to turn up.

ADITIONAL: I am aware the official line is that they simply forgot to remove the warheads before flying them off for disposal. However, which mistake do you find more comforting? That nuclear missles can be sent through so many breaches in security, or that someone can actually forget where they’ve left 900 kilotonnes of nuclear explosive?