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Generals grilled on Minot nuclear mishap

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled Air Force leaders over how six nuclear warheads could mistakenly get loaded onto a B-52 Stratofortress bomber flown across the country.

At a Tuesday hearing, Committee Chair Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., called last August’s nuclear accident a “wake up call” saying that “no breach of nuclear procedures of this magnitude has ever occurred.”

Three Air Force generals and retired Gen. Larry Welch, Air Force chief of staff from 1986 to 1990, took questions from the senators who expressed concern over how far the service’s nuclear program may have eroded.

“The sloppiness and lack of discipline and lack of respect for the process didn’t just happen overnight and fixing the problems are going to take awhile,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

Lt. Gen. Daniel Darnell, deputy chief of staff for air, space and information operations assured the committee the warheads never migrated off the wings of the B-52 and was always under Air Force control. However, Darnell did confirm that appropriate security was not present to protect the nukes while all six sat on the runway for close to 36 hours first at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and then at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., before a 2nd Bomb Wing airman discovered the mistake at Barksdale.

“Absence of that security represents a significant shortfall,” Levin said.

The intent of the late August mission that went awry was to fly a dozen Advanced Cruise Missiles from Minot to Barksdale to be decommissioned. But instead of loading two pylons of six non-nuclear missiles each under the B-52’s wings, the 5th Bomb Wing airmen at Minot rolled out one pylon loaded with nuclear warheads and strapped it onto one of the wings.

Maj. Gen. Douglas Raaberg, director of operations of Air Combat Command, testified that airmen failed to comply with five specific procedures designed for handling nuclear weapons, and committed three scheduling errors, which led to the accident.

Immediately after the accident was discovered, 90 airmen lost their certification to handle nuclear weapons and four high ranking officers lost their jobs, including 5th Bomb Wing Commander Col. Bruce Emig. After further review Raaberg said the Air Force found 25 airmen directly responsible.

The Air Force and Defense Department issued separate reports Tuesday on two of three investigations launched after the accident occurred. One was prepared by the Blue Ribbon Review directed by Maj. Gen. Polly Peyer, director of resource integration in the office of the deputy chief of staff for logistics, installations, and mission support; the other by the Defense Science Board .

Between the two reports and the Command Directed Investigation released earlier, the Air Force has amassed 132 recommendations to improve its nuclear program. So far, Darnell said 41 of those changes have been made.

In an odd exchange, Levin also asked the four Air Force generals whether the nuclear tipped missiles could have leaked plutonium if they had been dropped from the B-52 during its flight from North Dakota to Louisiana.

Not one of the officers could answer the Senator’s question confidently before Nelson, and later Levin, pointed out how a B-52 crashed over Spain in 1966 with nukes aboard causing the missile’s high explosives to detonate spewing plutonium into the soil.

Related reading:

237 nuke handling deficiencies cited since 2001