Air Chiefs Face Court Over Nuclear Missile Blunder

Oct 19, 06:10 PM

Current Headlines: By Barry Wigmore

AT least five U.S. Air Force commanders are facing criminal charges for allowing armed nuclear cruise missiles to be flown across America.

The officers, one a colonel, have been relieved of their command following an investigation into what has been described as the worst breach of weapons security for 40 years.

The alert on August 29 involved a B-52 Stratofortress bomber being flown 1,500 miles from North Dakota to Louisiana with six armed nuclear warheads in launch position below its wings. Each one had ten times the destructive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The incident sparked a so-called 'Bent Spear' nuclear alert, one step down in military terms from a 'Broken Arrow'. A 'Broken Arrow' is triggered if a nuclear missile has been lost or detonated in a way that does not create the risk of nuclear war.

Except in times of high-alert or war, bomber flights with live nuclear weapons over land were ended in the late 1960s after accidents in Spain in 1966 and in Greenland in 1968. They are now normally transferred unarmed in the hold of cargo planes.

The B-52 flight sparked a dramatic security alert. White House and defence chiefs were horrified when the mistake was spotted after the plane landed at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana.

It sat overnight on the tarmac at Minot, North Dakota, without the special guards all nuclear weapons require, and only a chainlink fence and an occasional roving security patrol to protect it. One Security Council official said: 'All the elaborate safeguards built in involving crew, munitions, storage and tracing procedures meant this could never happen. But it did.'

Russia is developing new types of nuclear weapons, President Putin revealed yesterday as he unveiled plans to boost the country's defences. The move triggered anxiety in the West of a return to the Cold War.

'We will develop missile technology including completely new strategic (nuclear) complexes, completely new,' Mr Putin told a televised question session with Russian citizens. 'Work is continuing and continuing successfully.'

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