Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

by Maddow, Rachel

  The Pentagon said forty years ago that all four nuclear bombs exploded in that Greenland crash and were subsequently destroyed, which was almost true. But not quite. Using recently declassified documents and film, the BBC reported in 2008 that three bombs exploded, but the fourth was never found. The fourth bomb is thought to have melted through the sea ice and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Our military looked for it for a long time but figured that if they couldn’t find it, then no bad guys could either. Maybe after a few more decades of global ice melt, its location will reveal itself to us.

  There’s also a large plutonium-packed bomb still stuck in a swampy field in Faro, North Carolina. In 1961 a busted fuel line caused a fire and then an explosion in a fully loaded nuclear B-52 during a predawn “training flight,” causing the plane’s right wing to more or less fall off, making it hard to fly. The crew managed to bail out before the explosion, and then the plane’s nukes separated from the plane in the general breakup of the falling aircraft. What happened to those two bombs keeps me up at night sometimes. One of the bombs had a parachute on it, and that one had a soft landing—or as soft a landing as a twelve-foot-long, five-ton missile can have. Strategic Air Command found it just off Shackleford Road, its nose burrowed eighteen inches into the ground, its parachute tangled in a tree overhead, its frangible bomb casing deformed but largely intact. That bomb, the bomb by the tree, had six fuzes on it designed to prevent an accidental full nuclear detonation. The first five of the six fuzes had failed. The last one held.

  The second hydrogen bomb on board that plane did not have the benefit of an open parachute. When it hit a marshy field in Faro, it was traveling at more than seven hundred miles per hour, by knowledgeable estimate, and buried itself more than twenty feet deep in the swamp. A woman living nearby remembered the impact “lit up the sky like daylight.” Whoopsie!

  A farmer named C. T. Davis owned that field, and he said that when the military came out to look for the lost bomb—heading straight for the right spot, thanks to an enormous crater—they said they were looking for an ejection seat that they had lost. A very valuable ejection seat. But the field was so muddy, so quick-sandy, that they started to lose their excavating equipment into the crater before they could get the bomb out of the hole. So they decided to just leave it there, and got an easement from the Davis family that said nobody could ever dig deeper than five feet on that piece of land. If you’re ever in the neighborhood and want to play with your metal detector, you can find the exact spot on Google Earth. It’s just immediately west of Big Daddy’s Road.

  Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I don’t know about other countries, but that’s what we admit to. And we’re regarded as top-drawer, safety-wise. We’re known to go the extra mile, like in 1984, when a computer malfunction nearly triggered the launch of a Minuteman III ICBM, and some resourceful missileer parked an armored car on top of the silo in a heroic effort to prevent the accidental opening salvo of World War III. These things all happened back in the good old days, when we were really minding the store.

  Here’s what happened more recently, since our awesome nuclear responsibilities slipped a bit from the forefront of our national consciousness: On August 29, 2007, at around 8:20 a.m., a weapons-handling team entered one of those Minot igloos (#1857, to be precise) to retrieve the first of two pylons, each with six twenty-one-foot-long cruise missiles attached. This had become a familiar drill in the previous few months, ever since the secretary of defense had ordered four hundred of these aging missiles off-line. The Minot team had already successfully shipped about half of them to be mothballed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The crewmembers’ familiarity with the task may have been why they didn’t much bother with the safety checklist.

  The first pylon in question, GZ377, had two letter-sized “TacFerry” signs attached to it, signaling that it had been prepped for the flight, or tactical ferry, to Barksdale. That meant that the silver nuclear warheads had been removed and replaced with harmless dummy weights. Nobody on the weapons crew followed the mandated procedure of shining a flashlight into a postage-stamp-sized, diamond-shaped window on the missile to verify that no nukes were on board. Nor did the tow-rig driver shine his light into that little window—as his Technical Order required him to—before hooking the pylon to his trailer. The driver later said he was “under the impression that this package for sure was TacFerry.” For sure.

  The second missile pylon on the schedule sheet, GZ203, was stored just down the way in igloo 1854. The handlers were in and out of igloo 1854 in twenty-two minutes, not enough time to do the most cursory of checks. The junior member of the team was apparently told not to bother with the whole flashlight thing—not that he really knew what that meant, because he was new on the job and had never performed any such check. The second tow driver, as far as anyone could see, also failed to check the little window for signs of nuclear warheads aboard. In fact, one member of the team said he did not see anyone even carrying a flashlight that day, much less putting one to use.

  Oh, and one more thing: the second pylon displayed no TacFerry signs, but this did not raise any red flags for the team. Nobody called a higher-ranking officer to ask why GZ203 lacked a TacFerry placard or checked the computer database to verify the status of the pylon. So nobody on the team got the information that a few weeks earlier an officer at Minot had made a switch and ordered an older pylon prepped for shipment instead. She put it on the official schedule. Problem was, nobody ever checked the updated official schedule. So the prepped pylon with its dummy warheads sat undisturbed in its igloo that morning, while the tow driver carrying the unplacarded GZ203 pulled onto Bomber Boulevard, completely unaware that he was hauling six real operational nukes.

  In the eight hours it took to attach the two pylons to a forty-five-year-old B-52H Stratofortress, no member of the loading crew noticed the warheads aboard, or the fact that one of the pylons was not marked for shipment. The six nuclear bombs strapped to the Stratofortress then sat on the runway unguarded except for a chain-link fence from five o’clock that afternoon until early the next morning, when an aircrew from the 2nd Bomb Wing out of Barksdale arrived to prep for flight. Happily, there was a member of the flight crew, the instructor radar navigator, whose job it was to check and see what exactly his aircraft was carrying before the bomber could take off.

  But the navigator had apparently been infected with the general feeling about this mission of decommissioning old missiles; as one of his fellow airmen put it, “We’re only ferrying carcasses from Point A to Point B.” Others told investigators, without a hint of shame, that they weren’t sure that verifying meant, like, actually physically checking something. And so it was that “the Instructor Radar Navigator only did a ‘spot check’ on one missile, and only on the right pylon loaded with nuclear-inert payloads,” according to the report of an after-incident investigation. “If the IRN had accomplished a full and complete weapons preflight, the IRN should have discovered the nuclear warheads.” He did not.

  The bomber, named, interestingly, Doom 99, departed North Dakota on schedule on the morning of August 30, 2007. “The takeoff from Minot,” noted the after-incident report, “was uneventful.” The flight itself was notable: it was the first time in forty years a nuclear-armed bomber had traversed US airspace without clearance. Six nuclear warheads—each one capable of Hiroshima-size damage times ten—were unwittingly flown 1,400 miles, from up around the US–Canadian border to within a few hundred miles of the Gulf of Mexico, within plutonium-spittin’ distance of Sioux Falls and Sioux City and Omaha and Kansas City and Tulsa. The instructor pilot on Doom 99 was not qualified for a nuclear mission. In fact, she later told investigators, she had never physically touched a nuclear weapon.

  Happily, the nukes did get back to land without incident. They then sat unguarded on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for another nine hours before the ground crew there discovered that it
s command had accidentally acquired six new nuclear warheads, and they decided they’d better get them in a safe place, under guard. All told, six nuclear warheads were misplaced for a day and a half.

  Here was the good news, according to the testimony of Air Force generals at the Senate Armed Services Committee on the occasion of presenting findings from the blue-ribbon review of the incident: “During the incident there was never any unsafe condition, and the incident was promptly reported to our national leadership including the Secretary of Defense and the President. These weapons were secure and always in the hands of America’s Airmen.”

  “General,” the chairman of that Senate committee responded, “I’m a little taken aback by your statement that warheads were—there was never a safety issue and they were always under the control of American pilots. Did the pilots know they had nuclear weapons on board?”

  “Sir, they did not.”

  “So when you say they were under the control of the pilots, not knowing that you have nuclear weapons on board makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes sir, it does. The intent behind that statement is to make it clear that they never migrated off the aircraft anywhere else.”

  Migrated?

  As for whether or not an accident involving Doom 99 could have occasioned a spread of plutonium from the warheads, one of the generals at the hearing was forced to plead ignorance. “I’m a logistician, not a technician. But knowing the knowledge of how a system is developed, and that’s part of the reliability of the system, is that there is no inadvertent detonation of the system.”

  “I’m not talking about detonation,” the chairman said. “I’m talking about could the plutonium be released inadvertently if this weapon were smashed into the ground from fifteen thousand feet.”

  “That piece,” said the general, “I would not know.”

  It was left to the senator to remind the Air Force that the United States was still cleaning up pieces of Spain forty years after the Palomares accident.

  One of the first things the Air Force did in the aftermath of the Minot-to-Barksdale debacle was to institute no-warning inspections, and the first one they ran was on the 2nd Bomb Wing. Thirty-one inspectors (including six civilian augmentees) were detailed to assess the Barksdale nuclear team, and they spent ten months’ worth of man-days doing it. (That was the assessment that turned up the wing fungus.) Barksdale’s first inspector-assigned task was to stick a pylon full of cruise missiles onto a Stratofortress bomber and ready the bomber for a combat mission. The first try failed because the $450,000 bomb hoists kept malfunctioning and the electrical generators crapped out three times. After fourteen hours and two separate “mating/demating” operations, the loading crew decided to give up and start from scratch. The second try was delayed when the loading team parked the weapons bay over uneven pavement and the bomb hoist could not gain proper purchase, and then delayed again when the bomb hoist “boogie wheel” failed. The second mating attempt was aborted after fifteen hours. On the fourth attempt—after only a minor lift-arm malfunction—the Barksdale technicians managed to generate a combat-ready mission.

  The 2nd Bomb Wing received a rating of Excellent from the inspectors in the following areas:

  • Weapons Maintenance Technical Operations

  • Storage and Maintenance Facilities

  • Motor Vehicle Operations

  • Safety

  They had to settle for a Satisfactory in Loading and Mating. The inspectors did give extra-credit points to the loading and mating team for gamely fighting through the failure of six weapons load trailers, five power generators, a power-controller-unit trailer malfunction, and a range of unfortunate tire-pressure issues. “The weapons loading community overcame numerous equipment malfunctions,” the inspectors reported. They also commented favorably on the loading community’s “strong two-person concept adherence,” its “cohesive squadron teamwork,” and its “highly effective communication.” The inspectors did ding the loading and mating team for not prepositioning chocks to keep the loading trailers from accidentally bashing into the bomber, and suggested that they get some foam cutouts in the weapons expediter truck to keep the enabling switches and data cartridge safe during transport. But they gave Team Barksdale a thumbs-up for successfully preparing one bombing run … after three failed attempts … at somewhere past the thirty-hour mark.

  “It’s very, very difficult to believe they could receive a passing grade on any kind of inspection when they were unable to generate a single successful nuclear sortie until the fourth attempt,” one weapons expert told the pseudonymous blogger (and former airman) “Nate Hale,” after reading the report that Hale had jimmied free from the Pentagon through a Freedom of Information Act request.

  Hale quoted a second retired Air Force weaponeer, who was more to the point: “Tell me this is a joke.”

  Still and all, the Air Force and the Pentagon decided the whole Minot-to-Barksdale mishap could be a lemons-into-lemonade moment. Apparently we needed some renewed attention to our nuclear-handling skills—we just hadn’t known it. That seemed all the more true when, a few months later, we discovered that we had erroneously shipped to Taiwan four nose-cone fuzes designed to trigger nuclear explosions in lieu of the helicopter battery packs Taiwan had requested, and that it had taken a year and a half to discover the accidental switcheroo. So the Air Force and the Pentagon embarked on some serious soul-searching, which took the form of a mess of incident investigations and blue-ribbon reviews and task-force studies to see how our atomic hair trigger was faring in the twenty-first century.

  When all the investigations and reviews and task-force studies were completed, the consensus was clear: they all found erosion and degradation and a general web of sloth and anxiety within our nation’s nuclear mission. The root cause? Lack of self-esteem. The men and women handling the nukes were suffering a debilitating lack of pride. Their promotion rates, it was noted, were well behind the service average. We had to remind them in big ways and small that they were important to us, that the “pursuit of the nuclear zero-defect culture” and “generating a culture of nuclear excellence” wasn’t just hot air. What the program needed was resources: better pay, new layers of high-level managers dedicated to the nuclear mission, upgraded computer systems for tracking all the nuclear nuts and bolts, a commitment to more (and more serious) nuclear-training exercises, and of course, you know, a bigger program to upgrade and modernize the hardware. Money! “Definitely,” the logistician Air Force general told the Senate’s key nuclear oversight committee, “a re-look at recapitalizing that.”

  Do I hear nine trillion?

  Even though there’s been a lot of blue-ribbon hand-wringing about how best to sustain and rejuvenate our big, leaky, can’t-quite-keep-track-of-our-warheads nuclear-bomb infrastructure, our worries about it haven’t caused us to re-ask the big question of why we still have it. Given the manifest difficulties of maintaining our apocalyptic nuclear stockpile, how many nuclear bombs does the United States need to complete every conceivable military mission in which we’d use them?

  An attack with one of the nuclear weapons we’ve got now would cause an explosion about ten times the size of the one at Hiroshima. Can you imagine us setting off two such bombs now? How about five of them? Fifteen? Fifty? What do we imagine would be on the list of fifty targets for those fifty American nuclear blasts, each ten times the size of Hiroshima?

  Our current arsenal of nukes is about 5,000 weapons. Of those, between 2,000 and 2,500 are deployed and ready to use—about the same number as Russia has ready. Thanks to the New START treaty negotiated in President Obama’s first year in office, that number is slated to eventually go down to 1,500 in both countries. But to get the Senate to agree to the deal with Russia reducing our total number of ready-to-launch nukes, President Obama also agreed to a huge new increase in the size of America’s nuclear weapons infrastructure. Fewer weapons, but more money. A lot more. To secure the two-thirds vote necessary in
the Senate to ratify the treaty, the initial Obama administration plan was to commit an extra $185 billion over ten years to our nukes—a nearly 10 percent annual increase. This was in 2009 and 2010, at a time when our economy was cratering and Republicans were insisting that the rest of the budget be slashed. “This might be,” noted one nuclear expert, “what’s necessary to buy the votes for ratification.”

  Actually, it wasn’t enough. Republicans in the Senate thought this treaty-ratification fight was a good chance to monetize the nuclear-bomb infrastructure going forward. They evinced furrow-browed concern that the Obamanauts were not serious and might allow the whole reinvestment in nukes idea to “peter out.” Six months later, the Obama folks came back with more goodies. They added another whopping 10 percent to the next annual budget request, reiterated their promise to keep nuclear subs continuously patrolling both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to stand ready—in a phrase that seemed to have migrated from the previous administration—to “surge additional submarines in a crisis.” They agreed to spend whatever it took to keep the ICBMs and the B-52s ready to fly for another full generation.

  Settle in, Missileers, it’s gonna be at least another few decades.

  The Obama administration said it was even ready to fund a new remote-controlled long-range nuclear bomber. How did eighty to one hundred nuclear-armed drones sound? Nuclear-armed flying robots. On remote control. What could possibly go wrong? “The most robust, sustained commitment to modernizing our nuclear deterrent since the end of the Cold War” was what the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration called Obama’s treaty-ratification goodie bag. “My predecessor put it best, saying he ‘would have killed’ for budgets like this.”

  A couple of months after the Grand Bargain that bought the START treaty ratification, in 2011 a team of Air Force generals was back on Capitol Hill to share with a handful of senators the wonderful strides they had made in the three years since all that bad press that surrounded the six lost nukes; they were happy to explain just exactly what America was getting for the extra $650 million Congress had appropriated to shore up our nuclear program in the wake of Minot-to-Barksdale. For instance, there were the new posts manned by the generals testifying that day. (“The positions Lt. Gen. Kowalski, Maj. Gen. Chambers, and Brig. Gen. Harencak now hold were all established as a result of that mistake,” the subcommittee chairman noted by way of introduction.) The generals assured the congressional oversight committee that the Air Force’s relatively new oversight bureau, the Nuclear Weapons Center, was being spectacularly collaborative. The Pentagon had even invented a new someone with whom the Nuclear Weapons Center could exercise teamwork. “One of our most vital collaborations is with the newly created office of the Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Strategic Systems. The PEO … has assumed the responsibility for the development and acquisition of future systems and for modernization efforts while [the Nuclear Weapons Center] focuses on day-to-day operations and sustainment.” The Nuclear Weapons Center commander assured Congress that they were also being more proactive and forward-looking! They’d find problems before they hit the crisis stage; they’d train their personnel properly and give them working equipment and tools. (Let’s hope somebody thought of safety leashes for the socket wrenches.) They’d already merged databases so we’d no longer accidentally ship nuclear parts to warehouses in Taiwan or less-friendly countries. Oh, and they were determined to fix that problem with the sophisticated and complex Mk21 fuzes. They’d work that out.