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ON NOT LOOKING WEAK IN FRONT OF THE RUSSIANS. A bit more is emerging regarding the flight of a half-dozen nuclear warheads from North Dakota to Louisiana last week. Hans at Strategic Security Blog has an excellent discussion of the safety protocols normally associated with the transit of nuclear weapons by air. Also see Jane at ArmsControlWonk, and this article at Military Times, which puts the incident in perspective:
At no time was there a risk for a nuclear detonation, even if the B-52 crashed on its way to Barksdale, said Steve Fetter, a former Defense Department official who worked on nuclear weapons policy in 1993-94. A crash would ignite the high explosives associated with the warhead, and possibly cause a leak of plutonium, but the warhead’s elaborate safeguards would prevent a nuclear detonation from occurring, he said.“The main risk would have been the way the Air Force responded to any problems with the flight because they would have handled it much differently if they would have known nuclear warheads were onboard,” [Steve] Fetter said.As part of my ongoing effort to try to connect this issue with Russia's increasingly assertive defense policy, Fox News is reporting that British and Norwegian fighter aircraft scrambled twice earlier today to intercept a flight of eight Tu-95 "Bear" bombers on the edge of Norwegian airspace. Again, we don't know whether the Russian aircraft carry nuclear weapons (they probably don't), but the fact that young pilots are flying very old aircraft in unfamiliar situations (and with British and Norwegian fighter jets in close proximity) helps create a situation in which very serious accidents can happen. If the USAF can have accidents of this sort, then the less experienced Russians certainly can as well. --Robert Farley
