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NUCLEAR ACCIDENT THEORY REVISITED. Via Defense Tech:
A B-52 bomber was mistakenly loaded with five nuclear warheads during a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana, a military newspaper reported Wednesday.The bomber carried advanced cruise missiles as part of a Defense Department program to retire 400 of the missiles, the paper said, quoting three officers who spoke on condition they remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.The officers said the nuclear warheads should have been removed before the missiles were mounted onto pylons under the bomber's wings for the Aug. 30 flight from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.Ahem.And this, people, is why we worry about the prospect of Russian Tu-95s resuming nuclear patrols after an 18 year break. The USAF is accustomed to dealing with this kind of equipment, takes very serious care of its nuclear weapons, has multiple redundancy systems to prevent accidents, and has many lifetimes of experience in nuclear weapons handling, yet it still makes mistakes. The Russians haven't conducted long distance bomber patrols for almost a generation, so it's quite reasonable to worry about the state of their procedures, equipment, and human capital. Scott Sagan wrote a book about this kind of thing called The Limits of Safety, pointing out that both of the superpowers had "lost" nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and that the most likely cause of a nuclear explosion is accident. --Robert Farley
