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Nukes on a plane - AF Coverup?

by avahome

Fri Nov 02, 2007 at 01:17:25 PM EST

Seems more information has come to light and with that information...more questions. I stumbled on this article in buzzflash today. The article makes a lot of sense...and it is our worst nightmare. The part that really gets to me is the proximity of Barksdale base to Dallas, New Orleans, Little Rock, Shreveport..... This article also hints at a dirty bomb possibility. I shudder when Dick Cheney's name is mentioned and I say why not. Anything is possible... BTW, the electronic alarm and motion detectors securing the missiles..pay attention to that part.

Dave Lindorff: The Air Force Coverup of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

excerpt:

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52's wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes, according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)
The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems -- automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.
While the Air Force report doesn't mention any of this, this means if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone -- and actually at least two people, since it's long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem -- had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.
Since the Air Force report does not explain how this hurdle to unauthorized removal of the six nukes could have been surmounted by "mistake," the report has to be considered a whitewash, or at best a coverup.

Now I really wondered to myself how this kind of snafu information would become so public so quickly. Will we ever know? Follow me below the fold then........

commentary :: :: :: buzz-it!

* Who disabled the alarm systems on those weapons and on the bunker itself?

Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?

Who authorized them to perform this operation?

Who moved the armed weapons out of the bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)

Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?

Was there targeting information in the missile's guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?

Just who were the whistleblowers and what has happened to them? Hopefully they are not in the brig. And yes, people have mysteriously died.

What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the Military Times newspaper?

Why hasn't the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle "accidents" involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crew members at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force "investigation" didn't even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 22 issue of the magazine American Conservative, found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

I hope this piques your interest enough to read the whole article. I'm going to include a link to previous commentaries on this incident. We need to know the truth. As a kid, I grew up being scared to death of a nuclear war but I never expected to retire with the same fear...mankind has learned nothing.

Nukes on a plane - 70 punished