The Barksdale AFB B-52 Loose Nukes and a Cluster of Dead Airmen
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The Barksdale AFB B-52 Loose Nukes and a Cluster of Dead Airmen
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[Astonishingly, investigators in the deaths of some of the AF
personnel, some ruled "suicides," all say they were totally unaware of
the nuclear missiles loaded on the B52 to Barksdale AFB. It was hardly
as "unreported" as Dave Lindorff says here. But apparently these people
just don't read anything, or even watch new on TeeVee. The first two
deaths Lindorff talks about, traffic accidents, also occurred weeks
before the flight, and probably have nothing to do with it. The 4
that occurred afterward, however, include the two odd "suicides" and the
clueless forensic investigators. -NY Transfer]
Global Research - Nov 25, 2007
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7441
The Mystery of Minot:
Loose nukes and a cluster of dead airmen raise troubling questions
by Dave Lindorff
The unauthorized Aug. 29/30 cross-country flight of a B-52H
Stratofortress armed with six nuclear-tipped AGM-29 Advanced Cruise
missiles, which saw these 150-kiloton warheads go missing for 36
hours, has all the elements of two Hollywood movies. One would be
a thriller about the theft from an armed weapons bunker of six nukes
for some dark and murky purpose. The lead might be played by Matt
Damon. The other movie would be a slapstick comedy about a bunch
of bozos who couldnt tell the difference between a nuclear weapon
and a pile of dummy warheads. The lead might be played by Adam
Sandler, backed by the cast of "Police Academy III."
So far, the Pentagon, which has launched two separate investigations
into the incident, seems to be assuming that it is dealing with the
comedy version, saying that some incredible "mistake" led to nuclear
weapons being taken inadvertently from a weapons-storage bunker,
loaded into launch position on a bomber, and flown from North Dakota
to Louisiana.
To date, more than a month after the incident, Pentagon investigators
have completely ignored a peculiar cluster of six deaths, during
the weeks immediately preceding and following the flight, of personnel
at the two Air Force bases involved in the incident and at Air Force
Commando Operations headquarters.
The operative assumption of the investigations appears to be that
an Air Force decision to store nuclear, conventional, and dummy
warheads in the same bunker and one mistake by weapons handlers
initiated a chain of errors and oversights that led to the flight.
On Sept. 23, the Washington Post, in a story based upon interviews
with military officials, many of them unidentified, suggested that
the first known case of nuclear warheads leaving a weapons-storage
area improperly was the result of two mistakes. The first, the
article suggested, was a decision by the Air Force to permit the
storing of nuclear weapons in the same highly secure and constantly
guarded sod-covered bunkers -- known as "igloos" -- as non-nuclear
weapons and dummy warheads (something that had never been allowed
in the past).
The second was some as yet unidentified mistake by weapons handlers
at Minot to mount six nuclear warheads onto six of the 12 Advanced
Cruise Missiles that had been slated to be flown to Barksdale AFB
for destruction. Those missiles and the six others, part of a group
of 400 such missiles declared obsolete and slated for retirement
and disassembly, should have been fitted with dummy warheads also.
The Post article quotes military sources as saying that once the
mistake was made, a cascade of errors followed as weapons handlers,
ground crews, and the B-52 crew skipped all nuclear protocols,
assuming they were dealing with dummy warheads.
The problem with this theory is that dummy warheads don't look the
same as the real thing. The real warheads, called W80-1's, are shiny
silver, a color which is clearly visible through postage-stamp-sized
windows on the nosecone covers that protect them on the missiles.
In addition, the mounted warheads are encased in a red covering as
a second precaution.
Apparently the nukes (which can be set to explode at between 5
kilotons and 150 kilotons) were easily spotted by a Barksdale AFB
ground crew when they went out to the plane on the tarmac hours
after it landed. If the Barksdale ground crew, which had absolutely
no reason to suspect it was looking at nuclear-tipped missiles,
easily spotted the "error," why did everyone at Minot miss it, as
claimed?
Clearly, whoever loaded the six nukes on one B-52 wing pylon, and
whoever mounted that unit on the wing, knew or should have known
that they were dealing with nukes -- and absent an order from the
highest authority in Washington, loading such nukes on a bomber was
against all policy. The odds of randomly putting six nukes all on
one pylon, and six dummies on the other, are 1:924. And how curious
that the pilot, who is supposed to check all 12 missiles before
flying, checked only the pylon containing the dummy warheads.
Various experts familiar with nuclear-weapons-handling protocols
express astonishment at what happened on Aug. 29 and 30. After all,
over the course of more than six decades, the protocols for handling
nuclear arms have called for at least two people at every step,
with paper trails, bar codes, and real-time computer tracking of
every warhead in the arsenal. Nothing like this has been known to
have happened before. Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as
US Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, told the Post, "I a
have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of
any incident more disturbing."
Philip Coyle, a senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information
who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton
administration, calls the incident "astonishing" and "unbelievable."
He says, "This wasn't just a mistake. I've counted, and at least
20 things had to have gone wrong for this to have occurred."
Bruce Blair, a former Air Force nuclear launch officer who is now
president of the World Security Institute, says that the explanation
of the incident as laid out in the Washington Post, and in the
limited statements from the Air Force and Department of Defense,
which call it a "mistake," are "incomplete." He notes that no mention
has been made as to whether the nukes in question, which had been
pre-mounted on a pylon for attachment to the B-52 wing, had their
PAL (permission action link) codes unlocked to make them operational,
or whether a system on board the plane that would ordinarily prevent
an unauthorized launch had been activated. "For all we know, these
missiles could have been fully operational," he says.
The Air Force and Department of Defense are refusing to answer any
questions about such matters.
Meanwhile, there are those six deaths. On July 20, 1st Lt. Weston
Kissel, a 28-year-old B-52 pilot from Minot, died in a motorcycle
accident while on home leave in Tennessee.
Another Minot B-52 pilot, 20-year-old Adam Barrs, died on July 5
in Minot when a car he was riding in, driven by another Minot airman,
Stephen Garrett, went off the road, hit a tree, and caught fire.
Airman Garrett was brought to the hospital in critical condition
and has since been charged with negligent homicide.
Two more Air Force personnel, Senior Airman Clint Huff, 29, of
Barksdale AFB, and his wife Linda died on Sept. 15 in nearby
Shreveport, Louisiana, when Huff reportedly attempted to pass a van
in a no-passing zone on his motorcycle, and the van made a left-hand
turn, striking them.
Then there are two reported suicides, which both occurred within
days of the flight. One involved Todd Blue, a 20-year-old airman
who was in a unit that guarded weapons at Minot. He reportedly shot
himself in the head on Sept. 11 while on a visit to his family in
Wytheville, Virginia. Local police investigators termed his death
a suicide.
The second suicide, on Aug. 30, was John Frueh, a special forces
weather commando at the Air Force's Special Operations command
headquartered at Hurlburt AFB in Florida. Hurlburt's website says,
"Every night, as millions of Americans sleep peacefully under the
blanket of freedom," Air Force Special Operations commandos work
"in deep dark places, far away from home, risking their lives to
keep that blanket safe."
Frueh, 33, a married father of two who had just received approval
for promotion from captain to major, reportedly flew from Florida
to Portland, Oregon, for a friend's wedding. He never showed up.
Instead, he called on Aug. 29, the day the missiles were loaded,
from an interstate pull-off just outside Portland to say he was
going for a hike in a park nearby. (It is not clear why he was at
a highway rest stop as he had no car.) A day later, back in Portland,
he rented a car at the airport, again calling his family. After he
failed to appear at the wedding, his family filed a missing person's
report with the Portland police. The Sheriff's Department in remote
Skamania County, Washington, found Frueh's rental car ten days later
on the side of a road nearly 120 miles from the airport in a remote
area of Badger Peak. Search dogs found his body in the woods. His
death was ruled a suicide, though neither the sheriff's investigator
nor the medical examiner would give details. What makes this alleged
suicide odd, however, is that the sheriff reports that Frueh had
with him a knapsack containing a GPS locator and a videocam -- odd
equipment for someone intent on ending his life.
Of course, it could be that all six of these deaths are coincidences
- -- all just accidents and personal tragedies. But when they occur
around the time six nuclear-tipped missiles go missing in a bizarre
incident, the likes of which the Pentagon hasn't seen before, one
would think investigators would be on those cases like vultures on
carrion. In fact, police and medical examiners in the Frueh and
Blue cases say no federal investigators, whether from DOD or FBI,
have called them. Worse still, because the B-52 incident got so
little media attention -- no coverage in most local news -- none
of those investigating the accidents and suicides even knew about
it or about the other deaths. [DUHHH... it was pretty damned hard to
miss this story. -NYTr]
"It would have been interesting to know all that when I was examining
Mr. Blue's body," says Virginia coroner Mike Stoker, "but no one
told me about any of it or asked me about him." [Duhhhhh]
"If we had known that several people had died under questionable
circumstances, it might have affected how we'd look at a body, says
Don Phillips, the sheriff's deputy in Washington State who investigated
the Frueh death. "But nobody from the federal government has ever
contacted us about this." [Duhhhhhhhh]
"Certainly, in a case like this, the suicides should be a red flag,"
says Hans Kristensen, a nuclear-affairs expert with the Federation
of American Scientists. "It's wild speculation to think that there
might be some connection between the deaths and the incident, but
it certainly should be investigated."
[Award-winning investigative reporter Dave Lindorff has been working
as a journalist for 33 years. A regular columnist for CounterPunch
(www.counterpunch.org), he also writes frequently for Extra!
(www.fair.org) and Salon magazine (www.salon.com), as well as for
Businessweek, The Nation and Treasury & Risk Management Magazine.
In the late 1970s, he ran the Daily News bureau covering Los Angeles
County government, and in the mid-'90s, spent several years as a
correspondent in Hong Kong and China for Businessweek. Over the
years he has written for such publications as Rolling Stone, Mother
Jones, Village Voice, Forbes, The London Observer and the Australian
National Times.]
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