Minot/Barksdale Nuclear Bent Spear Incident-Part II

Last month I posted part 1 of my piece on Minot/Barksdale here. In it, I reviewed the incident and the Defense Science Board’s final report on the incident in question. When the story broke, there were reports and writings all over the blogosphere connecting it with possible strikes against Iran, possible diversion for false-flag attacks here at home and even Chinese electronic tampering through backdoor access to Chinese-made semiconductors allegedly used in Air Force electronics. In this piece, I will examine some of these allegations as well as some of the deaths of Air Force personnel in an attempt to determine any relationship to the above incident.

As stated in Part 1, over 36 hours on August 29-30, 2007, two pylons of 6 AGM-129 cruise missiles one package containing inert payloads, the other 6 active nuclear warheads, were removed from the 5^th Bomb Wing secure ordnance storage at Minot AFB, mounted on a B-52H bomber like the one pictured above carrying identical pylon payloads and flown 1100 miles to Barksdale AFB where they were discovered by ground crews after sitting, unguarded on the tarmac for 11 hours. The resulting Nuclear Security Alert and it’s aftermath investigations led to a wholesale review of Air Force Nuclear Weapons Handling procedures and precipitated an unprecedented wave of disciplinary actions across the ranks, up to and including the resignations of the Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley and Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne. Although the weapons never left overall Air Force custody, they passed through five separate chain-of-custody handoffs requiring visual inspections on two bases until being discovered by the unloading crew at Barksdale.

The DSB final report found the following:

1. Over time, nuclear weapons movement procedures for bomber weapons have been compromised for expedient work processes. This evolution occurred without adequate review and approval above the Wing level.

2. There was confusion over applicability of nuclear weapons handling procedures for nuclear weapons systems that do not contain nuclear weapons.

3. The practice of storing nuclear munitions in the same facility with nuclear-test, nuclear-training and nuclear-inert devices led to confusion and unnecessary access to nuclear weapons.

4. The various levels of inspection activities failed to detect these changes in process which compromised established procedure. The Nuclear Operational Readiness Inspection process required only limited mission performance, sometimes generating as few as one aircraft being subjected to inspection.

This combined with the increased tempo of conventional bombing operations led to an overall erosion of standards within the nuclear weapons mission. In other words, it was a FUBAR SNAFU of the highest order. For me, the one glaring omission not addressed was how nuclear warheads, by all informed accounts, easily identifiable and rigorously alarmed to prevent improper movement, could have been removed from Secure Ordnance Storage in the first place without setting off alarms as soon as they crossed the threshold.

Others have asked this question and posited possible answers such as Dave Lindorff here, Wayne Madsen here and Larry Franklin here. All speculated that this was a case of an alternate command structure outside of the Presidential Command Authority staging weapons for use against Iran. Madsen went so far as to tie this incident to the Operation Orchard Strike by Israel against a suspected Syrian/North Korean nuclear site. Walter Pincus at the Washington Post generally echoed the DSB’s report here. So let’s take a look at the possible scenarios as outlined above.

Staging for an Iran Attack

Lindorff, Madsen and Franklin all posited a possible covert attack on Iran, Madsen wrote it was to coincide with the Israeli strike on Syria. To accomplish this, a separate chain of command was allegedly set up through the VP’s office and key elements in the Air Force command structure outside of the Presidential Command Authority. The problem with such a scenario is that the authentication procedures for nuclear launch in the PCA would be impossible to duplicate without detection. While there is a remote possibility that such a regime might work to move nuclear weapons, authorizing launch would be an entirely different matter. Also recognize that many of our nuclear weapons storage and Nuclear power plant facilities are secured with alarm and monitoring systems provided by Magal Security Systems, an Israeli government controlled security company. If the fix was in, this company or whichever one was tasked to build the Minot Security system would have to be involved as well. Such a situation would not reflect well on that firm’s reputation for infrastructure security. Also, since Barksdale AFB was home to the 2^nd Bomber Wing flying identical aircraft and having an identical weapons inventory, including AGM-129s, it would be much easier to stage such a scenario at Barksdale with fewer personnel involved. In any case, Gates’ housecleaning of the Air Force subsequent to this incident would seem to have removed many of the alleged links in this “alternate Chain-of-Command”.

False-Flag Attack/Missing Nuclear Weapon

The initial report published by Military Times stated that 5 operational nuclear weapons were found at Barksdale. This was later revised to 6 after the source location of the weapons was determined. Many posit that one of the warheads was removed somewhere in transit. The problem with this scenario is that every report I’ve read about this incident states that the AGM-129s were always prepackaged on pylons of 6 weapons each and only the warheads themselves were removed and replaced with dummies prior to tactical ferry. Once the pylons were moved from secure storage, they were mounted on the bomber as a whole unit rather than as individual weapons. Additionally, one commenter on Johnson’s article at TPM with experience in AF nuclear weapons storage pointed out that Barksdale’s 2^nd Bomber Wing is actually twice the size as the 5^th Wing at Minot, with twice the weapons storage area making it a better storage site for decommissioning.

Unexplained Personnel Deaths

Five Air Force Personnel died in the months surrounding this incident. Of these, only Airman 1st Class Todd Blue was even peripherally related to the incident. He died on Sept. 10, 2007. Blue served in the 5^th Security Forces Squadron at Minot. This unit is tasked with security for all weapons storage facilities of the 5^th Bomb Wing. What is unclear is whether Blue was on duty on the day of the incident in question. He did NOT have any responsibility for any weapons movements scheduling or operations and his role would have been to guard the facility and any approved nuclear warhead movements outside the storage area.

Air Force Captain John Frueh was found dead on Sept. 8, 2007 near Badger Peak in Washington State, just across the border from Portland, Ore. Where he had traveled to attend a friend’s wedding. Frueh, a major-selectee was attached to the USAF Special Operations Command, part of the JSOC unit headquartered at McDill AFB, Fla. Despite these facts, no connection was ever found between Frueh and the Minot/Barksdale Incident.

Senior Airman Clint Huff and his wife, Linda, were killed in a motorcycle accident near Shreveport, La. On Sept. 15, 2007. Huff, attached to the 26^th Operational Weather Squadron at Barksdale, also has no known connection to the Minot/Barksdale incident.

1^st Lieutenant Weston Kissel of the 23^rd Bomber Squadron of the 5^th Bomb Wing was killed in a solo motorcycle accident while on leave in Tennessee on July 17, 2007. While Kissel was a B-52 pilot, his death a month before the incident would leave him with no connection to it.

Senior Airman Adam Barrs, of the 5^th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, was killed in a single-car auto accident on July, 5 2007, as a passenger. The car was driven by Airman 1^st Class Stephen Garrett. There is speculation that Barr’s specialty, communications and navigations systems could be relevant to the incident but his death over the July 4^th holidays both predates the incident and had no direct link to it.

Additionally, the Military Times published a story stating 237 nuclear handling deficiencies in the Air Combat Command in total just since 2001. This report would also buttress the DSB’s conclusion of an overall erosion of nuclear handling procedures. Strangely enough, the actual Bent Spear incident is not included in that list. Scott Vest, a former USAF Captain and Munitions Specialist with the 5^th Bomb Wing at Minot also has an interesting article on the subject here that also buttresses the DSB report.

As for the Chinese semiconductor hack story, I only found one website postulating the theory. That I would have to dismiss out of hand due to the fact that semiconductor suppliers don’t have any knowledge of the use their products have after they are sold.

In conclusion, despite all the dire warnings and postulations, I see nothing here that would indicate anything other than the DSB’s findings of an erosion of the nuclear mission due to increased conventional operations, downgrading of the nuclear mission and personnel & budgetary cutbacks that were warned about to the Air Combat Command as far back as 1992. The scope of SecDef Gates’ housecleaning and the fact that resignations and disciplinary actions went all the way to the top of the Air Force command structure are consistent with both the gravity of the incident and the desire by the DOD to put their nuclear house in order.

# # # #

North Korea's Second Nuclear Test - Fearful Pride

By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.

The US Geological Survey detected a 4.7 magnitude seismic event at 00:54 GMT on the 25th of May at Hwaderi, near Kilju City in North Harnkyung province in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK = "North Korea") at 10 km (6 miles) below the surface. The nature of the seismic signals indicated this to be the second nuclear test carried out by the DPRK, and the yield of the device was between 10 kT and 20 kT (kT = kilo-tons of TNT explosive power, 1 kT = 4.184 x 10-to-12th-power Joules). The Hiroshima bomb was 13 kT, and the Nagasaki bomb was 21 kT. The DPRK also conducted three short-range missile tests on the same day, a few hours after their nuclear detonation.

The last paragraph summarizes the publicly available facts about the DPRK's nuclear test #2 (see notes 1 and 2 for news accounts). Commentary on the meaning of this test was actually written three years ago, on the occasion of the DPRK's nuclear test #1 of 9 October 2006 (see notes 3 and 4).

My commentary of 2006 still applies because neither the policy goals of the United States and Security Council Nuclear Powers, nor the fears of the DPRK leadership have changed since 2006. In the simplest terms, world capitalism under the direction of the United States wants the North Koreans to dismantle their DPRK state and to integrate their economy and workforce into that of an expanded Republic of Korea (South Korea) in a manner similar to the dissolution of the East German communist state (Democratic Republic of Germany, 7 October 1949 to 3 October 1990). The foreign policy of the DPRK, of which its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs are a part, is aimed at combatting the existential threat to the DPRK governing elite.

First, let us consider some of the physical aspects of DPRK test #2.

A yield up to 20 kT is clearly a "success" and indicates the verification of one design of an implosion system (discounting the possibility of a gun-type assembly as in the Hiroshima bomb). I presume, but do not know, that this bomb is an experimental device that is neither compact and light-weight enough, nor ruggedized enough to fit within the payload mass and space limitations of a slim missile body, and to withstand the forces of acceleration required of a ballistic missile nuclear warhead. Any program aimed at that goal will require another test (in perhaps three years?) of a militarized packaging of the "pit" (nuclear core and its surrounding blanket of high explosives) tested today.

The amazingly deep burial at 10 km will probably assure full containment of radioactivity from the DPRK test. US underground tests were often 0.3 km to 0.5 km down. Because of the rapid attenuation of the high frequency parts of an electrical signal with its travel distance along a cable, the US nuclear program engineered its underground tests with the minimum burial depth necessary to assure containment, so as to have the highest fidelity possible for the detection and recording systems relaying and storing experimental data from sensors near the device. Optimizing the burial depth for signal fidelity required a sophisticated arrangement of plugs and backfill to seal the emplacement shaft or tunnel. I wonder if the DPRK test program is satisfied with simple low-fidelity data (the simplest being the sensation of an artificial earthquake), or if they have an underground alcove with high-fidelity recording equipment in a cavern near the detonation point. It may be that the DPRK wished to avoid snooping by US intelligence satellites, so it buried the entire test operation. It is also possible to partially decouple the force of a buried explosion from the surrounding earth by placing the bomb in the center of a larger cavity; this will transmit a weaker seismic signal, and could spoof seismic measurements of yield by foreign powers.

Clearly, the DPRK nuclear program scientists evaluated the data from their test of October 2006, made new calculations, undoubtedly built new assemblies for hydrodynamic testing (perfecting the dynamics of the heavy-metal implosion driven by chemical high explosives), and settled on a design that produced sizable yield. It is equally clear that their nuclear materials program was able to produce sufficient weapons-grade fissile material for at least one new device since 2006 (perhaps 10 kg), and probably several times that amount.

All in all, it is evident they are now a full-fledged member of the nuclear weapons club. The most honest reaction the Security Council of the UN, and the leading world powers could offer would be: "congratulations!"

Now, let us speculate on the political fallout.

The DPRK has made the clearest possible statement that the best defense against domination by superior powers is nuclear weaponry. The greater care with which the U.S. and Security Council Nuclear Powers approach the DPRK confirms this argument. When observing the situations of Palestine, Iraq and Iran, most of the rest of the world would concede the validity of the argument.

The policy of the U.S. is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- and renounce nuclear weapons -- while exempting itself from it; essentially "disarm that we may more easily rule." The DPRK posture is a rejection of the US policy, and a pointed example of rebellion calling out to the rest of the world.

Another aspect of the DPRK's nuclear weapons politics is to put its near neighbors on notice not to think of colonizing it. This message is particularly aimed at South Korea, seen as an extension of US capitalism, and to Japan. There are still Koreans living who remember being brutally enslaved by Imperial Japan, which forcibly annexed Korea during 1910 to 1945. Even more Koreans remember the 1950-1953 war between China and the U.S., on their peninsula. The casualties of that war, for the US-led anti-communist forces, were 474,000; the combined casualties for the communist Chinese and North Korean forces were between 1.19 million and 1.58 million; and the total number of Korean civilians killed or wounded is estimated at 2 million (5).

Today, Japan fustigates that it may have to build its own nuclear weapons (within one year!) to counter those of the DPRK, and South Korea issued similar statements to assuage domestic concerns about the nuclear developments in the North. There is little reason to fear aggression by the DPRK. While it may soon be true that it could launch a few nuclear warheads into South Korea, Japan and toward US bases and fleets in the Pacific, such attacks would ensure the swift destruction of the DPRK elite by retaliatory actions of the most modern military forces on this planet. Nuclear weapons would not be needed for this; waves of GPS-guided missile strikes with conventional high explosive warheads, followed by similarly guided airborne bombing would eradicate the DPRK nomenklatura and its entire military infrastructure. Also, it is very likely that missiles launched by North Korea would be immediately detected by US and allied nations' radars and satellites, and countered by anti-missile missiles (today's equivalent to the flak thrown up in WW2). Such defenses are more likely to be effective against long-range missiles since there is more time to react. The DPRK leadership knows from its own history that US-led military action has no regard for Korean loss-of-life, so they are fully aware that their nuclear arsenal is only a stratagem strictly limited to diplomatic gamesmanship short of actual war.

So, what does the DPRK leadership hope to gain by brandishing nuclear arms? The DPRK leadership's deepest desire is that of all elites everywhere: a long-term guarantee of its privileged position within the undisturbed extent of its domain. The DPRK wants to interact with the rest of the world in a way that sustains the physical and economic existence of their state but without introducing any ideas or social forces that weaken the control of the DPRK leadership, and the fealty of the population to that leadership. Clearly, the present DPRK regime is skeptical it can follow the Chinese example of introducing a state-directed form of capitalism while maintaining ideological control and sufficient popular obedience, so it is resistant to allowing the population wider exposure to foreign influences. The DPRK nuclear arsenal is the equivalent of a 10 foot (3.3 m) high wall topped with glass shards surrounding an estate with Pit Bulls and Doberman Pinschers running loose. It is a shield built with pride and motivated by fear.

Unfortunately, urging the DPRK leadership to engage in nuclear disarmament is equivalent to urging it to dissolve; the nature of their brittle power structure could not withstand the corrosive effects of the psychological, cultural and economic forces within world capitalism. They know this, hence the obsessive defensiveness. The most humane policy toward the DPRK would be to leave it alone. Over the long term, if it is neither harassed nor provoked, it will slowly relax many of its fears. Once the apprehensions of the DPRK are reasonably lowered because it is no longer being pressured and hurried to fit into a foreign capitalist agenda, then it is likely the society of the DPRK will evolve into greater harmony with the world consensus on many issues. Such a policy would be one of respecting the integrity of another society, and of non-interference. It is definitely not the policy with the highest expected return on investment (ROI), nor the earliest expected payoff, but it is the policy with the least likelihood of harming the Korean people and their neighbors. One has to imagine the possibility of arriving at nuclear disarmament as the inevitable consequence of the disuse of nuclear weapons: they are no longer maintained and rust away because their owners have moved on to other activities.

Internationally, patient respect will ultimately soften the fearful pride of an otherwise unaggressive state. The real solution to nuclear proliferation is the expansion of social and economic justice within our own nations, because nuclear arms are primarily a symptom of economic class warfare coupled with racism. Let the people of North Korea deal with their economic elite, and let us reform ours; and in that way we can eliminate the nuclear weapons squeezed out of the world's popular collective labor by our various ambitious and parasitic ruling classes.

Manuel Garcia, Jr., a former physicist at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory, can be reached at mango@idiom.com

Notes

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8066615.stm

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8067438.stm

[3] http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia10172006.html

[4] http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia10192006.html

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

When We Almost Nuked Savannah or The Case of the Missing H-Bomb (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.)

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Warsaw Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb's 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn't detonate.

The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. "The search for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement."

There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat, as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10, 1958 classified memo to Congress: "There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. ... The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities."

But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security, safety or ecological problem, than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a joint statement to the press, the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be "scattered" by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the letter downplayed possibility of that ever happening: "The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited."

In fact, that scenario had already occurred and would occur again.

That's where the matter stood for more than 42 years until a deep sea salvage company, run by former Air Force personnel and a CIA agent, disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to locate it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents, the disclosure prompted fear and outrage among coastal residents and calls for a congressional investigation into the incident itself and why the Pentagon had stopped looking for the missing bomb. "We're horrified because some of that information has been covered up for years," said Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican.

The cover-up continues. The Air Force, however, has told local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing to worry about.

"We've looked into this particular issue from all angles and we're very comfortable," said Major Gen. Franklin J. "Judd" Blaisdell, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations at Air Force headquarters in Washington. "Our biggest concern is that of localized heavy metal contamination."

The Air Force even has suggested that the bomb itself was not armed with a plutonium trigger. But this contention is disputed by a number of factors. Howard Dixon, a former Air Force sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that in his 31 years of experience he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane that wasn't fully armed. Moreover, a newly declassified 1966 congressional testimony of W.J. Howard, then assistant secretary of defense, describes the Tybee Island bomb as a "complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule." Howard said that the Tybee Island bomb was one of two weapons lost up to that time that contained a plutonium trigger.

Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned bomb was an "Mk-15, Mod O" hydrogen bomb, weighing four tons and packing more than 100 times the explosive punch of the one that incinerated Hiroshima. This was the first thermonuclear weapon deployed by the Air Force and featured the relatively primitive design created by that evil genius Edward Teller. The only fail-safe for this weapon was the physical separation of the plutonium capsule (or pit) from the weapon.

In addition to the primary nuclear capsule, the bomb also harbored a secondary nuclear explosive, or sparkplug, designed to make it go thermo. This is a hollow plug about an inch in diameter made of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (the Pentagon has never said which) that is filled with fusion fuel, most likely lithium-6 deuteride. Lithium is highly reactive in water. The plutonium in the bomb was manufactured at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State and would be the oldest in the United States. That's bad news: Plutonium gets more dangerous as it ages. In addition, the bomb would contain other radioactive materials, such as uranium and beryllium.

The bomb is also charged with 400 pounds of TNT, designed to cause the plutonium trigger to implode and thus start the nuclear explosion. As the years go by, those high explosives are becoming flaky, brittle and sensitive. The bomb is most likely now buried in 5 to 15 feet of sand and slowly leaking radioactivity into the rich crabbing grounds of the Warsaw Sound. If the Pentagon can't find the Tybee Island bomb, others might. That's the conclusion of Bert Soleau, a former CIA officer who now works with ASSURE, the salvage company. Soleau, a chemical engineer, said that it wouldn't be hard for terrorists to locate the weapon and recover the lithium, beryllium and enriched uranium, "the essential building blocks of nuclear weapons." What to do? Coastal residents want the weapon located and removed. "Plutonium is a nightmare and their own people know it," said Pam O'Brien, an anti-nuke organizer from Douglassville, Georgia. "It can get in everything--your eyes, your bones, your gonads. You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there."

The situation is reminiscent of the Palomares incident. On January 16, 1966, a B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed while attempting to refuel in mid-air above the Spanish coast. Three of the H-bombs landed near the coastal farming village of Palomares. One of the bombs landed in a dry creek bed and was recovered, battered but relatively intact. But the TNT in two of the bombs exploded, gouging 10-foot holes in the ground and showering uranium and plutonium over a vast area. Over the next three months, more than 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation was scooped up, placed in barrels and, ironically enough, shipped back to the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Lab, where it remains. The tomato fields near the craters were burned and buried. But there's no question that due to strong winds and other factors much of the contaminated soil was simply left in the area. "The total extent of the spread will never be known," concluded a 1975 report by the Defense Nuclear Agency.

The cleanup was a joint operation between Air Force personnel and members of the Spanish civil guard. The U.S. workers wore protective clothing and were monitored for radiation exposure, but similar precautions weren't taken for their Spanish counterparts. "The Air Force was unprepared to provide adequate detection and monitoring for personnel when an aircraft accident occurred involving plutonium weapons in a remote area of a foreign country," the Air Force commander in charge of the cleanup later testified to Congress.

The fourth bomb landed eight miles offshore and was missing for several months. It was eventually located by a mini-submarine in 2,850 feet of water, where it rests to this day.

Two years later, on January 21, 1968, a similar accident occurred when a B-52 caught fire in flight above Greenland and crashed in ice-covered North Star Bay near the Thule Air Base. The impact detonated the explosives in all four of the plane's H-bombs, which scattered uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 2,000-foot radius. The intense fire melted a hole in the ice, which then refroze, encapsulating much of the debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs. The recovery operation, conducted in near total darkness at temperatures that plunged to minus-70 degrees, was known as Project Crested Ice. But the work crews called it "Dr. Freezelove."

More than 10,000 tons of snow and ice were cut away, put into barrels and transported to Savannah River and Oak Ridge for disposal. Other radioactive debris was simply left on site, to melt into the bay after the spring thaws. More than 3,000 workers helped in the Thule recovery effort, many of them Danish soldiers. As at Palomares, most of the American workers were offered some protective gear, but not the Danes, who did much of the most dangerous work, including filling the barrels with the debris, often by hand. The decontamination procedures were primitive to say the least. An Air Force report noted that they were cleansed "by simply brushing the snow from garments and vehicles."

Even though more than 38 Navy ships were called to assist in the recovery operation, and it was an open secret that the bombs had been lost, the Pentagon continued to lie about the situation. In one contentious exchange with the press, a Pentagon spokesman uttered this classic bit of military doublespeak: "I don't know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for."

When Danish workers at Thule began to get sick from a slate of illnesses, ranging from rare cancers to blood disorders, the Pentagon refused to help. Even after a 1987 epidemiological study by a Danish medical institute showed that Thule workers were 50 percent more likely to develop cancers than other members of the Danish military, the Pentagon still refused to cooperate. Later that year, 200 of the workers sued the United States under the Foreign Military Claims Act. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the discovery process revealed thousands of pages of secret documents about the incident, including the fact that Air Force workers at the site, unlike the Danes, have not been subject to long-term health monitoring. Even so, the Pentagon continues to keep most of the material on the Thule incident secret, including any information on the extent of the radioactive (and other toxic) contamination.

These recovery efforts don't inspire much confidence. But the Tybee Island bomb presents an even touchier situation. The presence of the unstable lithium deuteride and the deteriorating high explosives make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition--so dangerous, in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.

In short, there aren't any easy answers. The problem is exacerbated by the Pentagon's failure to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the situation and reluctance to fully disclose what it knows. "I believe the plutonium capsule is in the bomb, but that a nuclear detonation is improbable because the neutron generators used back then were polonium-beryllium, which has a very short half-life," said Don Moniak, a nuclear weapons expert with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Aiken, South Carolina. "Without neutrons, weapons grade plutonium won't blow. However, there could be a fission or criticality event if the plutonium was somehow put in an incorrect configuration. There could be a major inferno if the high explosives went off and the lithium deuteride reacted as expected. Or there could just be an explosion that scattered uranium and plutonium all over hell."

This essay is featured in the forthcoming book, Loose Nukes published by Count Zero Press.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

US Army Confirms Israeli Nukes

March 18, 2009

Military.com|by Bryant Jordan

The Army has let slip one of the worst-kept secrets in the world -- that Israel has the bomb.

Officially, the United States has a policy of "ambiguity" regarding Israel's nuclear capability. Essentially, it has played a game by which it neither acknowledges nor denies that Israel is a nuclear power.

But a Defense Department study completed last year offers what may be the first time in a unclassified report that Israel is a nuclear power. On page 37 of the U.S. Joint Forces Command report, the Army includes Israel within "a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east."

The single reference is far more than the U.S. usually would state publicly about Israel, even though the world knew Israel to be a nuclear power years before former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu went public with facts on its weapons program in 1986.

Several years later investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published "The Samson Option," detailing Israel's strategy of massive nuclear retaliation against Arab states in the event it felt its very existence was threatened. Israel's nuclear arsenal has been estimated to range from 200 to 400 warheads.

Yet Israel has refused to confirm or deny it's nuclear capabilities, and the U.S. has gone along with the charade.

As recently as Feb. 9 President Barack Obama ducked the question when asked pointedly by White House correspondent Helen Thomas whether he knew of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. Keeping the blinders on is necessary politically in order to avoid a policy confrontation with Israel.

By law, the U.S. would have to cease providing billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel if it determined the country had a nuclear weapons program. That's because the so-called Symington Amendment, passed in 1976, bars assistance to countries developing technology for nuclear weapons proliferation.

Given the U.S.'s long history of selective blindness when it comes to Israeli nukes, it's unlikely that the Joint Operating Environment 2008 report compiled by the Army amount to much more than a minor faux pas.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in a March 8 article on the report, observed: "It is virtually unheard of for a senior military commander, while in office, to refer to Israel's nuclear status. In December 2006, during his confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates referred to Israel as one of the powers seen by Iran as surrounding it with nuclear weapons. But once in office, Gates refused to repeat this allusion to Israel, noting that when he used it he was ‘a private citizen.' "

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If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran By Paul Craig Roberts

The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Gen. Sanchez says, is “to stave off defeat,” and that requires more intelligence and leadership than Gen. Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political leadership: “I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time.”

More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines reporting: “U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of Baghdad, the military said on Monday.” After five years of war the US controls one-third of one city and nothing else.

A host of US commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is destroying the US military. A year ago Colin Powell said that the US Army is “about broken.” Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush has “piecemealed our force to death.” Gen. Barry McCafrey testified to the US Senate that “the Army will unravel.”

Col. Andy Bacevich, America’s foremost writer on military affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that Bush’s insane war has depleted and exhausted the US Army and Marine Corps:

“Only a third of the regular Army’s brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president’s strategy of escalation, the US will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.”

“The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army’s lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants.”

Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages have been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school dropouts and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of tests have spiked. The US military is forced to recruit among drug users and convicted criminals. Bacevich reports that wavers “issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent.” Combat tours have been extended from 12 to 15 months, and the same troops are being deployed again and again.

There is no equipment for training. Bacevich reports that “some $212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just plain worn out.” What remains is in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under these circumstances, “staying the course” means total defeat.

Even the neoconservative warmongers, who deceived Americans with the promise of a “cakewalk war” that would be over in six weeks, believe that the war is lost. But they have not given up. They have a last desperate plan: Bomb Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney is spear- heading the neocon plan, and Norman Podhoretz is the plan’s leading propagandist with his numerous pleas published in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary to bomb Iran. Podhoretz, like every neoconservative, is a total Islamophobe. Podhoretz has written that Islam must be deracinated and the religion destroyed, a genocide for the Muslim people.

The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke Iran to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket propelled grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash the militias against US troops. These weapons would neutralize US tanks and helicopter gunships and destroy the US military edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces subject to being cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America on the verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up to “save the troops” by nuking Iran.

Five years of unsuccessful war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel’s recent military defeat in Lebanon have convinced the neocons that America and Israel cannot establish hegemony over the Middle East with conventional forces alone. The neocons have changed US war doctrine, which now permits the US to preemptively strike with nuclear weapons a non-nuclear power. Neocons are forever heard saying, “what’s the use of having nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.”

Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail against nuclear weapons.

Many US military officers are horrified at what they think would be the worst ever orchestrated war crime. There are reports of threatened resignations. But Dick Cheney is resolute. He tells Bush that the plan will save him from the ignominy of losing the war and restore his popularity as the president who saved Americans from Iranian nuclear weapons. With the captive American media providing propaganda cover, the neoconservatives believe that their plan can pull their chestnuts out of the fire and rescue them from the failure that their delusion has wrought.

The American electorate decided last November that they must do something about the failed war and gave the Democrats control of both houses of Congress. However, the Democrats have decided that it is easier to be complicit in war crimes than to represent the wishes of the electorate and hold a rogue president accountable. If Cheney again prevails, America will supplant the Third Reich as the most reviled country in recorded history.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell