Whether we're talking about ignoring warnings that terrorists were going to strike in 2001 or whether we're talking about 60 Hiroshima's worth of nuclear warheads traveling unleashed in America's skies in 2007 -- and all the messes in between -- we're talking about politically-driven incompetence so dangerous that a measured, polite reaction is out of the question. We have been living with an administration so obviously unwilling and unable to govern that we wonder what kind of government will be left when they're finished. Just how much of the mess created was intentional?
Look at what happened at Minot AFB and what continued to happen for weeks and followed by their response to what could have been a serious disaster. Keep in mind what the mishandling of nuclear warheads means in terms of how "national security" is actually working -- well, in this case, not working.
Here are some of the phrases used in Walter Pincus' Washington Post report to describe what happened.
"...Did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads,"no idea nuclear warheads were coming," "without special high-level authorization," "security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana," "warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge," "missteps at every turn," "sloppy procedures could leave room for theft or damage to a warhead, disseminating its toxic nuclear materials," "a breakdown at a number of levels involving flight crew, munitions, storage and tracking procedures," "munitions custodian officer is supposed to keep track," "supposed to look at check sheets, bar codes and serial numbers denoting whether the missiles are armed," "in this instance, just one person examined only the six unarmed missiles and inexplicably skipped the armed missiles on the left..."
And here's a rundown of responses.
"I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing," retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as U.S. Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, said in an interview."
"No press interest anticipated."
"It is more significant than people first realized, and the more you look at it, the stranger it is," said Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress think tank and the author of a history of nuclear weapons. "These weapons -- the equivalent of 60 Hiroshimas -- were out of authorized command and control for more than a day."
Even if the bomber had crashed, or if someone had stolen the warheads, fail-safe devices would have prevented a nuclear detonation. But independent experts warn that whenever nuclear weapons are not properly safeguarded, their fissile materials are at risk of theft and diversion. Moreover, if the plane had crashed and the warheads' casings cracked, these highly toxic materials could have been widely dispersed.
"When what were multiple layers of tight nuclear weapon control internal procedures break down, some bad guy may eventually come along and take advantage of them," said a former senior administration official who had responsibility for nuclear security.
The base's officers made an egregious mistake in allowing nuclear-warhead-equipped missiles and unarmed missiles to be stored in the same bunker, a practice that a spokesman last week confirmed is routine. Charles Curtis, a former deputy energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said, "We always relied on segregation of nuclear weapons from conventional ones."
A former Air Force senior master sergeant wrote separately that "mistakes were made at the lowest level of supervision and this snowballed into the one of the biggest mistakes in USAF history. I am still scratching my head wondering how this could [have] happened."
Apologists for the Bush administration will lean heavily on the news that before 2000, before Bush, there were concerns about security.
A secret 1998 history of the Air Combat Command warned of "diminished attention for even 'the minimum standards' of nuclear weapons' maintenance, support and security" once such arms became less vital, according to a declassified copy obtained by Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' nuclear information project.
But isn't this precisely what the reshuffling of intelligence agencies and national security agencies was supposed to address? Aren't we seeing, over and over again, evidence of willful incompetence? Shouldn't we conclude that the neglect was intentional? Are we nuts to conclude that governance and security have been at the very bottom of the list of Bush administration concerns for fully seven years in spite of all the rhetoric?