Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday insisted that the Air Force fix what Defense Department officials described as the U.S. military’s loss of focus in safeguarding its nuclear weapons.
Senators from both parties demanded answers about an incident last August in which a B-52 bomber flew from an air base in North Dakota to one in Louisiana with six cruise missiles onboard that the crew did not know were carrying nuclear warheads, each with destructive power 10 times that of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. It took 36 hours before anyone missed the weapons.
Defense Department officials told the panel the incident reflected a waning emphasis on nuclear-weapons procedures across the U.S. military but they insisted the stockpile is nonetheless secure. Committee Republicans, while acknowledging the seriousness of the incident, emphasized the weapons were not in a condition that would have allowed them to detonate.
But Democrats stressed that if military personnel do not know they are handling nuclear weapons, they are less likely to follow procedures designed to safeguard them from terrorists. And even if a warhead could not have exploded in a nuclear reaction, Democrats said, the potentially deadly plutonium inside might have scattered in an aircraft crash.
“No breach of nuclear procedures of this magnitude has ever occurred,” said Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich).
The hearing revealed that during the August incident at least 25 different people in the Air Force did not do their jobs in failing to discover that actual warheads, as opposed to dummies, had been put on the cruise missiles.
Republicans sought to put the incident in context.
“The American public were never in danger if there had been an accident,” said John W. Warner (R-Va).