A little mix-up over at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota gets a lot of ink today. Last week, a ground crew accidentally loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles onto a B-52 bomber bound for Louisiana. The plane arrived without incident, but as of this morning, a munitions commander was relieved of duty and several others had been suspended.

Several papers including the Edmonton Sun, Detroit News, and New York Daily News warned of the Air Force accidentally flying “live” warheads, but it’s pretty unlikely that was the case. The bomber was carrying W-80-1 warheads, which are some of the Pentagon’s more sophisticated weapons. They’re equipped with Permissive Action Links (PALs) which prevent the crew from using them without presidential authorisation. The PALs on these particular warheads maintain an actual physical barrier between the electrical systems of the warhead and the rest of the missile and could even be used to remotely disable it, so there’s no way the crew could have armed, fused or fired the missiles. Even if the plane had crashed, the warhead’s “primary” contained fire-resistant “insensitive” high explosives of the type that would be unlikely to detonate.

In fact things were a lot more dangerous in the good old days of the Cold War. In the early 60s, the Air Force kept nuclear-armed B-52s aloft twenty-four-seven. The programme came to an end in 1968 after one of the B-52s carrying four nukes crashed in Thule, Greenland. A succinct summary of the incident, and the Air Force’s nuke-flying history can be found <a href= “https://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2007/09/flying_nuclear_bombs.php”> here

The real issue here, as most of the coverage pointed out, is the inventory system the Air Force uses to keep track of its weapons. It should be quite difficult for a ground crew to load warheads in place of duds, and a thorough investigation will be needed to find out exactly what happened.

Credit: USAF