Update to the original story.Its not any better now than when I first posted it.
Nuclear deficiencies
Records show Air Force let safety standards slip for many years before Minot
By Michael Hoffman - mhoffman@militarytimes.com
Posted : February 25, 2008
Before airmen at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., lost track of six nuclear warheads in late August, nuclear security there had eroded to such a level that instead of using orange cones and multiple official placards to distinguish racks of non-nuclear missiles from nuclear-tipped ones, the 5th Bomb Wing was using 8-by-10-inch sheets of paper placed on the pylons.
That all changed Aug. 30, when Air Force officials discovered a B-52 Stratofortress bomber had mistakenly flown the six warheads from Minot to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., and the glare of the national spotlight returned to America’s nuclear stockpile for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
Over the past four months, Air Force leaders have scrambled to review the nuclear program. On Feb. 11 and 12, they announced 132 recommendations to improve the service’s ability to protect the world’s most lethal weapons, the result of two internal reviews and a Defense Department investigation.
Four Air Force generals who testified about the Minot incident and nuclear security before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 12 said the service has lost its focus on the nuclear mission.
However, internal Air Force reports and safety records dating to 1992 show service officials received regular and consistent warnings about the erosion of nuclear safety standards. But there was no thorough examination of vulnerabilities until after the incident at Minot.
The intent of the late August mission was to fly a dozen Advanced Cruise Missiles from Minot to Barksdale to be decommissioned. But instead of loading two pylons, each containing six non-nuclear missiles, under the B-52’s wings Aug. 29, the 5th Bomb Wing airmen rolled out one pylon loaded with nuclear warheads and strapped it onto one of the wings.
All six warheads sat on runways for close to 36 hours — first at Minot and then at Barksdale — without the appropriate nuclear security until a 2nd Bomb Wing airman at Barksdale discovered the mistake Aug. 30.
Former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak warned 16 years ago when Air Combat Command took over the nuclear mission from Strategic Air Command “about the worsening practices regarding the safe handling and storage of nuclear weapons and directed commanders at every level to review surety programs,” according to a 2005 Natural Resources Defense Council report, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe: A Review of Post-Cold War Policy, Force Levels and War Planning.”
That sentiment was echoed in the Air Force’s most recent reviews of its nuclear program.
The review, done by a Defense Science Board task force upon the request of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and headed by former Air Force Chief of Staff retired Gen. Larry Welch, was particularly critical of the erosion of the nuclear program and the systemic Air Force problems that allowed it to occur.
“The task force and several of the senior [Defense Department] people interviewed believe that the decline in focus has been more pronounced than realized and too extreme to be acceptable,” the report read.
Last October, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, Air Combat Command produced a list of 237 reported “safety deficiencies” — known in the nuclear community as Dull Swords — over the past six years, three months.
Dull Sword is a term the Air Force uses to describe and report a discrepancy or problem with certified nuclear equipment or with the processes for handling nuclear weapons, said Col. Billy Gilstrap, ACC safety director. The more serious incident at Minot is described as a Bent Spear.
The records Kristensen received in response to his FOIA request went back only as far as June 2001, because the Dull Sword ACC digital database was not created until 2005 as part of a mishap prevention effort, Gilstrap said. Before that, Dull Sword records were deleted once the problem was fixed, or two years after the initial report, he said.
The list of Dull Sword records provided by the Air Force includes a short description of each safety discrepancy: From failures in the Personnel Reliability Program — which is used to determine which airmen can handle nuclear weapons — to broken towing vehicles used to transport warheads from the storage units to the bombers, to unexplained problems with the equipment designed to carry the nuclear weapons on the aircraft and other deficiencies.
The 509th Bomb Wing, which operates the B-2 Spirit bomber at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., alone recorded 111 of the 237 safety deficiencies, by far the most for one wing. However, Gilstrap said he looks at those records as a positive, not a negative.
“We’re proud of those guys,” he said. “We really encourage Dull Swords as much as possible. If we don’t know about it, we can’t fix it.”
Since the Minot and Barksdale mishap, top Air Force leaders have had a fix-it-now attitude, but back in 2003, an Air Force inspector general report warned that pass rates for nuclear surety inspections — which nuclear units receive every 18 months — had “hit an all-time low.”
Historically, Air Force units had a 79 percent pass rate on NSIs, but that year, it dipped to 50 percent. Five of 10 units tested that year failed, with only one unit test left, the report stated.
“The poor performance can be rationalized many ways: the NSI sample size is dramatically smaller in recent years, ... conventional operations tempo is higher than ever before ... or the failures are attributable to complex regulatory guidance,” wrote Lt. Col. Lynn Scott, deputy director of inspections for the IG in 2003.
“While there is some shred of truth to [these rationalizations], the bottom line is that each one offers a convenient excuse to avoid accepting responsibility for failure — and failure is not something that is acceptable when it comes to the safety, security and reliability of our nuclear weapons.”
Ten years before, nuclear units in Europe faced a similar nuclear surety failure rate. U.S. Air Forces in Europe tested 12 units in 1993, and only seven passed, according to a partially declassified Air Force report, “History of United States Air Forces in Europe, Calendar Year 1993.”
But the inspection issue goes beyond pass-fail rates.
High marks?
Last year, Minot’s 5th Bomb Wing passed its NSI and received “outstanding” ratings in certain subareas of the test, such as the Personnel Reliability Program.
“Our report found that the problem with the inspections is the scope is just too limited,” Welch told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 12. “Over time, the scope has been more and more limited, to the point where they really don’t demonstrate operational readiness.”
The Air Force also is taking its most comprehensive look yet at the breadth and depth of the nuclear surety inspection process, said Maj. Gen. Polly Peyer, who directed the Air Force’s blue ribbon review into the incident, which produced an internal report Feb. 12.
Lt. Gen. Daniel Darnell, deputy chief of staff for air, space and information operations, told senators that now nuclear units might receive less warning before an NSI takes place.
“We think that there may be some value to a limited-notice inspection for units,” he said.
An executive summary of the blue ribbon review report, obtained by Air Force Times, said Peyer’s team of 30 airmen visited 29 locations and interviewed 822 people. The report criticized the inspection process, the waning focus on the nuclear mission, the lack of experience in the ranks and the aging equipment used to maintain the nuclear stockpile.
“We did see a diminished focus on the nuclear mission,” Peyer said in an interview. “You can kind of trace it back to 1991 and the end of the Cold War.”
The Air Force referenced the blue ribbon review’s 36 recommendations as justification for adding 11 items, totaling $99.5 million, to the unfunded requirements list it sent to Congress. These requests, designed to shore up nuclear security, include nuclear test equipment, intercontinental ballistic missile transporters, UH-1N helicopters to monitor missile fields and nuclear munitions storage trailers.
Service officials said they could not fit the requests into the regular fiscal 2009 budget because it was due before the report from the blue ribbon panel.
Aging infrastructure is a problem, Peyer told senators at the Feb. 12 hearing. “For example, nuclear weapons test equipment is 25 to 30 years old, and so [we’re] definitely [looking] at recapitalizing that,” Peyer said.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said he didn’t understand how updating nuclear weapons security could be put on the back burner over the years.
“How do you think we got to where we didn’t allocate enough to ensure nuclear weapons surety and safety, even in an environment where we’ve got constrained resources?” he asked.
Fair warning
But the problem is not new. A decade ago, security systems used to monitor nuclear weapons storage areas at bases such as Minot, Barksdale and Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., had exceeded their “useful life cycle” by 12 years and were in danger of failing, according to a partially declassified report, “History of Air Combat Command: 1 January — 31 December 1998.”
The Air Force installed the Advanced Entry Control System that year at all three bases, narrowly avoiding a dangerous sensor failure, ACC Security Forces officials said in the report.
Peyer said the service also is looking into procuring new technology to monitor its nuclear stockpile.
For example, portal monitors that can detect sources of radiation entering or leaving a weapons storage area are being considered. Such an advance could have prevented the mistake at Minot by warning airmen that radiological munitions were exiting the storage structure.
Peyer, a senior logistics officer, said she has seen technological advances used in the logistics field and would like to see them transferred to tracking nuclear weapons, especially an information system that could “tie together scheduling functions.”
Maj. Gen. Douglas Raaberg, ACC’s director of air and space operations, told senators three major scheduling mistakes by the 5th Bomb Wing led to the mix-up at Minot.
But, Peyer warned that technological upgrades can’t make up for airmen’s lack of expertise in handling nuclear munitions. Along with the loss of focus on the nuclear mission has come a waning experience level within the ranks.
“The decline is characterized by embedding nuclear mission forces in non-nuclear organizations, markedly reducing levels of leadership whose focus is the nuclear enterprise, and a general devaluation of the nuclear mission and those who perform the mission,” according to the report by the Defense Science Board task force led by Welch.
Interviews with B-52 crews showed they typically spend only 5 percent to 20 percent of their time on the nuclear mission. Air Force leaders understand that the conventional mission is still the primary role of most bomber units, but they stressed that airmen need to spend more time training.
“We need to look at our exercise and inspection programs,” Peyer said. “What you can’t get from practical experience you have to supplement through your training and your exercise program. We can’t go back to where we were in 1991. We don’t live in the same world.”
By acting on the 132 recommendations of the various reviewing agencies, Air Force leaders hope to rebuild the nation’s faith in its ability to secure nuclear weapons, but Thune and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., voiced the concern many people still have: How could the Air Force have ignored the warnings and let the program erode to this point?
“The sloppiness and the lack of discipline and the lack of respect for the process didn’t just happen overnight,” Nelson said.
The spotlight on the Air Force’s nuclear program will eventually dim, Thune warned.
“While I have every confidence in the system while this subject is very much at the forefront of our minds, my concern would be that as we get farther away from the time of this incident that we’ll have the same loss of focus and perhaps erosion of procedures,” he said.