Originally published on the CGS blog on September 7, 2007.
According to the highly-respected Jeffrey Lewis over at the uber-wonky ArmsControlWonk :
I do not find compelling the speculation, suggested by Larry Johnson and others, that the nuclear-armed Advanced Cruise Missiles that mistakenly ended up at Barksdale Air Force Base were being staged for an attack on Iran.
Pilots, crews and all those associated with handling nuclear weapons do make mistakes, as a casual reading of Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons will demonstrate. Indeed, the fact that the bombs sat on the tarmac for ten hours because no one quite believed that such an accident could happen will make excellent fodder for organizational theorists:
Sources in the Air Force say it took [ten hours] because the airmen who first discovered the bombs could not believe what they were seeing and had a hard time convincing superiors that the missiles on the bomber were, in fact, carrying nuclear weapons.
Phew! I never thought I’d be so happy to hear an accident involving mulitple nuclear warheads was just that…an accident.
Or is that just what they want us to think? Who cares?! It’s Friday!
