Who’s Minding America’s Nukes?

Another reason we were better off during the Cold War: The nation paid a lot more attention to the safety and security of its nuclear arsenal when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were poised to blast each other to atomic smithereens. It was that lack of vigilance, last August, that allowed six nuclear-armed cruise missiles to be loaded on to a B-52 bomber for a flight from North Dakota to Louisiana without anyone even knowing they were there. There is a “perception at all levels in the nuclear enterprise that the nation and its leadership do not value the nuclear mission and the people who perform that mission,” retired general Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. Welch had chaired a Defense Science Board inquiry into last summer’s snafu. The 27-page report (available online) says the Pentagon has been ignoring the problem. “The Defense Department has received authoritative and credible reports of declining focus and an eroding nuclear enterprise environment for at least a decade with little in the way of effective and lasting response,” the report says. Pentagon officials interviewed by Welch’s panel “believe that the decline in focus has been more pronounced than realized, and too extreme to be acceptable,” it added.

Read the story from TIME | No Comments | Posted February 13, 2008 at 1:37 AM by Sam Bear