by CKR
How does it happen that the military can’t tell helicopter batteries (presumably boxy or flattish, heavy) from, er, fuses for nuclear weapons (electrical-looking stuff, connectors)? (NYT, WaPo)
Or how is it that they didn’t notice that those cruise missiles just happened to be armed with nuclear weapons?
It’s not quite as simple as this, or is it? Does the military have great warehouses stocked with everything, they punch a number in, and the computerized mechanism spits forth a part and wraps it, just like Amazon.com?
Back a decade and more ago, I noticed that the military’s standards for classified information weren’t quite as careful as I was accustomed to. I sailed onto the base (and it wasn’t just any base, but Fort Leavenworth, the center for Army tactics and doctrine) in my rental car. My hosts escorted me to where I was to give my classified talk with my properly wrapped transparencies. “Here?” I asked. “Oh, we’ll post a sergeant outside the door,” they said. But I was referring to the open windows in the classroom, tall and wide. I persuaded them to draw the shades; it hadn’t occurred to them. I was also referring to being outside anything I could recognize as a security area. It wasn’t nuclear weapons data, I reasoned, so maybe it was okay.
I understand that security has been tightened on military bases since 2001, and I haven’t had occasion to test that. But when these little problems crop up, I recall how oblivious my military hosts seemed to what I took for granted in protecting classified information.
Where I come from, both those nuclear warheads and the “fuses” for them would be considered classified and therefore would be protected in the same way classified documents were. Perhaps there is a difference: in a research institution, of course we would emphasize the information content. In the military, these things are parts for doing their job.
Of course, when the job comes to nuclear weapons, we’re talking serious consequences if something goes wrong. An accident on that plane carrying the nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and whoops! there goes Memphis. Or shipping nuclear weapons parts, even if they don’t contain fissionable material, to Taiwan just might catch the attention of Taiwan’s large and nuclear-armed neighbor who wouldn’t like it much if Taiwan got nuclear weapons. Taiwan had a real, hands-on nuclear weapons program for a while, not just something on a laptop someone got from somewhere.
What boggles my mind is that nuclear warheads for cruise missiles and components for nuclear warheads should be kept in a different place than the dummy warheads or the printer cartridges and mechanical pencils. That place should have multiple locks, openable only by two people or more.
It appears that multiple breaches of procedure or security occurred to put those cruise missiles up in the air. What got sent to Taiwan was less than full nuclear weapons, so it’s possible that they were stored with less security than the warheads, but they still should have been protected.
This latest problem happened in 2005, it turns out. We can all wonder what has been happening since then. Was an investigation undertaken? Who knew about it? Was an apology sent to China? (Apparently not.) Other problems in other departments seem to be delayed on their way up to the top. We may also wonder if those at the top in this administration have made perfectly clear that they don’t want to hear about it. The underlings get the message. Don Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense in 2005.
Conspiracy theories proliferate about the Barksdale incident, as can be expected when there is too much secrecy. Very little is available publicly about what went wrong or why people were disciplined. To some degree, this secrecy is justifiable in maintaining security, but that has to be weighed against the gain in public and international confidence in making more information available. In any case, the procedures should have been updated and changed, so telling what went wrong wouldn’t really spill any serious beans about what is being done now.
A note on nomenclature: Once again, secrecy supersedes clarity in describing what was shipped. Just as plutonium pits are described as “triggers” for thermonuclear weapons, several names have been applied to what was shipped to Taiwan. Pale Rider and Blue Girl try to puzzle out exactly what the components were (via NewsHoggers).