Missile Mishap Revives Alarm Over Nuclear Arsenal

(Oct. 27) -- Computer glitches, hardware failures and unexplained communication outages happen all the time. But when the affected systems control nuclear-armed missiles, it gets a little scary.

That's why Saturday's brief malfunction at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, disconnecting 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles of the 450-ICBM-strong U.S. arsenal from their human controllers, has raised concerns just two years after a Defense Department panel said there had been "an atrophy of the Air Force's nuclear mission."

"It is yet another indication of the risk associated with having these types of weapons around," said Stephen Young, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which advocates a reduction in the atomic arsenals of the U.S. and other nuclear-armed states.

In the event of a nuclear emergency, the military could have re-established command and control of the missiles through separate airborne systems, but underground missileers -- like those romanticized in Cold War-era movies like "War Games" -- are supposed to be on full alert at all times.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were notified immediately, and President Barack Obama was briefed on the matter Tuesday.

As described by The Atlantic, which first reported the incident, a squadron of Minuteman III ICBMs suddenly dropped into "LF Down" status, which signifies a complete cut in communication between the missiles and the Air Force personnel in the bunker. Even the intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms were off-line.

An official tells The Atlantic a launch control center computer, or LCC, that maintains communications with the missiles began to record errors. Those error messages cascaded through the system and prompted missileers to take five LCCs off-line, leaving the missiles "in the dark." Four of the computers were eventually restarted, but that first suspect LCC remained off-line.

The official said Air Force engineers found a similar failure 12 years ago at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, which set off a similar cascading sequence. But as of late Tuesday afternoon, the draft of the engineers' initial findings hadn't concluded what happened, according to The Atlantic. Earlier reports of a power failure were declared wrong, while a breach of underground cables beneath the base was suspected.

"We've never had something as big as this happen," a military officer briefed on the incident told The Atlantic.

But the Air Force has experienced much bigger and far more alarming mishaps with its nuclear arsenal, to the point that two years ago Gates, under President George W. Bush, fired both the secretary of the Air Force and the service's chief of staff.

In August 2007, the crew of a B-52 bomber unknowingly carried six air-launched cruise missiles loaded with live nuclear warheads across the country from Minot to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The warheads weren't supposed to be on board, but they weren't reported missing for more than a day. And until then, the warheads went unprotected by the rigorous security procedures that are mandatory for atomic weapons.

Less than a year before that, in October and November 2006, four forward-section assemblies for Minuteman III ICBMs were inadvertently sent to Taiwan instead of the helicopter batteries that had been approved for sale to the Taiwanese. A Pentagon investigation blamed errors and omissions in inventory control and packaging.

The task force appointed by Gates to look into those incidents found that "inattention and conscious budget decisions have led to the atrophy of the Air Force's nuclear mission."

"Despite the decreased inventory of nuclear weapons, there has never been a stated or implied willingness on the part of national leaders to permit, allow or tolerate a lessening of the 'zero-defects' standard regarding the safety, security and reliability of U.S. nuclear forces or weapons," the panel said. "Yet, the investigations that followed each of these incidents revealed a serious erosion of expertise and discipline related to the nuclear weapons enterprise within the Air Force."

That task force made dozens of recommendations to close the shortfalls in "stewardship of and focus on policies, procedures, munitions handling, processes, security and operational exercise of nuclear weapons" that investigators determined to be "dramatically weakened."

As investigators work to determine the cause of the ICBM system malfunction over the weekend, the one clear lesson is that the "zero-defects" standard still isn't being met.