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The Mystery of Minot: Loose nukes and a cluster of dead airmen raise troubling questions
by Dave Lindorff
 The unauthorized Aug. 29/30 cross-country flight of a B-52H Stratofortress armed with six nuclear-tipped AGM-29 Advanced Cruise missiles, which saw these 150-kiloton warheads go missing for 36 hours, has all the elements of two Hollywood movies.
One would be a thriller about the theft from an armed weapons bunker of six nukes for some dark and murky purpose. The lead might be played by Matt Damon. The other movie would be a slapstick comedy about a bunch of bozos who couldn’t tell the difference between a nuclear weapon and a pile of dummy warheads.
The lead might be played by Adam Sandler, backed by the cast of “Police Academy III.”
So far, the Pentagon, which has launched two separate
investigations into the incident, seems to be assuming that it is
dealing with the comedy version, saying that some incredible “mistake”
led to nuclear weapons being taken inadvertently from a weapons-storage
bunker, loaded into launch position on a bomber, and flown from North
Dakota to Louisiana.
The American Conservative has discovered
that to date, more than a month after the incident, Pentagon
investigators have completely ignored a peculiar cluster of six deaths,
during the weeks immediately preceding and following the flight, of
personnel at the two Air Force bases involved in the incident and at
Air Force Commando Operations headquarters.
The operative
assumption of the investigations appears to be that an Air Force
decision to store nuclear, conventional, and dummy warheads in the same
bunker and one mistake by weapons handlers initiated a chain of errors
and oversights that led to the flight.
On Sept. 23, the
Washington Post, in a story based upon interviews with military
officials, many of them unidentified, suggested that the first known
case of nuclear warheads leaving a weapons-storage area improperly was
the result of two mistakes. The first, the article suggested, was a
decision by the Air Force to permit the storing of nuclear weapons in
the same highly secure and constantly guarded sod-covered bunkers—known
as “igloos”—as non-nuclear weapons and dummy warheads (something that
had never been allowed in the past). The second was some as yet
unidentified mistake by weapons handlers at Minot to mount six nuclear
warheads onto six of the 12 Advanced Cruise Missiles that had been
slated to be flown to Barksdale AFB for destruction. Those missiles and
the six others, part of a group of 400 such missiles declared obsolete
and slated for retirement and disassembly, should have been fitted with
dummy warheads also. The Post article quotes military sources as saying
that once the mistake was made, a cascade of errors followed as weapons
handlers, ground crews, and the B-52 crew skipped all nuclear
protocols, assuming they were dealing with dummy warheads.
The
problem with this theory is that dummy warheads don’t look the same as
the real thing. The real warheads, called W80-1’s, are shiny silver, a
color which is clearly visible through postage-stamp-sized windows on
the nosecone covers that protect them on the missiles. In addition, the
mounted warheads are encased in a red covering as a second precaution.
Apparently
the nukes (which can be set to explode at between 5 kilotons and 150
kilotons) were easily spotted by a Barksdale AFB ground crew when they
went out to the plane on the tarmac hours after it landed. If the
Barksdale ground crew, which had absolutely no reason to suspect it was
looking at nuclear-tipped missiles, easily spotted the “error,” why did
everyone at Minot miss it, as claimed?
Clearly, whoever loaded
the six nukes on one B-52 wing pylon, and whoever mounted that unit on
the wing, knew or should have known that they were dealing with
nukes—and absent an order from the highest authority in Washington,
loading such nukes on a bomber was against all policy. The odds of
randomly putting six nukes all on one pylon, and six dummies on the
other, are 1:924. And how curious that the pilot, who is supposed to
check all 12 missiles before flying, checked only the pylon containing
the dummy warheads.
Various experts familiar with
nuclear-weapons-handling protocols express astonishment at what
happened on Aug. 29 and 30. After all, over the course of more than six
decades, the protocols for handling nuclear arms have called for at
least two people at every step, with paper trails, bar codes, and
real-time computer tracking of every warhead in the arsenal. Nothing
like this has been known to have happened before. Air Force Gen. Eugene
Habiger, who served as US Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998,
told the Post, “I a have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am
not aware of any incident more disturbing.”
Philip Coyle, a
senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information who served as
assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, calls the
iincident “astonishing” and “unbelievable.” He says, “This wasn’t just
a mistake. I’ve counted, and at least 20 things had to have gone wrong
for this to have occurred.”
Bruce Blair, a former Air Force
nuclear launch officer who is now president of the World Security
Institute, says that the explanation of the incident as laid out in the
Washington Post, and in the limited statements from the Air Force and
Department of Defense, which call it a “mistake,” are “incomplete.” He
notes that no mention has been made as to whether the nukes in
question, which had been pre-mounted on a pylon for attachment to the
B-52 wing, had their PAL (permission action link) codes unlocked to
make them operational, or whether a system on board the plane that
would ordinarily prevent an unauthorized launch had been activated.
“For all we know, these missiles could have been fully operational,” he
says.
The Air Force and Department of Defense are refusing to answer any questions about such matters.
Meanwhile,
there are those six deaths. On July 20, 1st Lt. Weston Kissel, a
28-year-old B-52 pilot from Minot, died in a motorcycle accident while
on home leave in Tennessee.
Another Minot B-52 pilot,
20-year-old Adam Barrs, died on July 5 in Minot when a car he was
riding in, driven by another Minot airman, Stephen Garrett, went off
the road, hit a tree, and caught fire. Airman Garrett was brought to
the hospital in critical condition and has since been charged with
negligent homicide.
Two more Air Force personnel, Senior Airman
Clint Huff, 29, of Barksdale AFB, and his wife Linda died on Sept. 15
in nearby Shreveport, Louisiana, when Huff reportedly attempted to pass
a van in a no-passing zone on his motorcycle, and the van made a
left-hand turn, striking them.
Then there are two reported
suicides, which both occurred within days of the flight. One involved
Todd Blue, a 20-year-old airman who was in a unit that guarded weapons
at Minot. He reportedly shot himself in the head on Sept. 11 while on a
visit to his family in Wytheville, Virginia. Local police investigators
termed his death a suicide.
The second suicide, on Aug. 30, was
John Frueh, a special forces weather commando at the Air Force’s
Special Operations command headquartered at Hurlburt AFB in Florida.
Hurlburt’s website says, “Every night, as millions of Americans sleep
peacefully under the blanket of freedom,” Air Force Special Operations
commandos work “in deep dark places, far away from home, risking their
lives to keep that blanket safe.”
Frueh, 33, a married father of
two who had just received approval for promotion from captain to major,
reportedly flew from Florida to Portland, Oregon, for a friend’s
wedding. He never showed up. Instead, he called on Aug. 29, the day the
missiles were loaded, from an interstate pull-off just outside Portland
to say he was going for a hike in a park nearby. (It is not clear why
he was at a highway rest stop as he had no car.) A day later, back in
Portland, he rented a car at the airport, again calling his family.
After he failed to appear at the wedding, his family filed a missing
person’s report with the Portland police. The Sheriff’s Department in
remote Skamania County, Washington, found Frueh’s rental car ten days
later on the side of a road nearly 120 miles from the airport in a
remote area of Badger Peak. Search dogs found his body in the woods.
His death was ruled a suicide, though neither the sheriff’s
investigator nor the medical examiner would give details. What makes
this alleged suicide odd, however, is that the sheriff reports that
Frueh had with him a knapsack containing a GPS locator and a
videocam—odd equipment for someone intent on ending his life.
Of
course, it could be that all six of these deaths are coincidences—all
just accidents and personal tragedies. But when they occur around the
time six nuclear-tipped missiles go missing in a bizarre incident, the
likes of which the Pentagon hasn’t seen before, one would think
investigators would be on those cases like vultures on carrion. In
fact, police and medical examiners in the Frueh and Blue cases say no
federal investigators, whether from DOD or FBI, have called them. Worse
still, because the B-52 incident got so little media attention—no
coverage in most local news—none of those investigating the accidents
and suicides even knew about it or about the other deaths.
“It
would have been interesting to know all that when I was examining Mr.
Blue’s body,” says Virginia coroner Mike Stoker, “but no one told me
about any of it or asked me about him.”
“If we had known that
several people had died under questionable circumstances, it might have
affected how we’d look at a body,” says Don Phillips, the sheriff’s
deputy in Washington State who investigated the Frueh death. “But
nobody from the federal government has ever contacted us about this.”
“Certainly,
in a case like this, the suicides should be a red flag,” says Hans
Kristensen, a nuclear-affairs expert with the Federation of American
Scientists. It’s wild speculation to think that there might be some
connection between the deaths and the incident, but it certainly should
be investigated.”
This article appeared initially in the Oct. 22, 2007 issue of American Conservative magazine.
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