A bomber mistakenly armed with nuclear missiles and flown hundreds of miles across the country. A set of secret nuclear fuses shipped mistakenly to another country, an error undiscovered for more than a year. Security guards napping at a nuclear power plant.
Tales from a sieve-like nuclear Russia? Or the precarious Pakistan atomic arsenal? Not quite. Those highly embarrassing, potentially catastrophic lapses in security all happened here in the U.S.
The latest atomic blunder emerged on Tuesday, when Pentagon officials acknowledged that four nose-cone fuse assemblies — which help trigger nuclear warheads — were shipped to Taiwan in August 2006. The Taiwanese were supposed to get helicopter replacement battery packs. We don’t know yet how this astonishing mix-up happened. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a full inventory of all nuclear weapons and an investigation into the incident, the second such probe of a nuclear blunder in the past year.
Some senior defense officials are blaming “human error.”
That doesn’t make anyone feel any better. There was also human error over the summer when six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, mistakenly believed to be carrying dummy warheads, were loaded on an Air Force B-52 and flown 1,400 miles from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
“No one knew where they were, or even missed them, for over 36 hours,” said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee. “This entire episode really is a wake-up call.” Here’s the chilling part of that sentence: Or even missed them.
In the aftermath of that incident, a Defense Science Board task force concluded that the decline of Defense Department focus “has been more pronounced than realized and too extreme to be acceptable.” That’s partly because the “daily business” of the “nuclear enterprise” has been shifted “from senior flag officer or senior civilian at the end of the Cold War to colonels/captains or mid-level civil servants today.”
The U.S. can’t afford to become complacent about its nuclear security and not just for the obvious safety reasons. The U.S. is leading an effort to help Russia and other countries to tighten safeguards on their nukes, or in some cases, to abandon nuclear ambitions altogether. That message will be far less effective if the U.S. is perceived as letting nuclear security slip at home.
The concern about nuclear complacency spreads beyond the Defense Department. The Government Accountability Office concluded recently, and chillingly, that the risks of a terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor on a college campus may have been underestimated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report noted that security and emergency response requirements at the research reactors haven’t changed much since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The NRC disputed many of the GAO’s assertions. Then there was last year’s videotape of sleeping nuclear plant guards at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. They were catching regular naps in what they called — we presume with irony — “the ready room.” The fallout: Wackenhut Corp., which provided the guards, had its contract terminated.
Yes, these are isolated and disparate incidents that shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. America’s nuclear arsenal and its nuclear power plants remain among the best protected and most secure in the world.
But humans do that work. And with humans, we’ve been reminded, comes human error. Preventing a nuclear terror attack on American soil isn’t just about securing borders and setting up radiation detectors at ports. As these incidents show, complacency is a wily and patient enemy.
