Thursday Sept. 06, 2007-
"Nothing like this has ever been reported before, and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible."
Rep. EDWARD J. MARKEY
of the Homeland Security Committee, after learning that a B-52 bomber had been mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads and flown across the country last week
Photo: Julian Herbert / Getty Source: AP
Wow... I am sitting here stunned after reading this Time magazine quote. I feel a bit like Chicken Little here. The sky is falling... or at least it could have!
Maybe it is because I was blessed, or cursed, with an active imagination, but it scares the hell out of me to think what could have happened.
I can only hope there is a system by which these nuclear bombs have to be armed by the pilot before drop, because in my little, imaginative world the plane crashes, and we go boom!
Well thankfully, I am a little more educated than my brain would like to think, but really without knowing what security features are in place I can scare up a lot of similiar, terrifying scenarios.
I actually have to laugh when I say "security features", because I had previously assumed that said features were already in place to prevent nuclear bombs from accidentally being strapped to the underside of a plane, and flown across country.
I cannot for the life of me understand how this mistake would, or could, take place. Were the pilots told there was an exercise? Were they told to transport them to the other side of the country? Obviously, I believe if they needed to be transported they would have been transported in a different manner, so that does not explain it. There does not seem to be a reasonable explanation, nor does it make sense that any pilot that is trained to carry such bombs would not know that this was out of the ordinary.
Why did no one ask any questions, and if they did, why were there no answers that would have prevented this? I cannot believe that no one asked questions. I would have thought that the ground crew strapping those bombs aboard must have had a few reservations. I would have thought that the pilot's training would have kicked in, and they would have thought it strange. Is the US Military so robotic in nature that they obey all, and ask no questions? If this is the case, then I am even more terrified than when I first sat down to write this.
I have no answers, only questions myself. I probably, as a journalism student, should have researched this further before blogging, but the very idea that nuclear bombs can belly up to a plane unnoticed, and go for a flight for thousands of miles, got my attention to say the very least. I needed to debrief my fear. I hope that somewhere, in some secretive place, some debriefing about the nuclear stowaways is taking place. Then I hope we scared little chickens who may have had our coops blown to bits are told why!
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