A view from the inside regarding the Minot AFB Nukes

The following email was sent to CLG on 19 September, anonymously.

Hello there,

I’m a Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force. I do network security, so, that’s why I’m emailing anonymously, even though I really don’t feel it’s necessary. I’m just paranoid like that, which is why I’m pretty good at my job. ;) Also, parts of what I’m putting in here are probably classified, which is the primary reason I’m sending this anonymously.

Anyway, I see a lot of people posting about government conspiracies about nukes and things like this. It’s frustrating for me because it’s really very silly. Please, let me explain some background, to help you all understand what’s going on in the background for the Air Force:

Minot AFB is a dead-end base. It’s the abyss of the Air Force, the saying goes “Why not Minot?” They have major retainability problems there – people volunteer to go to Iraq, Korea, anywhere just to get out of there.

Beside its location (middle-of-nowhere North Dakota), the base has very little real mission and spins its wheels forever in drills that all result in the end of the world since it’s a nuke base designed to fight the Cold War.

But, there is no Cold War for them to fight (at least not one that Minot’s golden piece of real estate would be useful in fighting), so its people probably feel pretty worthless and tired of fighting the now non-existent Soviet Union. The base has already been re-aligned (more on that in a moment) and it’s probably going to be BRACed into a regional airport in a few decades. Ellison AFB in South Dakota has already had its closure decided.

One of the biggest problems with killing off Minot is its core mission – all of the nukes it has. Its weapons capability is moving to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana as the AF further consolidates after the Cold War and infrastructure budget cuts because of Iraq et al. Moving weapons capability to Barksdale, in real world terms, means moving the actual missiles that would deliver the nuclear warhead to Barksdale. No big deal, conventional weapons move all the time.

Nuclear warheads, however, when transported for these reasons, are moved by the Department of Energy – a very time consuming, expensive, and burdensome process that someone else will have to figure out much later once they finally decide to close the base.

So, the Air Force’s solution is to move the missiles, and leave the warheads behind, to be dealt with one day when all of us are retired and don't have to worry about it. That’s what SHOULD have happened. So the mission itself was pretty normal otherwise.

(It may actually be intentional to leave things this way, to prevent Congressional involvement, as whatever Senator is from ND is probably desperate to keep Minot around as long as possible; leaving the nukes, but operationally stripping the base serves both sides purposes).

The mistake, and the reason everyone now knows about this, is that the warheads weren’t removed from the missiles being moved to Barksdale. I bet the guys on the ground in Barksdale were sure as shit surprised when they cracked the payload open and saw a warhead. ;)

I know as much as I do because I work with a cross-trainee whose last base was Barksdale as a munitions specialist. He was involved in this process there; along with the various other missions Barksdale has (it’s a pretty critical base in the AF). Anyway, you would think there would be a pretty clear checklist for all of this, but apparently no one even bothered. Doing what they do day-to-day, is pretty standard operating procedure. People get lazy when they do the same thing day after day, and there’s no less than a half dozen teams who would be transferring these weapons around from storage until they’re loaded.

The idea of someone dropping the ball in the AF is not exactly unusual (quite common, actually, heh), especially when 4:30 rolls around and everyone wants to go home. If the next step is to hand it off to the guys who remove the warhead, and it’s 1630 on a Friday, hell, let’s just leave it until Monday, since the mission doesn’t fly until Tuesday anyway. Monday rolls around, someone else takes over, and doesn’t know the job wasn’t finished on Friday.

There SHOULD be some paper trail for that kind of thing, but then, like I said, people are lazy. Oh, and Minot usually fails its nuclear operational readiness inspections. ;) Sorry to kill your confidence in the military.

I’ve seen too much crazy stuff to believe in some massive conspiracy, there’s too many people involved. You’d have to kill like 50 people to “cover up” moving nukes to Barksdale. Plus, what would it achieve? There’s already more than enough nukes at Barksdale to blow the world up 3x over. Who needs 6 more? Seriously? Plus, more accidents occur with conventional than nukes, since nukes are computerized and designed to be super-duper safe. Conventional weapons are built by the lowest bidder. [Yikes!]

I’d be more worried about a fully-loaded F16 flying around NYC after 9/11 sucking up a bird than a B52 with nukes flying around without anyone knowing it was loaded with nukes. The pilots couldn’t "secretly" be in on it and launch them, the interface wouldn’t be installed, the COMSEC material wouldn’t be available, etc. You’d have to kill half the base to hide the paper trail necessary to give the pilots the ability to launch.

Several people dying from Minot is bad, of course, but then, crazy stuff happens.

Motorcycle accidents, mind you, are the #1 non-war cause of dead in the Air Force. The Captain who died wasn’t a pilot (he was Combat Weather, as evidenced by his pewter beret in the photo linked from your site). Captains are a dime a dozen, just like the Security Forces troop who died.

Yes, a part of the Security Forces Squadron mission there would be do defend the nukes, but he’s not at all involved in any of the process. He stands outside the door and checks IDs. Seriously, that’s it.

I have 5 cops (as they're generally called in the Air Force) I deal with every day where I work because I do computer stuff, and they have zero clue what’s happening behind the door. They spend most of the day on the phone chit chatting with friends at other security posts about the latest dorm gossip about who slept with whom.

So, to conclude, just chill out a bit about the conspiracy, it’s kinda silly. Plus, again, what would be the point? It’s not a big deal to authorize a nuke mission. After 9/11 the entire Barksdale arsenal was loaded and on the flightline ready to fly. I wouldn’t sweat 6 who someone forgot to unload.

Feel free to republish, maybe it'll educate a few people.

V/r
SSgt