Less than a month ago, the U.S. Air Force lost track of six nuclear cruise missiles for 36 hours. They were left unguarded on the ground for a total of 24 hours. Needless to say, this mistake was big enough to trigger a “Bent Spear” incident report once it was discovered. Such events are ranked second in seriousness only to “Broken Arrow” incidents, which involve the loss, destruction or accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon. Today’s Washington Post has the details:

Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.

The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane’s wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.

That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.

… “I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing,” retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as U.S. Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, said in an interview.

… The incident came on the heels of multiple warnings — some of which went to the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the National Security Council — of security problems at Air Force installations where nuclear weapons are kept.

Verdict: This was a totally avoidable screwup which the Bush administration was warned about in advance. Why were nuclear-armed missiles stored in the same bunker with unarmed missiles? Maybe it has something to do with the fact we have a President who can’t even pronounce the word “nuclear.”

Maybe we should ask how good a job our government is doing keeping track of nuclear weapons in places like the former Soviet Union, India, Pakistan and North Korea when our own can go missing like this. No terrorist group needs to assemble its own nuke when they can get a ready-made one.

UPDATE: In the immortal words of Bush speech writer Michael Gerson, “the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud.”

UPDATE: Naturally, there is already a half-baked conspiracy theory because some people still can’t accept that the Bush administration is anywhere near as incompetent as it appears to be. Although unprecedented in the US Air Force, this blunder is just the latest in a series for Bush’s national security bureaucracy.