US Air Force leaders sacked over mishandling of nukes

So deep and serious are the problems, Gates said, that he has asked a former defense secretary, James R Schlesinger, to head “a senior-level task force” to recommend improvements in the safekeeping of weapons, delivery vehicles and other sensitive items.

Never before has a defense secretary ousted both a service secretary and a service chief, according to senior Pentagon officials. Since taking office 18 months ago, Gates has made accountability of theme of his tenure. He has also fired senior Army officials, after disclosures of shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the service’s premier medical facility for wounded soldiers.

“Our policy is clear,” Gates said. “We will ensure the complete physical control of nuclear weapons, and we will properly handle the associated components at all times. It is a tremendous responsibility, and one we must and will never take lightly.”

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nosecone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March — a year and a half after the erroneous shipment.

Most troubling, a senior Pentagon official said in advance of the briefing, was that little had been done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure after it was disclosed last year that the Air Force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the US carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Gates emphasized that neither incident posed a danger of a nuclear mishap. Nevertheless, he said, the inquiry made it clear that the Air Force has suffered for years from a loss of expertise in handling nuclear materials. He acknowledged that the Air Force has taken steps to improve the situation, but he said more must be done, and with outside scrutiny, to fix “structural, procedural and cultural problems.”

Pentagon officials said General Moseley met Thursday with Adm Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and that Wynne was meeting Gates’s deputy secretary, Gordon England.

The mishandling of the nosecone fuses was viewed as another indication of lack of discipline within America’s nuclear infrastructure, and was another embarrassment for the people in charge of those weapons.

Last year, the Air Force disclosed that it unwittingly let a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles fly from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana last August. About 36 hours passed before the missiles were properly secured, officials have said.

Those errors in handling nuclear weapons components was more than just an indication that the cold war-era focus on these powerful weapons had become fuzzy. It put the Bush administration in a difficult position, as the US is struggling to prevent the technology for nuclear weapons from spreading to nations that do not already have them and has criticized North Korea and Iran for their nuclear ambitions.