Were Those Cruise Missiles Targeted? Did Anybody Check?

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10636

Were Those Cruise Missiles Targeted? Did Anybody Check?
by Dave Lindorff | Oct 25 2007


Philip Coyle, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information and a former assistant secretary of defense from the Clinton administration period, has a troubling question about the recent nuclear weapon incident in the US.

He wants to know if the six nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise Missiles that were improperly removed from a guarded bunker at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and flown in launch position on a wing pod of a B-52H Stratofortress bomber on Aug. 29-30 to Barksdale AFB were programmed with targeting information.

He also wants to know if the Air Force and Pentagon, which last Friday concluded an investigation into that shocking incident (no nuclear weapons have been flown on a bomber over US territory for 40 years on presidential orders, and since 1991 no nuclear weapons are even supposed to be loaded for practice on a parked plane), ever checked the missiles' computer guidance systems.

snip//

Coyle says that it's true that following the end of the Cold War, the military claims it no longer targets ICBMs at targets, but rather aims them at spots in the middle of oceans. This is to prevent an accidental launch, he says, and can be done because the modern intercontinental missiles have computers that can be reprogrammed with real target information very fast.

The older 1970s-era cruise missiles have older, smaller computers on board, though, and Coyle says because they are harder to program, he "wouldn't be surprised" if they were pre-programmed with terrain-mapping information "to get them to their eventual targets."

Certainly it would seem like the investigators who looked into this "mistake" should have checked out those onboard computers to see where these cruise missiles were programmed to deliver their errant 150-kiloton warheads. That information might have gone a long way towards establishing whether the missiles were moved to Barksdale AFB (a staging area for B-52s intended for use in the Middle East theater) by accident, or with some dark plan in mind.

The Air Force, as of this filing, has not provided an answer to this question.
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[BridgeTheGap]

1. I doubt will ever know

As he says in the article, these missles can be programmed for targets on very short notice, so doubtful that there was any targeting information already in them.
The big question is: was this transfer ordered and if so, by whom?