By Bill Van Auken
Global Research, September 9, 2007
wsws.org - 2007-09-07
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Wednesday’s revelation that a US Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the length of the United States armed with six cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads has attracted amazingly little media attention.
The story, first broken by the Military Times web site based on tips from military officers, was relegated to the bottom of page 16 in Thursday’s New York Times and to page 10 of the Washington Post.
Featured prominently in both newspapers and generally in media coverage were reassurances from a spokesman for the Air Force that it represented “an isolated mistake” and that “at no time was there a threat to public safety.”
This incident, however, has immense and ominous significance. Describing it as an “isolated mistake” begs the obvious questions of how a nuclear-armed B-52 was allowed to become airborne—ostensibly without the approval of senior officials—and who ordered this extraordinary flight, and why.
The B-52 took off from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on August 30 after six nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise Missiles were mounted on the pylons under its wings. Each of the warheads carried a yield of up to 150 kilotons, more than ten times as powerful as the US bomb that leveled Hiroshima at the close of the Second World War.
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