THE REPORT that the Air Force flew six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from North Dakota to Louisiana by mistake late last month is disturbing, not because of what might have happened, but because of what the incident says about the state of U.S. nuclear forces.
There is no reason to believe that the flight was inherently dangerous. For many years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, B-52 bombers armed with nuclear weapons regularly flew long-range missions from bases in the United States. The bombs and missiles they carried were carefully designed not to explode by accident — even if the planes carrying them crashed. If the B-52 had crashed in eastern Kansas on Aug. 30, it would have left a large hole in the ground and perhaps some radioactive material scattered around the landscape. But no fireball or mushroom cloud would have bloomed on Emporia’s eastern horizon.
But the incident does raise the possibility of some sort of nuclear disaster down the road. The mishandling of the warheads — which should have been removed before the missiles were placed on the bomber — indicates that there has been some erosion of attention in the Air Force nuclear weapons program. The Air Force did not learn that the warheads were gone from the North Dakota base until the bomber arrived in Louisiana.
The old adage says that familiarity breeds contempt, but that is not quite true. What familiarity breeds is inattention, and inattention can breed disaster.
The nation has seen such disasters before in the space shuttle program. As the years passed, many of the managers who were originally responsible for making safety decisions about the space shuttles retired or moved to other jobs. The new managers who replaced them lacked their experience and — in some cases — their sense of urgency. After years of successes in space, many people in NASA began to think of safe flight as the normal order of things, rather than as the result of an almost paranoid attention to tiny details.
As a result of this flagging attention, the United States lost two shuttle crews and two enormously expensive spacecraft.
The slow, sure passage of time is the enemy of any organization that handles dangerous technology. What was once extraordinary and frightening becomes routine. Important checklists and inspections begin to seem like busy work with no real importance beyond fulfilling some bureaucratic mandate.
It is more than 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and almost 20 years since the end of the Cold War. Bad habits have had a long time to take root.
What the Air Force needs to do is find ways to instill some of that useful work-related paranoia in the current generation of bomb-handlers.