For years the Navy has resisted changing the third-stage rocket propellant of the Trident II missile or using the W-87 warhead — which is almost identical to the W-88 but employs a safer insensitive high explosive. Using a less energetic propellant would decrease the missile’s range by perhaps 4 percent, and the W-87 warhead has a slightly lower yield. Parochial concerns may also be a factor in the Navy’s attachment to the W-88. That warhead was designed for the Navy by Los Alamos; the W-87, by Lawrence Livermore for the Air Force.
The best way to load a Trident II missile onto a submarine is one of the few areas of disagreement between Sidney Drell and Bob Peurifoy. Drell endorses the Navy’s current method: load the missile first, then attach the warheads. Peurifoy prefers another method: put fully assembled missiles into the launch tubes. The difference between the two opinions may seem esoteric, and yet the potential consequences of an accident are beyond dispute: a missile explosion inside a submarine with as many as 144 nuclear warheads.
Today’s United States Air Force bears little resemblance to the Air Force of the 1970s. The arms buildup during the Reagan administration greatly increased spending on new aircraft, new weapons, spare parts, and better training. Morale improved and illegal drug use plummeted, thanks to widespread testing. A cultural shift occurred, as well. While serving as head of the Tactical Air Command from 1978 until 1984, General Wilbur L. Creech had the same sort of lasting influence on the Air Force that Curtis LeMay once exerted. But Creech promoted a fundamentally different type of leadership — the adaptive, decentralized, independent thinking of the fighter pilot. By the early 1980s the bomber generals had been driven from power, and the leading staff positions at the Air Force were filled with fighter generals. The new tactics, equipment, and esprit de corps transformed its performance in battle. During the Vietnam War, 1,737 Air Force planes were shot down. During the past quarter century of air campaigns over Iraq, Kuwait, Kosovo, Libya, and Afghanistan, the Air Force has lost fewer than 30 planes to enemy fire.
The Air Force’s focus on tactical warfare, however, led to severe neglect of its strategic mission. Nuclear weapons seemed largely irrelevant after the Cold War, and ambitious officers wanted nothing to do with them. The United States Strategic Command not only combined the nuclear arsenals of the Air Force and the Navy, it also assumed control of numerous conventional missions: missile defense, intelligence and reconnaissance, space operations, cyber warfare. After the Strategic Air Command was dismantled, the Air Force no longer had an organization solely devoted to maintaining nuclear weapons and planning for their use. The no-notice inspections and black hat exercises that LeMay thought indispensable were ended. Nuclear weapon units were now given seventy-two hours of warning before an inspection. And instead of a four-star general commanding the Air Force’s strategic assets, a captain or a colonel became the highest-ranking officer in charge of daily nuclear operations. The lack of interest in the subject began to show.
In 2003 half of the Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections — despite the three-day advance warning. In August 2006 the nose-cone fuze assemblies of four Minuteman III missiles were inadvertently shipped from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Taiwan. Workers at the Defense Logistics Agency thought they were helicopter batteries. The top secret nuclear-weapon fuzes sat in unopened boxes for two years, until Taiwanese officials discovered the error. On August 29, 2007, six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber named Doom 99 at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. The plane sat on the tarmac at Minot overnight without any armed guards, took off the next morning, flew almost fifteen hundred miles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana — violating the safety rule that prohibits nuclear weapons from being transported by air over the United States — landed at Barksdale, and sat on the tarmac there for nine hours, unguarded, until a maintenance crew noticed the warheads. For a day and a half, nobody in the Air Force realized that half a dozen thermonuclear weapons were missing.
