Bent Spear: The Two Thousand Seven Nuclear Incident

On August twenty-ninth of two thousand seven, a B-fifty-two Stratofortress took off from Minot Air Force Base on what ground crews believed was a routine transfer flight to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The plane carried six Advanced Cruise Missiles mounted on its wings. What almost no one involved in the mission knew, including the aircrew, was that those six missiles were each armed with a nuclear warhead.

For approximately thirty-six hours, six live nuclear weapons went unaccounted for, and they traveled across the United States without the knowledge of the crew carrying them, without the required security escorts, without any of the protocols that govern the handling of nuclear weapons. The weapons sat on the flight line at Barksdale for roughly nine hours before anyone realized what was there. The incident, when it became public in September of two thousand seven, prompted immediate congressional hearings and one of the most serious internal reviews in Air Force history.

The Air Force termed it a Bent Spear incident, its designation for a nuclear weapons accident that does not involve detonation or environmental release. The Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff were both relieved of their positions the following year, a level of accountability rarely seen in the post-Cold War military. The fifth Bomb Wing at Minot failed a nuclear surety inspection in the aftermath.

The incident revealed a dangerous erosion of the nuclear culture that had kept the Cold War arsenal safe for decades. Rules had grown slack, attention had wandered, and the weapons that were supposed to be the most carefully controlled objects on earth had traveled half a continent unguarded. Minot spent the following years under intense scrutiny as the Air Force rebuilt its nuclear oversight from the ground up.