alt.war.nuclear

"Bill Baker" wrote in message
news:1190694032_595@ ...
> On 2007-09-24 03:52:01 -0700, "Carey Sublette" said:
...
> The WP article did mention in passing that this particular B-52 was not
> nuclear-capable. That could either mean that the ALCM systems on that
> bird were temporarily non-functional, or else that they'd been removed or
> hard-deactivated (breakers wired off or whatever). But still, surely a
> significant portion of the B-52 fleet is still nuclear-capable, and why
> would you ferry nuclear-only missiles on a bomber downchecked for nuclear
> sorties?

That's the easy part of this whole affair - because the missiles had all
(supposedly) been denuclearized and were being ferried for retirement. Thus,
there was no need to dedicate one of their nuclear-capable, combat mission
ready assets to this duty, and no penalty (they thought) to it.

The article notes that once the missiles were considered non-nuclear they
were treated in a dramatically different manner than a nuclear armed weapon.

The B-52 force currently consists of 94 aircraft, 56 of which are primary
mission aircraft. The other 38 are assigned to other duties or statuses.
This would have been one of that 38,

Carey Sublette