Posted 10/18/2007 05:17:00 PM by Douglas

One time in High School me and a buddy crashed his pickup through the ice of a frozen river and I had to call my mom to pick us up after we walked four miles to the nearest house. When she was leaving, she got pulled over by the local Sheriff because someone placed a dead cat on the trunk of her Oldsmobile, which had by then, frozen to the car. Still, that's not nearly as difficult to explain as this.

The Air Force is planning to fire at least five officers for an incident in which nuclear-armed missiles were mistakenly loaded on a B-52 bomber and flown across the U.S. — the worst known violation of nuclear security rules in decades.

In an embarrassing incident that lawmakers called very disturbing, the B-52 mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles flew from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., with the missiles mounted under one of the bomber's wings and no one noticed for hours.

The officials declined to say what procedures were not followed. But the mishandling in August would have required not one mistake — but a series of lapses by a number of people in order for armed weapons — as opposed to unarmed ones — to be inadvertently taken out of a storage bunker, mounted on the B-52, misidentified on a flight manifest and flown across the country for three hours without anyone noticing.

Sleep tight, America! We're the Government, and we're here to help!