Armageddon Appetite

By Darren Weeks

These are very troubling times.

As I covered Monday and Tuesday nights on Govern America, the Military Times is reporting that the USAF will undergo a command-wide system stand down this Friday, September 14th to investigate the loading of six nuclear warheads aboard a B-52, which officials are saying was a "mistake".

Quoting from from the Military Times:

A B-52 bomber mistakenly loaded with six nuclear warheads flew from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30, resulting in an Air Force-wide investigation, according to three officers who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.

I stated on Monday that I could not believe that such a mistake was possible. One doesn't just "mistakenly" load six nuclear warheads on the wings of a B-52, and then transport them across the country. Security surrounding nuclear weapons is understandably so tight that there is no way this would be possible. The official story would have us believe that someone that was loading the weapons just somehow picked up the wrong ones, not knowing the difference. I wasn't buying it then; I'm not buying it now.

Then, on Tuesday, I received the following in an e-mail from a listener, which echoed my skepticism. The article was written by Dave Lindorff, a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter and columnist. Lindorff writes,

Nobody should fall for a story that those six (yeah, it was first reported as five, but now the original military whistleblowers have told Air Force Times it was six) nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that were flown in launch position on a B-52 from Minot, ND to Barksdale, LA, were put on there inadvertently.

I had some experience with the way nuclear weapons get handled, as compared to conventional weapons, and I can assure you that there is no way anyone would just "accidentally" pick up the wrong weapons.

Back in 1978, I was working as an investigative producer/reporter for the news program "28-Tonight" at KCET-TV in Los Angeles. I got word from some anti-nuke/peace organization that there were nuclear weapons being stored at the Seal Beach Naval Station south of Los Angeles. There was concern about this on two counts: first of all, it was a very densely populated urban area, and second, the weapons were allegedly being stored under the flight path of a busy civil airport, where a crash could easily happen.

Together with a cameraperson, I went down to the base. It was bisected by a highway. On either side of that two-lane road were big mesh wire fences. On the south side of the road, the fences were older, and topped with ordinary barbed wire. On the north side, there was a higher, new looking fence topped with coiled razor wire. There was then an interval of bare soil beyond which was a second fence, also topped with razor wire. Clearly, the security on the north side of the road was much greater.

Beyond the south fence were the weapons bunkers--long high mounds of earth, covered with parched sod. Each was perhaps 75 feet long, and 15 feet high. There was a concrete doorframe in the middle of each with an old iron door in the middle. No one was visible anywhere.

On the north side, however, where there were similar bunkers, but these mounds were bigger -- perhaps 20 feet high and much longer. The piled up earth looked newer, and the entrances were much more solid looking. As well, the door to each had an armed guard standing in front of it.

Clearly whatever was being stored in the bunkers on the north side of the street were much more important than those on the south side.

We stopped our car and got out, and the photographer started snapping still photos of the scene.

Immediately there was commotion inside the compound. Within less than a minute, a jeep came roaring towards us, filled with marines who were armed to the teeth. Guns drawn they ordered us, from behind the fence, to stop photographing and to stand where we were. Moments later there were sirens, and more armed jeeps came towards us from both directions down the road. We were quickly surrounded by armed marines who asked us what we were doing.

We told them we were investigating the nuclear weapons storage at the base.

They told us we had to go to the base headquarters, and took the camera. (The photographer, a pro at this stuff, had already snapped a role and stashed it in her pocket, so when they later took out and exposed the roll of film in the camera, we still had our visual evidence).

At base headquarters, the commander grilled us. Our station was called, and after it was confirmed that we were indeed journalists, they took the film, chastised us for bothering them, and, refusing to comment on whether or not there were nukes on the base, sent us on our way.

My point in recounting this experience is to note that nuclear weapons and warheads are not stored together with conventional weapons. They are also guarded much more tightly than are conventional weapons. There is simply no way that a ground crew could accidentally stroll into a weapons storage center and pick up the wrong missiles. (There's good reason for this, too, even aside from security issues: nuclear weapons have fail-safe triggers, and are not prone to just exploding on their own, but conventional weapons are different. They can and often do go off by accident, and if one were stored amidst nuclear weapons and this happened, it could shatter the nuke and spread dangerous nuclear material all over the place. As a result, whether at Seal Beach Naval Station or at Minot AFB, nuclear weapons are strictly segregated from other weapons materials.)

It's clear that so far, no one in Congress or in the corporate media is asking the hard questions about this very disturbing incident.

I would say that the chances that those Advanced Cruise Missiles and their W80-1 nuclear warheads were loaded accidentally on that B-52 are exactly zero. So the question is: Who ordered this flight, and why?

Until we have answers to those questions, we have to assume the worst (that this was deliberate, and thus sinister in the extreme) -- not the best.

Now that we've noted that it is very unlikely — if not impossible — that this could have been a mistake, several questions remain.

If it wasn't a mistake, then who chose to circumvent the normal chain of command and order the loading of the nuclear weapons aboard the B-52? What was their reason for doing so? Were these weapons intended to be covertly flown to Iran and dropped there? Or were they going to be utilized somewhere here in the United States as a pretense to blame Iran so that the death-profiting administration in Washington could have a reason to start World War III?

We know from the Sunday Times in London, that the Bush administration has been planning a massive three-day strike against Iran to wipe out its military capabilities.

Said the Times on September 2,

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

As Dave Lindorff has pointed out, "Barksdale AFB is a staging area for B-52s being sent to the Middle East for combat duty."

Quoting from GlobalSecurity.org:

Barksdale Air Force Base is headquarters for the 2d Bomb Wing, Eighth Air Force and 917th Wing. The 2d Bomb Wing provides global combat capability and trains all B-52 combat crews."

The official website for Barksdale AFB states,

Barksdale warriors and B-52s have a proud tradition serving both at home and abroad in support of the Global War on Terrorism; they have played vital roles in combat operations supporting Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

To make matters worse, we have learned from the Army Times that the United States has scheduled a "command-wide mission stand down" for this Friday, September 14th to "investigate" this incident.

The question that I have is what, exactly does this mean? Numerous people have concluded that this means that we will have zero air defense over America on that day. I spoke to one veteran of the military who concurred with that statement, but was quick to add that "we don't need those air patrols, anyway." He cited the radar technology as being adequate enough to detect potential threats.

If it is true that we don't need air patrols, then why do we even have a NORAD? Why do these patrols even exist if they serve no useful purpose? Does there not exist radar-fooling technology?

Furthermore, others have commented about how mysterious investers have ordered "put" options against the market, speculating that we will experience a huge economic collapse before September 21. Pat Shannan writes in the American Free Press that

A huge downside purchase of “put” options by an unknown investor or conglomerate in Europe has both investors and NWO watchers abuzz worldwide. Someone has placed a $4.5 billion bet that within 30 days the European stock market will take at least a 33% nosedive. Such an event would be tantamount to the market crash of 1929.

The two sales are being referred to by market traders as “bin Laden trades” because only an event on the scale of the 9-11 “terrorist” attacks could make these short-sell “put” options valuable.( A “put” option is a bet that a stock will go down. A “call” option is a bet it will go up.)

There are 65,000 pending contracts at $750 in the Standard and Poor Index. This controls 6.5 million shares at $750 or $4.875 billion. The entity or individual offering these sales can make money only if the market drops 30%-50% within 30 days. If the market does not drop, the entity or individual involved stands to lose about $1 billion just for engaging in these contracts. On the other hand, if the prediction is correct, the reward could be over $2 billion.

“The fact that the purchase was made in the European market is insignificant,” said one speculator with decades of experience, “because it could have been done by bank transfer from anywhere in the world. What concerns us is what kind of inside information could this group or individual have. It would have to have far deeper roots than just `insider trader’ knowledge.”

Similar "put" options were done just before the so-called "terrorist" attacks of September 11th. Were they ever investigated? If so, why haven't we heard of prosecutions?

When one connects the dots about how we are being made vulnerable, our air defenses are being lowered, our borders are wide open, our military is gone, uninspected shipping containers arriving every day, mysterious entities gambling on the collapse of our markets, and nukes being shipped across the country with one nuclear warhead apparently still missing (the B-52 was loaded with six warheads; only five were aboard upon its arrival), the situation couldn't look much more grim.

Say a prayer, people.