Rosatom-owned company accused of selling shoddy equipment to reactors at home and abroad, pocketing profits

The issues of nuclear power, the nuclear fuel cycle, weapons proliferation, and safety are virtually inseparable. These latest developments at Rosatom owned ZiO-Podolsk, highlights safety and nuclear power. Bellona elaborates:

"Russian Federal Prosecutors have accused a company owned by the country’s nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, with massive corruption and manufacturing substandard equipment for nuclear reactors under construction both at home and abroad. Charles Digges, 28/02-2012 The ZiO-Podolsk machine building plant’s procurement director, Sergei Shutov, has been arrested for buying low quality raw materials on the cheap and pocketing the difference as the result of an investigation by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. It is not clear how many reactors have been impacted by the alleged crime, but reactors built by Russia in India, Bulgaria, Iran, China as well as several reactor construction and repair projects in Russia itself may have been affected by cheap equipment, given the time frame of works completed at the stations and the scope of the investigation as it has been revealed by authorities. “The scope of this scandal could reach every reactor in Russian and every reactor built by Russia over the past several years and demands immediate investigation,” said Bellona President Frederic Hauge. “Were is the political leadership in the Russian government to deal with such a crime?" Hauge expressed outrage that an alleged crime of such a massive scale was not leading to immediate action to check each reactor that may have been affected by the profit pocketing scheme, and he was frustrated that the FSB and prosecutors were not naming specific reactors that may be involved. “As long as the Russian government is not investigating this case correctly, we will have to ask international society to do it,” he said. “Bellona will be taking further action in this case.” Vladimir Slivyak, co chair of Russia’s Ecodefense agreed. “Stopping and conducting full-scale checks of reactors where equipment from ZiO-Podolsk has been installed is absolutely necessary,” said Slivyak. “Otherwise [there is] the risk of a serious accident at a nuclear power plant with cleanup bills stretching into the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars [that] will have to be footed by taxpayers.” The criminal case was opened against ZiO-Poldolsk in December, but information about the investigation was released in the Russia media via the official Rosbalt agency only last week – a common circumstance in FSB-associated investigations. The charges leveled against ZiO-Podolsk, which is Russia’s only manufacturer of steam generators for nuclear plants built by Rosatom domestically and by its international reactor construction subsidiary Atomstroiproyekt are a staggering blow to Rosatom’s credibility. ZiO-Podolsk is a subsidiary organization of Atomenergomash, founded in 2006. Atomenergomash was acquired by Atomenergoprom, which is 100-percent state-owned, in 2007. Atomenergoprom is a part of Rosatom. But the paperwork is rather a technicality for a machine works that has been involved with the nuclear industry since its inception. Founded in 1919, ZiO-Podolsk produced the boiler for the first electricity-producing nuclear reactor at Obninsk in 1952, and has produced the boilers for every Russian reactor built ever since. A shudder in the environmental community According to prosecutors, ZiO-Podolsk began shipping shoddy equipment in 2007 or perhaps even earlier. This has implications for the safety of nuclear power plants built by, or that bought equipment from, Rosatom in Bulgaria, China, India and Iran – as well as Russia – striking a chord of outrage and distress among environmental groups. ZiO-Podolsk is also making critical parts for the reactor pressure vessel and other main equipment for the BN-800 fast reactor at Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant, in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Region in the Urals, a source told Bellona on the condition of anonymity. The machine works giant is also making steam generators for Russia’s Novovoronezh, Kalinin, and Leningrad Nuclear Power Plants, and Belene in Bulgaria, according to the London-based World Nuclear Association. The case assembled against ZiO-Podolsk involves embezzlement of state funding intended for purchases of raw material that are compatible with contemporary safety standards for nuclear reactors, Rosbalt reported. The FSB investigation According to the FSB investigation – which was described in unusual detail by the news wire – procurement director Shutov allegedly purchased low-grade steel for equipment in collusion with ZiO-Podolsk’s supplier AТОМ-Industriya. That company’s general director, Dmitry Golubev, is currently at large after embezzlement charges were filed against him by the same Moscow court that ordered Shutov’s arrest, Rosbalt quoted FSB sources as saying. The scheme between Shutov and Golubev allegedly involved Shutov turning a blind eye to inferior quality steel in return for a large portion of the profits reaped by ATOM-Industriya, the FSB told Rosbalt, citing transactions that were accounted for in bookkeeping documents the security service said it confiscated from the financial director of ATOM-Industriya. “This company purchased cheap steel in Ukraine and then passed it off as [a] more expensive [grade]; the revenues were shared by the scam’s organizers,” an FSB source was quoted by Rosbalt as saying. FSB agents said that ATOM-Industriya produced some 100 million roubles’ (€2.5 million) worth of pipe sheets, reactor pit bottoms, and reservoirs for ZiO-Podolsk – equipment that was delivered to Russian and foreign reactors – including an order of so-called tube plates for high-pressure heaters at Bulgaria’s Kozloduy NPP. High-pressure heaters, while having no relation to the safe operation of reactors, are used to improve efficiency of power output."

Nuclear Accident Roundup

Here are just a couple of recent mishaps both in Russia and the U.S. which should rightly keep one up at night. The first occurred in Sarov, Russia, and seems to subject the usual media fog as reported at Bellona:

"In an event that has led to several confusing reports in Russian media, an explosion of a non-radioactive substance occurred at the All Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics – known by its acronym VNIIEF) in the closed nuclear city of Sarov, reportedly injuring two – or one – depending on the news source. Charles Digges, 23/02-2012 According to an anonymous source at VNIIEF’s safety center, “the explosion posed no risk to the population of the town,” which has a population of 92,000. The source also said that agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, were conducting investigations at the site. Sarov, a tightly guarded nuclear city off limits to foreigners located in the Nizhny Novgorod region, was founded in 1946 as Arzamas-16 – home to Russia’s first atomic and hydrogen bombs. It is a massive complex belonging to Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, which includes several complexes devoted to theoretical physics, nuclear physics, laser development, high energy physics as well as a construction division. The explosion there, according to a reading of several leading Russian news sources, was either nuclear or non-nuclear. And where some sources reported that the incident occurred yesterday, other sources made no reference to when the accident occurred, while yet another pinned the accident down as occurring on February 20. The explosion also occurred during experimental work and two people or one person received minors skin injuries that were treated onsite. The work was, according to various sources, sanctioned or unsanctioned. “If the official Russian media were trying to calm us down after initial reports appeared early afternoon yesterday,” said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the environmental group Ecodefense, “they didn’t do a very good job – why were there so many conflicting details?” All sources do agree that the blast occurred after 2 grams of a non-radioactive substance exploded, but no one has yet reported what that substance was, or what caused it to ingnite. Nuclear explosion? In what was most certainly a shocking typo, Gazeta.ru, one of Russia’s most popular independent online publications reported that “[…] environmentalists demand that independent experts be allowed to the take radiation measurements of the nuclear explosion” (emphasis by author). Slivyak attributed that gaff in a telephone interview Thursday to the release by his organization sent to Gazata.ru, and the online newspaper’s splicing of official details obtained from the RIA Novosti news wire into Slivyak's release. Slivyak said that his organization’s press release on the incident contained a quote indicating that official information about accidents at Russian nuclear installations – most recently the fire aboard the Yekaterinburg nuclear submarine while in dry dock – were intentionally misleading. In that instance, the Defence Ministry reported that no nuclear missiles had been aboard the vessel during the 20-hour fire that engulfed it during repair works on December 29. In that instance, the Defence Ministry reported that no nuclear missiles had been aboard the vessel during the 20-hour fire that engulfed it during repair works on December 29. Yet on February 14, Russian deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry, Dmitry Rogozin, indirectly confirmed weapons were on the submarine at the time of the blaze by telling reporters the incident “was a gross violation of existing regulations for the repairs of nuclear submarines specifically with armaments onboard.” Slivyak said in his release that, “even if an explosion affecting nuclear materials had occurred [at Sarov], the authorities and Rosatom would try to convince people that there was no danger.” “Gazeta.ru made a sort of funny mistake,” said Slivyak Thursday. He did, however, insist that independent obsevers be allowed access to the site to measure radiation levels. More contradictions Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, told RIA Novosti that an explosion had indeed occurred, but failed to mention when it had happened. “One person received insignificant skin injuries during planned experimental work as a result of an explosion of two grams of a nonradioactive substance,” said the Rosatom source. “The worker was treated immediately. [VNIIEF] continues normal operations.” That the work had been planned, however, was ripped to pieces by VNIIEP’s head engineer Gennady Komarov in a report released by ITAR-TASS, another state news agency, several hours after the RIA Novosti report. According to ITAR-TASS Komarov said the “unsanctioned explosion” occurred due to “non-observance” of workers conducting an experiment. ITAR-TASS, like RIA Novosti and the semi-official Lifenews.ru online newspaper all reported that VNIIEF was now operating under normal conditions, confirming the Rosatom spokesman. But ITAR-TASS reported that the incident had occurred on February 20, where Lifenews.ru said it had happened yesterday, February 22. The official RIA Novosti news agency, which initially carried the report of the explosion early afternoon yesterday, did not indicate when the explosion had taken place. Lifenews.ru also released the report, citing an anonymous source, that indicated two people, not one, were injured when the explosion took place. Nuclear news continues to mystify Such contradictions and, in some cases, outright lies, are not uncommon relative to Russian nuclear industry accidents, and the practice has been on bold display for the past two months, which have seen more than their share of accidents at nuclear sites. Initial reports emanating from Murmansk newspapers on the Yekaterinburg fire, for instance, indicated that as many as 19 people had been taken to the hospital with smoke inhalation. These reports were based largely on accounts on Facebook and its Russian cousin vKontakte by users who had relatives and friends working in the Severomorsk naval hospital, north of Arkangelsk, where the victims were brought. The Emergency Services Ministry fixed the number at nine injured – seven sailors and two Emergency Services fire fighters. But the Defense Ministry was far more ardent in pushing its story that no weapons had been aboard the sub, even though Bellona investigations revealed that the Yekaterinburg had been transferred from dry dock in Ruslyakovo to the Okolnaya base, which has fixed pier cranes specifically for unloading and loading nuclear missiles. Rogozin’s remarks on the presence of “armaments” aboard the vessel simply confirmed what reporters and NGOs had managed to elucidate weeks prior. Officials in charge of governing information about the Yekaterinburg fire were similarly vague about what, exactly, on the sub burned for 20 hours. Official information said it was the rubber outer hull. But photos released by a blogger and analyzed by Bellona revealed that the fire had been centered in the sub’s so-called hydro-acoustic chamber - a part of the bow's outer hull that houses navigational antennas that contain long burning oils and high pressure air tanks, which fanned the flames. In early February, a fire broke out at the Alikhanov Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in southwestern Moscow. A similar cloud of misinformation and stonewalling smoldered on after the blaze. Officials said the fire broke out among cables surrounding a collider in the institute’s basement, and Rosatom and the institute led the chorus of denying any radiation dangers were present. But reports from official news agencies issued conflicting reports on whether the fire was indeed extinguished. Interfax cited a police source as saying fire brigades were denied access to the facility for “a long time” before being allowed in. State-run RIA reported earlier that that the fire had already been put out. The institute is home to the Soviet Union’s first heavy water reactor, designed in the late 1940s as part of dictator Josef Stalin’s program to develop nuclear arms, according to the institutes website. But Rosatom and other officials refused to comment on whether the decades-old structure contained any radiological material. The institute itself refused to answer telephone calls. Too old to not to burn Nils Bøhmer, Bellona’s nuclear physicist and general manager said this and similar situations underscored the decrepit condition of most of Russia’s nuclear industry. “This is the kind of thing that should not be happening,” said Bøhmer Sunday. “It just proves that Russia’s aging nuclear infrastructure is prone to fires.”

Next stop is Idaho where The Idaho Statesman reports on an incident involving weapons grade plutonium which I had not heard about previously:

"The contamination of 16 workers at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Materials Fuels Complex in November shook the nuclear establishment in eastern Idaho to its core. It appears today that none of the workers are suffering immediate effects from the uncontrolled release of oxidized plutonium from a package of weapons-grade plutonium at the retired zero-power physics reactor. But the breakdown in basic safety measures the accident revealed hit the site like nothing seen since the early 1990s. Now the Department of Energy has released its accident investigation report and the soul-searching continues. The same questions are raised after two miners died in the Silver Valley last year. The Idaho Falls Post Register did an in-depth story on the report that showed the accident was preventable and that INL managers had numerous opportunities to avoid the conditions that led to the contamination. Management at the ZPPR had changed hands since the fuel was removed from the reactor and stored. The board was critical of the contractor, Battelle Energy Alliance, for weakness in the work planning and control process. Battelle didn’t recognize the hazards associated with the plutonium material, the report said: “None of the work planning addressed the radiological and engineered controls necessary for mitigating a potential release of airborne plutonium.”...When our own Kevin Richert reported in the early 1990s about all kinds of violations of safety standards at the INL’s Naval Reactors Facilities, based on leaked documents, many readers in that nuclear-dominated community were critical. They said we journalists were making a big thing out of nothing. But Richert, then a reporter for the Post Register, was leaked the documents because safety officials trained under legendary nuclear pioneer Admiral Hyman Rickover considered the violations the harbinger of worse accidents to come if changes weren’t made. What the industry didn’t like was seeing its dirty laundry aired in public."

Nuclear Near-Miss With Russian Sub Fire

Another nuclear near-miss, this time involving a Russian submarine fire that could have resulted in the cook off of 64 nuclear warheads. The Guardian goes into greater detail:

"Russian officials said at the time that all nuclear weapons aboard the Yekaterinburg nuclear submarine had been unloaded well before a fire engulfed the 167-metre (550 feet) vessel and there had been no risk of a radiation leak. But the respected Vlast weekly magazine quoted several sources in the Russian navy as saying that throughout the fire on 29 December the submarine was carrying 16 R-29 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each armed with four nuclear warheads. "Russia, for a day, was on the brink of the biggest catastrophe since the time of Chernobyl," Vlast reported. The 1986 disaster in modern-day Ukraine is regarded as the world's worst nuclear accident..... The fire started when welding sparks ignited wooden scaffolding around the 18,200-tonne submarine at the Roslyakovo docks, 1,500 km (900 miles) north of Moscow and one of the main shipyards used by Russia's northern fleet. The rubber covering of the submarine then caught fire, sending flames and black smoke 10 metres (30 feet) above the stricken vessel. Firemen battled the blaze for a day and a night before partially sinking the submarine to douse the flames, according to media reports. Vlast reported that immediately after the fire the Yekaterinburg sailed to the navy's weapons store, an unusual trip for a damaged submarine supposedly carrying no weapons and casting doubt on assurances that it was not armed. "K-84 was in dock with rockets and torpedoes on board," the magazine said, adding that apart from the nuclear weapons the submarine was carrying torpedoes and mines as well as its two nuclear reactors."

It's like nuclear powers are asking the world more often than than we might imagine or wish a'la Clint Eastwood, " Do you feel lucky?"

Corporate Controlled Nukes

The Herald of Scotland reports that the management of the British nuclear weapons base at Coulport is being privatized and will be run by a corporate consortium headed by Lockheed-Martin:

"THE running of Britain’s nuclear bomb base at Coulport on the Clyde is to be handed over to a consortium of multinational private firms led by the controversial US arms dealer, Lockheed Martin, the Sunday Herald can reveal.

Defence ministers in Westminster have decided that the highly sensitive job of managing more than 200 Trident nuclear warheads, and arming the Royal Navy’s submarines with them, should be taken over by the group of companies within the next year.....

"Angus Robertson, the SNP’s defence spokesman and the party’s leader in Westminster, attacked the decision as “highly questionable” last night.

“Weapons of mass destruction are the most sensitive areas of military technology and should not be put in private hands,” he said.

“The SNP opposition to the nuclear fleet is absolute, but as long as Trident and nuclear missiles remain on the Clyde, their security must be absolute and UK ministers should reconsider their decision to give responsibility to companies outwith the country.”

"COULPORT’S Royal Naval Armaments Depot is meant to be one of the most secure places in Britain. Sprawled across the slopes above Loch Long, surrounded by cold war-era watchtowers and fences, are buildings and bunkers in which Britain’s nuclear bombs and missiles are kept.

The fact that private companies were bidding to take over running the site caused a furore when it was first disclosed by the Sunday Herald last October. At the time, the MoD said that Coulport’s management was under review, but insisted that no decisions had been taken. Now, however, arrangements for transferring management to ABL have begun.

According to the leaked MoD plan, ABL will be responsible for “processing, handling, and storage” of Trident warheads and missiles, along with “dockside handling”, “explosive handling”, “radiological safety” and “nuclear emergency response”.

This if anything shows that there is no limit to the monetization and corporatization of the most sensitive and potentially catastrophic of human activities. Obviously Fukushima and the Gulf Oil catastrophe, both corporate ventures within the past year alone, have changed nothing in the relentless pursuit of profits over common sense.

Report: US Nuke Weapons Drivers Got Drunk at Work

I was so shocked by this report I almost spilled my wine. From AOLNews (of all places):

"Federal agents driving convoys carrying America's nuclear weapons and other sensitive material sometimes got drunk on the job, and two agents were detained by police during an "incident" at a bar while on duty, according to an internal Energy Department report.

Another agent was arrested for alleged public drunkenness. Altogether, the department cited 16 alcohol-related infractions among nearly 600 workers at the Office of Secure Transportation between 2007 and 2009. "
......
"The agents are responsible for transporting -- usually by truck -- nuclear weapons, weapons components and other nuclear materials between laboratories and facilities around the United States. They undergo a 21-week program that's supposed to train them to be discreet, and how to defend the shipments from possible attacks or sabotage.

The report also cited problems with paperwork, including missing signatures on forms used to report violations of OST rules. The department also missed the one-year deadline to re-certify at least 17 of its agents, allowing them to continue working without required checks, it said.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the OST, issued a statement defending its agents and noting that the report did not find evidence that anyone was driving while intoxicated. Agents have safely transported nuclear materials more than 100 million miles without a deadly accident or release of radiation, it said.

"NNSA takes each of these cases very seriously and is working to evaluate the inspector general's report and make additional improvements to the program," NNSA spokesman Damien LaVera said in the statement, excerpted by The Washington Post.

The findings also alarmed some lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"I was appalled to learn that some couriers responsible for transporting nuclear weapons and material were found to be drinking on the job," Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., who chairs the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, told The Associated Press. He said he would seek a full briefing from the inspector general.

"We cannot tolerate any behavior that falls short of the level of excellence required and expected when it comes to protecting and handling our nation's most powerful and dangerous weapons," he said."

Groundhogs - Thank Christ For The Bomb 1970

Great UK band with a song with a certain moral ambiguity.

UK nuclear sub runs aground

As if my last post needed further emphasis. Truth be told "accidents" with nuclear weapon systems or their components are not that unusual. A threat to friend and foe alike.

Reports Cite British Nuclear Weapons Safety Issues

After a week I've finally adjusted to the Tokyo Madison time change and have stumbled across further evidence of the on going threat of nuke possession, this time in the U.K.:

"Years-old reports made public last week cite "poor" safety processes at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, which manufactures and maintains British nuclear warheads; potentially hazardous "crew fatigue" by personnel involved in the ground transport of nuclear weapons; and failure by commanders of the nation's nuclear-armed submarines to follow safety rules.

An August blaze at Aldermaston's high-explosives facility highlighted safety worries, according to the newspaper. It took firefighters nearly nine hours to quell the fire, records indicate (see GSN, Aug. 4).

A 2005 report identified eight "issues and regulatory risks." Defense Ministry nuclear arsenal regulator Andy Moore noted "slow progress in implementing the regulation framework for the nuclear weapons program."

He also addressed "inconsistent arrangements for managing transport activities," meaning that safety procedures for the transit of plutonium or other sensitive substances might "not meet departmental standards."

A mishap in a transport operation could result in radioactive tritium escaping from warheads, Moore stated. That could create a "potential impact on work force and public protection" (Rob Edwards, London Observer, Oct. 17).

Bombspotting Strikes Again

This is a fairly amazing video from the intrepid folks at Bombspotting. As American power winds down we now find ourselves in a spot not unlike the post-Soviet Russians with insecure nuclear facilities that not even the military wants.If nothing else Bombspotting is doing a service demonstrating the amazing lack of security at these facilities.

Countdown to Zero, Nukes, Loose and Otherwise

It's difficult to convey to those born after the 1970s the existential menace of nuclear war that subtlety pervaded American, if not, world life. Growing up in Winnipeg in the late 1950s it was difficult to ignore the night time air force maneuvers to the Arctic Circle. Unfortunately the nuclear threat never went away but merely morphed into newer and more diverse forms.

The film "Countdown to Zero" explores these new manifestations of potential doom. The Toronto Star elaborates:

"First conceived by Democratic politician Matt Brown and Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute, and directed by Britain’s Lucy Walker, the film features a critical mass of former world leaders, experts, spies, officials, activists — and one of the most cold-blooded weapons smugglers in history.

Its message is meant to put a new generation of anti-nuclear campaigners back on the peace path their grandparents pioneered as Cold War protesters in the days when grade schoolers had to “duck and cover” in anticipation of a Soviet nuclear attack.

Now things have changed — and not altogether in a good way.

“There’s pretty broad agreement that the No. 1 threat the world faces is nuclear terrorism,” says Joseph Cirincione a non-proliferation expert with the Ploughshares Fund who is among more than 80 people interviewed for the film. “There are apocalyptic groups who wouldn’t hesitate to build, and use, an atomic bomb.”

And Cirincione is not just talking about a homegrown “dirty bomb” combining low-level nuclear material with ordinary explosives — which would cause alarm and confusion but few casualties. Increasingly likely is a crude, Hiroshima-style weapon that could devastate a city, melt down an economy and throw the world into nuclear chaos...

“There are three ways to acquire a nuclear weapon,” says former CIA operative Rolf Mowatt-Larssen. “You can steal a bomb. You can buy a bomb. And you can build a bomb.”

To underscore the point, there’s Oleg Khinsagov, a jailed Russian black marketer from the northern Caucasus who cheered for the 9/11 hijackers and told Walker his stated goal “was to kill 4 million Americans using a nuclear device.”

Khinsagov’s attempt to sell weapons-grade uranium to Al Qaeda was foiled by a Georgian sting operation, and his 2006 arrest made few headlines worldwide.

But while they often slip below the media radar, reports of nuclear smuggling are far from rare. Since 1991, numerous plots have been tracked and halted — and those are only the incidents we know about.

In one of the biggest, three St. Petersburg men were arrested for trying to sell three kilograms of highly enriched uranium stolen from a Russian nuclear production facility in 1994. Some of the hazardous stuff was stashed in a refrigerator.

Two years earlier, a Russian research lab worker spent months stockpiling 1.5 kilos of highly enriched uranium in hopes a wealthy buyer would come along. Scientists say about 10 times that amount is needed for a small atomic bomb."

Hopefully this film can provoke interest in a threat to humanity that makes some of our other existential concerns pale in comparison.

More On the Stakes of Nuclear Arms Reduction

From the Russian site Nuclear No on what's at stake in the START negotiations. American nuclear hegemony has many supporters, the Defense Dept., Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, General Electric, the Carlyle Group, the list goes on....the American people and the people of the world of course benefit from none of this. Another missed opportunity.

"Zero Hour for Zero
Will the START treaty be the dead end of Obama`s no-nukes dream?

Remember Zero? As in zero nukes, Obama`s dream. The dream of "a world without nuclear weapons." The path he sought to start us down in his famous (and probably Nobel-winning) Prague speech in April 2009. The speech in which he seemed consciously to echo Martin Luther King when he said that we might not get there "in my lifetime" but that we must set forth on the path. Thereby construing nuclear abolition as something akin to the abolition of human bondage, freeing us from the plutonium shackles of annihilating weaponry the way the original abolitionists ultimately succeeded in cutting the shackles of slavery.

I remember it. I remember the Prague speech. I remember joint Moscow press conference in July, held by Obama and Russian President Medvedev, in which they both agreed on the goal of a nuclear-free world and signed onto the first step to Zero: a renewal or "follow-on" to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that would sharply cut the number of deployed and operational nuclear warheads to "between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads, down from the 2,200-weapon limit the states are required to meet by 2012 under another treaty." "The leaders also pledged to restrict strategic delivery vehicles [i.e., missiles, subs, and bombers] on each side to between 500 and 1,100," according to the Global Security Newswire, a clearinghouse for nuclear-arms information.

I remember those numbers; it is often forgotten that, despite dramatic post-Cold War reductions, the superpowers still possess sufficient nuclear warheads to destroy civilization, if not the species itself. (For one thing, those numbers don`t count the nondeployed warheads and those in the hands of other nations; one estimate of the total number of those, worldwide, is 23,000.)

I remember how much closer to Zero they seemed, those new numbers being negotiated. And yet how far away they`ve turned out to be. That first step, the renewal or renegotiation of a "follow-on" to the START Treaty-which was set to expire on Dec. 5, 2009-has stalled despite repeated assurances that all was going well. Indeed, over the months since that original announcement, the related failures to meet deadlines have made the negotiations begin to look like a tragic farce whose fate is seeming ever more grim as the weeks and months pass without a resolution of the constantly cropping up "niggling problems" that have prevented agreement.

Yet I remember the U.S. and Russian presidents and their chief negotiators exuding confidence last July that the Dec. 5 goal would be reached, no problem. Just a few details to iron out. And then, as Dec. 5 crept up, more little problems began to appear, and still they reassured us there was really no insurmountable difficulty, and, besides, if they missed the Dec. 5 deadline by a little bit, they`d just agree to a stop-gap extension of the current START treaty with all its provisions for inspection and verification of arms limitation intact. And I remember how everyone said that Obama`s cancellation of the Bush administration proposal to deploy ballistic-missile defense interceptors in Poland-if not on actual Russian soil but close enough to make them crazy-would ease the way to a friendlier climate, more conducive to concluding the START treaty and for walking hand-in-hand down the path toward the nuclear-free sunset beyond the START follow-on. The "follow-on to the follow-on," as it came to be known. The yellow brick road to Zero.

It was just a matter of shifting those interceptors (supposedly designed to protect Europe from Iranian missiles-but try telling the Russians that) to ship-based platforms in the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean. That would eliminate the problem, we were told.

But I also remember having some misgivings as to whether the nuclear industrial complex and its allies in the Pentagon were really all onboard with the Zero goal, as I reported on in Slate after watching them gather in Omaha, Neb. Our nuclear commanders at Omaha`s STRATCOM, the strategic command, had assembled a massive show of force of the civilian and military nuclear elite, most of whom delivered talks that treated Zero dismissively and even raised questions about the START follow-on`s goal of a radical reductions in nukes-an implicit rebuke to their commander in chief.

And then I remember the sudden chilling dispatch from the Global Security Newswire (a subsidiary of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an NGO formed by Sen. Sam Nunn and Ted Turner) on Dec. 3, 2009:

New Arms-Control Pact Unlikely Before START Expires, Officials Say

Despite "tense, intense and substantive" negotiations taking place "practically around the clock," according to one Russian lawmaker, the sides remain notably divided over arrangements for verifying compliance with the new agreement.

Russian military officials and foreign policy planners have pushed to restrain monitoring terms they said were too invasive under the 1991 treaty.

"Russia is not interested in having the same scope of verification procedures that were in the earlier treaty. There is this conclusion that these measures were too much, and too extensive," said Anton Khlopkov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies.

One White House official said a final deal is "not going to happen" by next week, when Obama is expected to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. "We are working this hard, but it will only get done if it is a good agreement that advances our national interests," the source said. ...

"The (new) agreement will not be signed on Saturday, but there is a possibility that it could be signed as early as mid-December," RIA Novosti quoted Alexei Arbatov, head of the Center for International Security Studies in Moscow, as saying.

Not quite Alexei, three months later and the talk is of May, maybe.

But then I remembered how, we`d been told that if the Dec. 5 expiration loomed, the negotiators had agreed to a no-conditions extension of START. And I remember how Dec. 5 came and went and there was no agreement, and I remember also how there was no formal extension and just vague assents to continuation. And no treaty ready for signing on Dec. 10 the day Obama received the Nobel Peace prize, a prize that specifically cited his goal of a nuclear-free world (and was probably the rationale for his winning it).

And I remember the photos of the American inspection team whose job it was (under the lapsed START Treaty) to sit outside a Russian missile factory and count the number of big and tall cylindrical objects that came out the doors. And how one day they were photographed happily picnicking together in front of the missile plant and the next ejected from Russia because the treaty they were monitoring was longer in effect. According to what James Acton, an arms-control expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, disclosed to me, their departure was a secret pre-emptive concession by the United States to get the START treaty ratified by expiration time. But that didn`t quite work out, did it?

Now any future inspection and verification counting of nukes will be complicated by the gap in continuity of inspection surveillance, but it was no big deal, we were told; the two parties were "very close."

But after the New Year, once again we began to hear optimistic pronouncements. In January of this year, Russian President Medvedev was telling the world not to worry; we were "95 percent" there, just a few little issues to be ironed out.

Only those few little issues involved the stubborn problems of inspection and verification, and the Polish concession hadn`t made a difference because now the Russians wanted the right to inspect the sea-based missiles that were to be substituted for the Polish interceptors and the Americans were having some problems with that, too. They didn`t want any ballistic missile defense, or BMD, restrictions. The American negotiators knew that any concession that restricted BMD was anathema to the GOP, and would likely kill hopes of any treaty ratification by the two-thirds majority necessary. (No "nuclear option" for the nuclear option, so to speak.) Can you say "stalemate"?

And then out of the blue we learned that the Obama Pentagon was announcing last week that it was going to be installing interceptor missiles in Romania, of all places.

When the Russians protested, the Pentagon explained that the Romanian interceptors would only have a range of 900 kilometers and could not reach Russia`s borders, which-surprise-the Russians did not find very reassuring.

Indeed, the timing and substance of the Romanian announcement may go down in nuclear history, should anyone be alive to write it, as the single stupidest act in the entire negotiation process and will perhaps sound the death knell for Obama`s dream of Zero. Or, at least, stop the START follow-on.

Didn`t it occur to someone in the Pentagon that the whole idea of missile bases of any kind and missiles of any range in Eastern Europe was anathema to the Russians? Having lost tens of millions of people to Hitler`s panzers last century in that neighborhood, they turned out to be still touchy. Imagine!

In my August Slate piece, I had argued that Obama needed a "Zero czar" if he were to whip the entrenched nuclear establishment into line behind his dream of Zero. A zero czar might have averted the potentially fatal Romanian mistake.

Meanwhile, I was informed that "sources" in Washington were spinning or being spun by the idea that a speech by Joe Biden would change everything. (As if!) Biden`s speech, the word was, would give the Republicans in the Senate more reason to vote to ratify a treaty (that had, needless to say, still not been signed and looked like it never would) by giving the Republicans nuclear "goodies" they wanted such as renewal of the "infrastructure" of our bomb-making capacity. And, indeed, Biden made a speech in which he trumpeted a puny 10 percent increase ($624 million) for renewing the physical and intellectual infrastructure of our nuclear capacity, but not the grail of the GOP, the "Reliable Replacement Warhead," a new generation of high-tech nuclear warheads they`d been lobbying for unsuccessfully since the beginning of the Bush administration.

The Biden speech was widely ignored, except for those arms-control advocates, like James Acton, who told me it epitomized a recurrent flaw in the Obama administration`s negotiating strategy-both with the Russians and the GOP-that was to give pre-emptive concessions (like Poland, like "infrastructure") in bargaining which the other side would then pocket and then ask for more.

Still, the negotiators and their spinners tried to crank up the START follow-on optimism. On March 2, those of us who followed the global security newswire were told there is new hope!
Russian Leader Optimistic on START Progress

Russia and the United States are "close to agreement on practically all questions" over a pending successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired in December, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday... Medvedev... suggested his nation and the United States could soon reach agreement on a successor to a key Cold War-era nuclear arms control treaty...

"In essence, we have reached the final part of negotiations," Reuters quoted Medvedev as saying. "I hope these negotiations will be finished in the very near future."

Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama pledged last July to cut their nations` respective strategic arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 deployed nuclear warheads under the new treaty. Negotiators have reportedly also agreed to reduce each state`s arsenal of nuclear delivery vehicles - missiles, submarines and bombers - to between 700 and 800, down from the 1,100-vehicle limit set by the leaders.

After wrapping up a one-month negotiation session Saturday, Russian and U.S. officials plan to reconvene March 9 in Geneva, Switzerland, "with the aim of finalizing the future treaty and presenting it for signing by the presidents of Russia and the United States," the Russian Foreign Ministry stated yesterday (Denis Dyomkin, Reuters, March 1).

Oh, Dmitry, stop being a tease! I`m beginning to wonder whether the whole thing has been a con game to make the United States look foolish. He "hopes" the negotiations will be completed in the "very near future." Just like they were going to be completed in several "very near futures" past. But now we`ve reached "the final part." But, wait, I thought we`d already gotten there, "95 percent" of the way two months ago. But two months of intense negotiations had failed to close that 5 percent gap?

In other words, minus the bogus spin, the first round of the Geneva negotiations have been a failure, and there`s no reason to believe the next round, which has the "aim of finalizing the treaty" when the negotiators reconvene March 9 in Geneva, will do any better. Not after all the false hope and groundless optimism they`ve been feeding us since July `09. Now we`re told further negotiations aim to wind up in April and present the treaty to the presidents of the United States and Russia sometime in May. Well, maybe it will happen. Keep hope alive and all that.

But the next GSN report-and the last one as I write (I have to kick my addiction to this charade at some point, but since I am working on a book about the new nuclear age, it`s hard not to chronicle the slow-motion car wreck)-was dated March 3 and we learned that all the optimistic bonhomie actually concealed something "tough," and, worse, there were "niggling details" to be resolved: "Work on the pact has been `very tough,` but `I think we can do it,` said a U.S. official familiar with the talks," according to the GSN report. "The nations remained divided over terms for monitoring compliance with the pact, such as the use of audits to check the other side`s nuclear-armed missiles, the official said. `There are still some niggling technical details,` the source said."

As any student of negotiations knows, when you get to the point where you`ve spent a year haggling over "niggling details," the details are not "niggling."

What has gone wrong? Who`s to blame? Is it zero hour for Zero or is Zero already dead?

I had a fascinating conversation with Carnegie`s James Acton about these questions and the speculations that surround them. One theory going the rounds, he said, is that Vladimir Putin doesn`t want to let Dmitry Medvedev to cover himself in worldwide glory (and thus bolster his stature viz-a-viz Vlad within Russia) by getting a nuclear treaty signed. And so Putin has allowed his minions among the Russian negotiators to raise objection after objection to the treaty. Almost all of them focusing on ballistic missile defense, which, ever since Star Wars, makes the Russians go ballistic.

Meanwhile, U.S. negotiators have made any incorporation of restraints on BMD a no-go area for negotiations, believing that any such restrictions would condemn a treaty to death in the Senate. In other words, they`ve capitulated to the Republicans pre-emptively on what could be a more ambitious treaty. Acton said what could not be known is just how substantive the differences were. If they were indeed "niggling details," Obama and Medvedev might step in and resolve them at the last minute. But if they involved ballistic missile defense, the problems might be insoluble.

When I asked Acton whether there was anything Obama could to break the logjam, he said he wasn`t sure-the delay might turn out to be a symptom of what veteran arms control negotiators had told him was a Russian negotiating tactic: make concessions along the way and then just as it looked as if agreement could be reached, "put everything back on the table."

"Meaning?" I asked.

Take back the concessions and see what else you can extract from the pressure of what seems like proximity to finality.

Proximity to finality. Zero always was a long-term dream. But the first step has been so agonizingly difficult, it begins to seem less like a dream and more like an ever tantalizing, never approachable delusion.

Alas, "proximity to finality" may be the epitaph for the START Treaty, for Zero, for the prospects of avoiding a nuclear cataclysm. Proximity to finality, yes. Zero may be stopped in its tracks before it could get STARTed.

I would argue there is one thing Obama could do. Recognize that this is at least as important as health care in terms of the urgency with which he treats it. And that he has to get involved personally and politically. He has to find out whether the Russians are serious, whether the Pentagon is sabotaging him, whether there`s any hope left. He has to realize that a nuclear war would be a rather substantial health care crisis, for instance, if he wants to put it in that framework. Recognize that this is truly the way he could make a mark on history unlike that of any previous president. And if he won`t follow my advice and appoint a Zero czar, at this very late hour, he should become the Zero czar himself."

Nuclear Policy Review American and Russian

The Obama administration faces a monumental decision regarding nuclear strategy that has largely gone un-noticed in popular media. Having backed away from conplan 8022, developed under the Bush-Cheney administration which, among other things , called for pre-emptive strikes against potential threats as well as real ones, the Obama administration must come to grips with the desire to make the world safer and satisfy the American military-industrial complex. FAS goes into more details:

"While the completion of the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review continues to slide, FAS today published an issue paper on how a decision to reduce the role of nuclear weapons might influence the U.S. strategic war plan.

President Obama pledged in his Prague speech last year that he would “reduce the role of nuclear weapons” to “put an end to Cold War thinking,” and reaffirmed earlier this month that the “Nuclear Posture Review will reduce [the] role….”

How to reduce the role in a way that is seen as significant by the global nonproliferation community, visible to adversaries, and compatible with the president’s other pledge to “maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary…as long as these weapons exist” apparently is the subject of a heated debate within the administration.
Click image to download report.

The most persistent rumor is that the review might remove a requirement to plan nuclear strikes against chemical and biological weapons; reduce the mission to the core role of deterring use of other nuclear weapons. I recently described that the Quadrennial Defense Review stated that new regional deterrence architectures and non-nuclear capabilities “make possible a reduced role for nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”

A reduction of the mission to only deter nuclear use would roll back much of the expansion of nuclear doctrine that happened during the Clinton and Bush administrations. But it would not “put an end to Cold War thinking,” but to post-Cold War thinking.

To put an end to Cold War thinking, the reduced role would have to affect the core of the war plan that is directed against Russia and China.

The issue paper describes how the strategic war plan is structured, how it has evolved, and discusses options for reducing the mission and the war plan itself."

Meanwhile Pavel Podvig reports on the Russian equivalent which seems to pull back from looser use of nukes:

"On February 5, 2010 President of Russia formally approved the new military doctrine, whose text is now available, and a document called "Basic principles of state's policy in the area of nuclear deterrence through 2020", which appears to be classified.

Nikolay Sokov, who has been following the Russian doctrinal debate closely, has a detailed analysis. The key point, however, is that despite the earlier signs that the doctrine would expand the use of nuclear weapons and even allow for preventive and preemptive strikes, the final document is quite reasonable. As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, the key statement of the new doctrine is that

Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction against her and (or) her allies, and in a case of an aggression against her with conventional weapons that would put in danger the very existence of the state.

This is, actually, not bad, since the scope of the use of nuclear weapons is quite limited. For example, a limited conventional aggression against Russia would not trigger a nuclear response. Neither would a "regime change" in an allied country, as long as it doesn't cross the nuclear threshold.

Of course, it is a declaratory policy and one can argue that things may change in a heat of a crisis. This is true, but the doctrine sets a baseline, which says that Russia is quite restrained in setting goals for its nuclear forces."

Belgian Loose Nukes Follow Up

In a Barney Fife type moment Belgian Defense officials denied that a recent breach by peace activists got near the actual nukes. Per FAS Strategic Security Blog:

"An astounding statement by a Belgian defense official has pointed an unexpected light on the apparent location of nuclear weapons at the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium.

After a group of peace activists climbed the base fence and made their way deep into an area assumed to store nuclear weapons, Ingrid Baeck, a chief spokesperson for the Belgian Ministry of Defense, bluntly told Stars and Stripes: “I can assure you these people never, ever got anywhere near a sensitive area. They are talking nonsense….It was an empty bunker, a shelter,” she said and added: “When you get close to sensitive areas, then it’s another cup of tea.”

April 3 2010, a day of resistance:

Loosely Held Nukes In Belgium

The Federation of American Scientists Strategic Security blog reports on a security breach earlier this month at a U.S. Air Force base and nuclear weapons facility at Kleine Brogel, Belgium:

"A group of people last week managed to penetrate deep onto Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium where the U.S. Air Force currently deploys 10-20 nuclear bombs...
The activists videotaped their entire walk across the base. The security personnel confiscated cameras, but the activists removed the memory card first and smuggled it out of the base. Ahem…

In June 2008, I disclosed how an internal Air Force investigation had concluded that most nuclear weapons sites in Europe did not meet US security requirements. The Dutch government denied there was a problem, and an investigative team later sent by the US congress concluded that the security was fine.

They might have to go back and check again.

The nuclear bombs at Kleine Brogel are part of a stockpile of about 200 nuclear weapons left in Europe after the Cold War ended. Whereas nuclear weapons have otherwise been withdrawn to the United States and consolidated, the bombs in Europe are scattered across 62 aircraft shelters at six bases in five European countries. The 130-person US 701st Munitions Support Squadron (MUNSS) is based at Kleine Brogel to protect and service the nuclear bombs and facilities.

They might have to go back to training.

The activists will likely be charged with trespassing a military base but they should actually get a medal for having exposed security problems at Kleine Brogel. And this follows two years of the Air Force creating new nuclear command structures and beefing up inspections and training to improve nuclear proficiency following the embarrassing incident at Minot Air Force Base in 2007. Despite that, the activists not only made their way deep into the nuclear base but also discovered that the double-fence around the nuclear storage area had a hole in it! “We’re not the first,” one of the activists said.

NATO needs to get over its obsession with nuclear weapons and move out of the Cold War and the Obama administration’s upcoming Nuclear Posture Review needs to bring those weapons home before the wrong people try to do what the peace activists did."

Yes fortunately the activists were peace activists rather than war activists.

Nuke Wing Commander Loses Job After Series of Screw Ups

The Minot AFB in North Dakota which has had more than its fair share of "unusual incidents" involving nuclear weapons has had the wing commander relieved of duty after yet more bizzare incidents:

NTI reports:

"The U.S. Air Force yesterday removed an officer from his post as missile wing commander at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota following a string of weapons mishaps at the site, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Aug. 19)....
"Col. Christopher Ayres led the 91st Missile Wing, which manages 150 Minuteman 3 nuclear missiles deployed in silos around the state.

Ayres was not held directly responsible for any of the incidents, which included three missile personnel dozing off last year while in possession of ballistic missile launch codes (see GSN, July 15). In another incident, a truck turned over while carrying a Minuteman 3 ballistic missile rocket booster near the base. In addition, a Minot service member has been charged with taking a missile launch controller, reportedly as a memento (see GSN, Aug. 1, 2008)."

The truck accident was caused by a large unidentified insect:

"An Air Force report blames an insect for a vehicle accident involving personnel from a nuclear missile base in Minot, North Dakota.

The accident happened back in August in North Dakota.

A truck driver lost control of a semi-trailer carrying missile parts from Minot Air Force Base.

The reports says the driver was distracted by a "large insect" that flew in a window and landed on the driver's back.

The truck overturned on a gravel road and was carrying rocket engine parts for the missile - but no nuclear material.

No word on the cost of the cleanup or the type of bug."

Siberian Parking Lot Doubling as Nuclear Waste Center

In case you were wondering what to do with your left over recycled uranium and plutonium from the backyard reactor, Der Spiegel informs us that there may be a parking lot in Siberia that can store your hot stuff:

"The largest utility company in Europe, Électricité de France, has been accused of storing nuclear waste in an open air car park in Siberia. An investigative documentary called the "Nuclear Nightmare" that screened on Tuesday in Germany and France accuses the company of sending nuclear waste to a town in Siberia where it is then stored in metal containers in a parking lot.

The containers, the makers of the documentary -- French documentary director Eric Guéret and French journalist Laure Noualhat of the newspaper Libération -- report, are in the Siberian town of Seversk, formerly a secret "closed city" where there are several nuclear reactors, plants for reprocessing uranium and plutonium as well as storage and production facilities for nuclear weapons. Although the Russian town now appears on maps, entry into the area is still restricted to locals. Noualhat told SPIEGEL ONLINE that although they visited the outskirts of the city during their research, they were not able to get in themselves. However, they did interview contacts who worked in the nuclear industry inside the city. And apparently the containers can also be seen via satellite images."

Well what's the fuss? This no doubt is a very high security Siberian parking lot/ storage facility.

Loose Nukes American Style

More disconcerting news regarding the day to day security of American nuclear weapons, this one from that hotbed of disarmament the Stars and Stripes :

" KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — An internal Air Force investigation has found that most military bases in Europe that store nuclear bombs do not meet the most basic Defense Department security regulations.

The report reveals some startling deficiencies in nuclear security in Europe in the wake of nuclear safety concerns and a historic Air Force leadership shake-up.

The report stated that each site had "unique security challenges."

"Inconsistencies in personnel, facilities, and equipment provided to the security mission by the host nation were evident as the team traveled from site to site," the study reads. "Examples of areas noted in need of repair at several of the sites include support buildings, fencing, lighting, and security systems."

At some places, the duty of protecting nuclear weapons fell upon foreign conscripts with as little as nine months of military experience, the report said.

The Pentagon released a summary of the report, titled "The Blue Ribbon Review of Nuclear Weapons Policies and Procedures," in February. The study found that the Air Force needed to improve how it safeguards its most lethal weapons and that numerous factors led to a B-52 mistakenly carrying six live nuclear warheads from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., last year.

Problems with nuclear safety at bases in Europe was unknown until Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists obtained a declassified version of the full report and posted it on his blog earlier this week.

"A consistently noted theme throughout the visits," the report states, "was that most sites require significant additional resources to meet DOD security requirements."

Investigators also found that periodic and routine inspections might not have been as effective as they could be because Air Force inspectors had to give prior notice to host nations and NATOs before visiting the sites....
The U.S. military does not reveal the number of nuclear weapons it has at European bases due to security reasons, but the Federation of American Scientists estimates there are between 200 and 350 warheads at bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, United Kingdom and Turkey.

Kristensen wrote in his blog that the report shows that nuclear weapons in Europe have been "a security risk" for the past decade.

"But why it took an investigation triggered by the embarrassing Minot incident to discover the security problems in Europe is a puzzle," he wrote.

Air Force leaders launched the internal investigation after the Minot incident involving the B-52 and the live nuclear warhead. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the Air Force’s top uniformed and civilian leaders for allowing nuclear safety to slip."

I beleive this is the same country that was going to "show" the Russians how to secure their nuclear weapons.

Airforce Purge What's Up?

As noted here earlier the recent concerns regarding the security of nuclear weapons controlled by the U.S. Airforce have attracted a fair amount of attention. As a result Defense Secretary Robert Gates sacked the Airforce Secretary,Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff, General Michael "Buzz" Moseley ostensibly for the failures associated with the "temporarily misplaced" nuclear cruise missiles in 2007,the "accidental" shipment of nuclear nosecone fuses to Taiwan in 2006, and the most recent failure of the nuclear surety inspection of the 5th Bomber Wing at Minot AFB in North Dakota.

The World Socialist Web Site now reports on other aspects of this story which have seemingly not registered. Among other things:

"Given the context of the incident, which transpired amid reports of planning within the Bush administration for an attack on Iran, including possible use of nuclear weapons, the perfunctory statement from the Air Force that the transfer was an “error” and that “the munitions were safe, secure and under military control at all times” hardly allayed concerns.

Taken together, the claims of innocent errors as the explanation for sensitive nuclear devices being sent to one of the tensest areas of the globe and a nuclear armed flight in the midst of mounting war threats strain credulity. Both incidents strongly suggest that much more is taking place behind the scenes in the US military and state apparatus than the American people are being told......

"While no doubt the incidents raised grave questions, the manner in which the two officials were forced to resign evinces a level of urgency that suggests that far more was involved than the release of an investigator’s report.

Both Wynne and Moseley were attending an Air Force leadership summit at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Moseley was hastily summoned to Washington Thursday for a meeting with Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked to resign. Later that same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England was sent to Wright-Patterson to find Wynne and demand his resignation as well...."

The article goes on to point out intriguing economic and political aspects of the whole affair which can only make one wonder what was really going on:

"Resignations hit Lockheed Martin

Perhaps not coincidentally, the resigning air force secretary, Wynne, was recruited to the Pentagon by the Bush administration in 2001 after a 30-year career in the aerospace industry, where he had headed the space divisions of both General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-22 and America’s number one military contractor.

The purge at the top of the Air Force was clearly seen as having substantial financial implications. “This can’t be good for any of us,” a Lockheed Martin official close to the F-22 program told Aviation Weekly. “I was completely surprised and nobody I know knew anything about it beforehand,” the official is quoted as saying.

It is now nearly half a century since the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower urged the American people to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The ever-closer relations between America’s expanding military and a financially powerful arms industry, he warned had the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

The threat indicated by Eisenhower in his farewell speech of 1961 has mushroomed into something far beyond anything the World War II general could ever have imagined.

The Air Force alone now disposes of a budget of close to $130 billion, while military spending as a whole - including the successive “emergency” funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the nuclear weapons appropriations for the Energy Department - is fast approaching one trillion dollars a year.

US generals and admirals who serve as regional commanders now act as American pro-consuls, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in many other parts of the world, where they wield far greater power than any ambassador or other civilian representative of the US government.

Meanwhile, an officer corps that in a previous period generally avoided partisan politics has become highly politicized, influenced not only by the Republican Party, but increasingly by the Christian right.

Finally, in pursuit of its strategy of global militarism, the Bush administration has sought to portray the military as entitled to virtual veto power over the elected government, insisting that it is the commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan-hand-picked supporters of the administration’s policies—who must decide the course of the wars.

Under such a government, a sudden shakeup within the top ranks of the military like this week’s unprecedented simultaneous removal of a service’s civilian secretary and uniformed chief—or for that matter the forced resignation of Central Command head Admiral William Fallon in March—raises a number of disturbing possibilities.

Was there more to the unauthorized flight of a nuclear-armed bomber last August than the government dares reveal to the American people?

Are the Air Force chiefs being sacked in preparation for using America’s airpower in another criminal war of aggression, potentially against Iran, under conditions in which the Pentagon’s uniformed command is already deeply dissatisfied with the over-extension of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Had the near mutiny over military procurements, which apparently enjoyed the backing of powerful financial interests, gone further than has been revealed? Were they forced out to avoid a more open challenge to the civilian control of the military?

The answers to these and other crucial questions remained hidden behind a veil of “national security.” Clearly, however, under conditions of a protracted decay of basic institutions of bourgeois democracy in America, the ever-increasing power of the military poses the most fundamental threat to the basic democratic rights of American working people."