Top missileer: Inspections improving nuclear surety

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Maj. Gen. Roger Burg, 20th Air Force commander, talks to members of the 91st Missile Security Forces Squadron at Minot Air Force Base on Feb. 18.


Top missileer: Inspections improving nuclear surety
By William H. McMichael - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Feb 23, 2009 22:13:09 EST

MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. — The much-maligned Air Force nuclear weapons program is on track to return to its Cold War-era excellence, the service’s top missileer says.

“We are, in my mind, clearly on a path back to the excellence that was the legacy of the nuclear force — from my perspective, the ICBM force — that I grew up in,” Maj. Gen. Roger Burg, commander of the 20th Air Force, said Feb. 18.

The key, he said, is a reinvigorated inspection regime established in the wake of two 2008 government reports that were harshly critical of Air Force nuclear surety.

“The depth and scope of the inspection is significantly different,” Burg said. “We are finding things that we did not find two, three, five years ago. And we’re fixing those things because we are aware that they exist.”

The Air Force, which oversees two legs of the nuclear deterrent triad of land, air and sea components, was staggered last year by revelations of nuclear mishandling: the mistaken 2005 shipment of fuses to Taiwan and the August 2007 incident in which nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 that flew to Barksdale Air Force Base, La.


Rest of article at: http://airforcetimes.com/news/2009/02/airforce_nuclear_022309w/%2e