Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a full inventory of all nuclear weapons and related materials after the mistaken delivery of ballistic missile fuses to Taiwan, the Pentagon said Thursday.
Gates told officials with the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to assess inventory control procedures for the materials and to submit a report within 60 days.
Earlier this week, Gates directed Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald to take charge of a full investigation of the delivery mistake in which four cone-shaped electrical fuses used in intercontinental ballistic missile warheads were shipped to the Taiwanese instead of the helicopter batteries they had ordered.
[From My Way News - Gates Orders Inventory of US Nukes]
This is one of these things that you never heard of back when I was in the service in the 90's. From the day we put on the uniform it was burned into our brains that all of our equipment must be accounted for at all times. The company commander basically signs for every item within his command, down to each trash can, chair, etc.
One of the classic punishments for misbehaving lieutenants was to have them re-inventory everything, starting with the office supplies closet.
The more sensitive the item, the more controls are put into it. If they could get away with it, they would have us count spent brass before we turned it in before leaving a firing range. If the item was remotely classified, then you had to push a LOT of paper because of each individual item. This was institutional, you couldn't just say screw it, I am not going to document it.
Fast forward to the late 2000s, and suddenly people are fucking up, either by accident, incompetence or dereliction. How are we expected to believe that something as sensitive as these fuses can simply be misplaced during a foreign transfer? It is not like the damn things were sitting in a shelf at an airport and somebody picked the wrong boxes. Or maybe they were?
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