Rinse and Repeat: The Art of Losing Nukes

In the grand tradition of American military blunders, where the stakes are nothing short of apocalyptic, few debacles have managed to reach the rarefied heights of the 2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident. A tale of breathtaking incompetence, bureaucratic oversight, and the kind of organizational failure that makes you wonder if we should even be allowed to have sharp objects—let alone nuclear weapons.

It all began on a balmy August day at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. A B-52H Stratofortress bomber was being prepped for what should have been a routine transfer of inert cruise missiles. Nothing too crazy—just your standard, everyday movement of multi-million-dollar pieces of military hardware. Only, somewhere between breakfast and bureaucratic stupor, six of those “inert” AGM-129 cruise missiles turned out to be very much armed with live W80-1 nuclear warheads. You know, just the kind of oopsie-daisy that could turn a large chunk of the planet into a glowing wasteland.

Now, let’s be clear—this wasn’t some covert military operation gone wrong. This was a logistical whoops on a scale so absurd it would be rejected as too far-fetched for a Hollywood script. The warheads were loaded onto the bomber, flown across the country to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and left sitting unguarded on the tarmac for a solid 36 hours. That’s right—six nuclear warheads, each capable of ending civilization as we know it, were essentially forgotten like a set of keys on the kitchen counter.

When the mistake was finally realized—likely when some poor airman looked up from his clipboard and muttered, Wait a minute…—the military scrambled to cover its ass. Heads rolled, careers ended, and the Pentagon vowed never again would such an incident occur. It was a lesson in the dangers of complacency, the perils of unchecked incompetence, and the importance of at least pretending to take nuclear security seriously.

Ah, but history, dear reader, is a cruel and repetitive joke. Fast forward to today, and the Department of Energy—the people in charge of safeguarding our nuclear arsenal—has once again demonstrated a level of competence usually reserved for malfunctioning vending machines.

In a move that could only be described as peak 2024, Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE) transition team—the self-proclaimed guardians of American nuclear security—managed to accidentally fire the entire team responsible for protecting the country’s nuclear arsenal. But wait, it gets better. They then promptly deleted their contact information, effectively losing the only people who knew how to do the job.

This isn’t just a case of bureaucratic carelessness; this is some next-level Keystone Cops meet the Doomsday Clock kind of incompetence. Imagine cleaning house at NASA and then realizing, Oh crap, who actually knows how to land the space shuttle? That’s where we are—except instead of astronauts, we’re dealing with nuclear weapons.

The details are as mind-numbing as they are terrifying. In the frantic shuffle of political musical chairs, Trump’s team, many of whom wouldn’t know a classified document from a Cheesecake Factory menu, unceremoniously ousted the very experts who oversee the security, maintenance, and operational readiness of our nuclear stockpile. And when they realized their mistake, they couldn’t even find these people because, in their zeal to wipe the slate clean, they’d also wiped out the ability to contact them.

One has to marvel at the sheer audacity of this blunder. At least in 2007, the Air Force found their lost nukes. Today, the people in charge of finding them are the ones who’ve been misplaced. The situation is like firing your pilot mid-flight and then realizing you never asked where they keep the parachutes.

Of course, the Trump administration’s approach to governance has always been less “strategic leadership” and more “late-stage office fire drill,” but even by their standards, this is a breathtaking display of amateurism. Nuclear security isn’t exactly an industry that tolerates on-the-job training, yet here we are, with some poor intern probably googling, how to prevent nuclear Armageddon on a government laptop.

And let’s not forget—these are the same people who lose track of emails, misplace classified documents in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms, and struggle with the basics of staffing an administration without it turning into a revolving door of grift and litigation. Entrusting them with nuclear security is like handing a toddler a loaded gun and hoping for the best.

So where does that leave us? Well, if history has taught us anything, it’s that incompetence at this level doesn’t just repeat itself—it escalates. If in 2007 we misplaced nuclear warheads, and in 2024 we misplaced the people who safeguard them, what’s next? Do we just wake up one morning to find a nuclear submarine listed on Facebook Marketplace?

The irony is rich, but the consequences are real. The same people who can’t operate a spell-checker are now fumbling with the keys to Armageddon. Sleep well, America.