The Toronto Star March 27, 2008
Embarrassed Pentagon officials admit foul-up saying they intended to ship helicopter batteries
By Tim Harper
WASHINGTON - By all accounts and the Pentagon's own admission, there is little similarity between a helicopter battery and a fuse used to trigger a nuclear missile.
Yet the Pentagon revealed yesterday that it had shipped four such fuses to Taiwan in 2006 instead of four batteries, an embarrassing and potentially diplomatically damaging mistake it learned only when the Taiwanese government told American officials what was sitting in a warehouse on the island.
The Bush administration scrambled to explain the misstep to Beijing, which considers Taiwan to be part of China, and allows Washington to export military components to Taiwan which could only be used for defence.
Any suggestion that Washington was arming Taiwan, even mistakenly, sparked official alarm here.
Pentagon officials told a hastily-convened news conference yesterday the fuses that were mistakenly shipped have no nuclear capability of their own, had not been tampered with and they have been safely returned to the United States
U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates has ordered an investigation to determine how the fuses were mistakenly shipped, how their absence went unnoted during at least six and perhaps eight inventories and how when the Taiwanese first alerted officials, they thought they were complaining about receiving the wrong batteries.
The military brass who did their public mea culpa in front of reporters yesterday could not explain how the mix-up was undetected for 18 months.
"Kind of makes you think someone is sitting with a box of helicopter batteries somewhere thinking they have fuses," said John Pike a security analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.
It is the second nuclear-related mistake involving the U.S. Air Force in recent months.
Last August, a B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale base in Louisiana.
The pilot and crew were unaware they had nuclear arms aboard.
Although the fuses themselves had no nuclear materials in them, they were the triggering device for the Minuteman strategic nuclear missile and even an indirect nuclear link could threaten relations between Beijing and Washington because of the sensitivity of the situation in Taiwan.
There was no immediate response from the Chinese government.
"There will be no international incident because of this," Pike said.
"The Chinese would only look foolish or paranoid if they made a stink about this."
He said the mistake would have likely come from a mislabelled box or simple human error which can come in a warehouse-type job which does "not foster mental creativity.
"All this shows us," Pike said, "is that the Pentagon has an inventory control program.
"But we already knew that."
The fuses were shipped in four cylindrical containers measuring nearly a metre high and a half-metre in diameter.
U.S. President George W. Bush was briefed on the mistake last Friday.
"He appreciates that they are taking action and there is a full investigation underway, and he's glad that the result is that they got the parts back," said White House spokesperson Dana Perino.
"But he'll be interested to hear what the results are from that investigation."
The incident is at least highly embarrassing for a nation which has scolded Russia in recent years for not keeping sufficient safeguards on its nuclear stockpiles and has attempted to galvanize world opposition to North Korea and Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Questions will now be raised about Washington's own scrutiny of its nuclear components and materials.
U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said Gates was taking the matter seriously.
"We are all taking this very seriously," he said. "Though this ... could not be construed as being nuclear, it is a component for the fuse and the nose cone for a nuclear system."
U.S. deputy defence undersecretary Ryan Henry stressed that the U.S. "one China" policy in which Washington's security assistance to Taiwan is geared only to its self-defence, has not changed.
"This specific incident was an error in process only and is not indicative of our policies, which remain unchanged," Henry said.
"In an organization as large as the department of defence, the largest and most complex in the world, there will be mistakes.
"But they cannot be tolerated in the arena in strategic systems, whether they are nuclear or only associated equipment."
© Copyright 2008, Toronto Star
