Oh Great: The Air Force Failed a High Stakes Nuke-Recovery Drill

It's the ultimate nightmare scenario: A weapon of mass destruction, stored in a remote nuclear missile silo somewhere in the Rocky Mountain West, goes missing, perhaps stolen by terrorists. Even more unsettling? The US Air Force, which oversees hundreds of launch-ready nuclear silos, would have a hard time recouping a loose nuke if one were to be hijacked today.

That's according to an internal USAF report recently obtained by the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to a bungled bomb-recovery simulation at Montana's Malmstrom Air Force Base in August 2013. The previously unreported drill—what's known as an "Empty Quiver" security test—was meant to test Malmstrom's 341st Missile Wing's preparedness in securing a nuclear warhead that's either lost, or forcibly seized by bad actors.

You might be asking, what the hell went wrong? And how?

It's hard to say. Not much is known about last summer's drill at Malmstrom; the FOIA materials handed over to the AP offer "no details on how the silo takeover was simulated, the number of security forces ordered to respond or other basic aspects of the exercise."

But what we do know, based off the partially-redacted FOIA documents acquired by the AP, is that a team of security personnel was tasked with recapturing one of the Air Force's 450 Minuteman 3 launch silos in a sort of hypothetical doomsday time trial. The tactical response force, comprised of experts trained and outfitted specifically to track and secure compromised American nukes, was unable to get the job done before the clock ran out on the Empty Quiver.

The misstep, as the internal Air Force report reads, was a "critical deficiency" rooted in the security team failing "to take lawful actions." (In the version of the incident report handed over to the AP, the passage explaining what those lawful actions even are—and what not sticking to them looks like—was removed altogether.) It's also why the 341st Missile Wing received poor marks for a routine audit of its border patrol and overall security chops.

If anything, the lagged response to the simulated assault is arguably one of the darker failures to cut across the nuclear missile corps' record in recent memory.

In just the past year, the bomb security wing has faced criticism over lax training and leadership, spotty security, and an embarrassing test-cheating scandal (the irony!) that left its top boss no choice but to resign in March, when the beleaguered unit was allowed to retake the security portion of the inspection. It passed.

That's shouldn't make the lingering sting of last summer's bombed bomb test any less worrisome. Back in 2012, the Air Force actually promoted the Malmstrom security team, together with sister teams stationed at the flying service's two other nuclear bases, in North Dakota and Wyoming, as a "secret weapon" against nuclear insecurity, saying they provided "an extensive amount of unique training and are expected to perform flawlessly in whatever scenario is thrown their way," as The Denver Post reported.

If only that were so. Had it been real life, the bad guys might very well have made off with an intercontinental ballistic missile.

And what would they have done with the stolen nuclear missile? The jackpot, of course, would be the warhead itself. Even if this all played out in real life, with the thieves managing to make off with the warhead, their chances of pulling off a rogue launch would be pretty slim. Doing so would involve unscrambling encrypted war authorizations sent by the president himself.

So don't lose too much sleep, for now, over the specter a weapon of mass destruction wrenched from a missilo silo in Montana being detonated by a terrorist network. Even still, it's worth noting that not too long ago, the Air Force didn't worry much about the threat of hostile parties storming a nuclear silo, hellbent on hijacking the apex technology of mass annihilation. That all changed after 9/11, when suddenly that threat was no longer considered highly unlikely, if not impossible, but a clear and present danger.