U.S. Asked Taiwan to Discard Nuclear Missile Fuses, Official Says

The United States requested that Taiwan discard four nuclear missile fuses sent to the island accidentally in August 2006 before grasping the significance of the parts and requesting their repatriation, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, March 25).

The U.S. Defense Department yesterday said it had shipped the fuses in place of helicopter batteries ordered by Taiwan.  The Pentagon believed the parts were nonsensitive equipment during months of communication with Taiwan regarding the order, and officials here learned only this month that the mistake involved electronic ICBM components.

“The U.S. recently informed us that the parts had been mistakenly sent to Taiwan, and they asked us to dispose [of] the parts by ourselves,” Taiwanese armaments chief Wu Wei-rong said today. 

“The U.S. then realized the parts were sensitive, controlled items which Taiwan could not deal with, and … the parts were returned” last week, he added (Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, March 26).

The 22-inch-long instruments are built into cones designed to fit on the tip of a Minuteman ICBM warhead and trigger its detonation when the missile reaches a specific height over the earth’s surface, Agence France-Presse reported.

“It’s very sensitive technology because it is essentially the brain of the re-entry vehicle,” said Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.  “As it comes toward the earth, it determines when the bomb goes off and that it goes off at the right height and at the right yield.”

According to U.S. Principle Deputy Defense Undersecretary Ryan Henry, the components are not compatible with other weapons systems.

“The specific manufacturing of this is done to be mated specifically with this weapons package,” he said.  “So you would not be able to use this in any other weapons system, nuclear or non-nuclear.  But the mechanism itself is common to many, many different weapons” (Agence France-Presse I/Spacewar.com, March 25).

Kristensen called the parts “hugely important.”

“For a country like China, that is trying to develop more capable systems, that would be very important material to get.  And (for) any country that is even lower on the nuclear threshold scale, having not quite gotten there, [it] would be potentially even more important,” he said.

The recent finding follows a U.S. atomic security breach in September in which a B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and  flown across the country.

“You would think anything dealing with components for nuclear warheads and for major ICBMs, that sort of thing would be set in stone,” said Victoria Samson, a nuclear expert at the World Security Institute.  “And when it isn’t it makes you wonder how much care is being taken in other parts of the Pentagon’s work” (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, March 25).

Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Larry Welch has said that Defense Department agencies have been taking action since 1992 to correct lax nuclear weapons handling procedures pointed out by a Defense Science Board task force, but the problems keep recurring, Time magazine reported.

“In each case the deficiencies were addressed, corrective actions were implemented but they didn’t endure, they didn’t last, and over time attention faded away and then we encountered a new set of deficiencies,” Welch told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

According to some Pentagon officials, the Defense Logistics Agency might be more at fault than the Air Force for the mistaken missile fuse shipment.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates has requested a full investigation of the incident (Mark Thompson, Time, March 25).

China expressed alarm over the error and urged Washington to halt all military cooperation with Taiwan, AFP reported.  Beijing considers the island to be part of its territory and has threatened military action should Taiwan seek formal independence.

“We express our serious concern and strong dissatisfaction and demand the U.S. side investigate this incident,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement.

“We urge the U.S. to cease selling military hardware to Taiwan and end U.S.-Taiwan military ties, or risk harming stability in the Taiwan Strait and the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. ties,” he said (Agence France Presse III/Spacewar.com, March 26).

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