Some of you may remember that at the end of August, a B-52 supposedly carrying conventional-warhead cruise missiles was, instead, equipped with six nuclear-tipped missiles and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana. It was more than a day before anyone discovered the mistake.
The Associated Press reported last Friday that the military investigation found that among other problems, the crews loading the missiles had ignored the procedures for tracking which missiles are loaded with what in favor of their own informal, less complicated system.
As a result of the investigation, the 5th Bomb Wing has been decertified from its wartime mission, and four officers, including the wing commander, have been relieved of their commands.
I agree with veteran turned military writer Phillip Carter that the punishment, while harsh, is fair, given that we’re dealing with nuclear weapons here. The fact that nothing bad actually happened doesn’t make mixing up nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry acceptable;it’s the kind of situation where a large margin for error is desirable.
More generally, this shows the time-honored problem of making sure that sensible policy, no matter what it is, will actually be carried out by the people on the front lines. No matter how good the rules and guidelines are, it’s next to impossible to prevent someone from overriding them.
The Canadian blogger Duncan Black told a story about arriving at a border point with a visa and all his other paperwork ready for a job in the US. The border guard refused him entry because a letter from Atrios’ employer had a misspelling in it: It must be a forgery! Black simply drove to the nearest checkpoint and passed through without trouble.
Or there’s the account of a nuclear power plant inspector who found one of the alarms in the plant he was looking over had been taped up so it wouldn’t work. A plant employee explained that it kept going off all the time, which annoyed everyone, so they deactivated it.
I can think of plenty of other stories, but why belabor the point? Perhaps the trouble is, we’re all sure we can tell whether a rule makes sense or not, whether it’s fair or not: If we don’t want to follow procedure, it’s easy to tell ourselves it’s the procedure that’s flawed, not our judgment.
Likewise, most of us are confident that even if a rule is good in general, we, our family or our friends have a good reason for an exemption: Our situation is special. We’re not like all those evil people who have to be kept from doing wrong (or like the little people who don’t deserve the special treatment we’re entitled to).
Of course, it doesn’t help that bureaucracy, whether government or corporate, often does pass down rules that are detached from reality. For example, a bookstore where I used to work was informed that the company would supply us with all the books we’d need for the Christmas season—even though that was more than the store could actually hold. Trust me, having the books on hand but piled into two dozen boxes in the back room doesn’t make them available to the customers.
When you deal with that sort of crap (and many of us do), it’s natural to treat rules with suspicion and wonder whether you really need to follow every safety protocol and keep every allegedly vital record, or whether anyone would be hurt if you let your brother-in-law fudge things.
Sometimes, however, it is important to follow the rules. Handling atomic weaponry is one of those times.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.