It happened in a frozen bay a few miles near the base. The rescue job was extremely difficult, as the documentation and video obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act show. It took months for the government to collect thousands of pieces from the B-52—scattered all around the bay—plus 500 million gallons of ice, some of it radioactive.

For a while it was just a giant recovery operation, but then the real problems started. After trying to make sense of all the pieces they were able to gather, they discovered that something was missing. The new documents reveal that they were only able to find three out of the four nuclear bombs on board the plane. The possible reason: "Something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary".

Nevertheless, the government said all four weapons were destroyed and everything was ok. Meanwhile, in April the US government sent a Star III submarine to find the bomb, making the Danish government believe it was a "survey of bottom under the impact point":

Fact that this operation includes search for object or missing weapon part is to be treated as confidential NOFORN [not to be disclosed to any foreign country]. For discussion with Danes, this operation should be referred to as a survey repeat survey of bottom under impact point.

The search was finally abandoned. According to William H Chambers, a former nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos: "There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components. It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them." There you go, people. If you are ever attacked by a 45-foot high shrimp, remember to call Mr. Chambers and tell him that, apparently, our new crustacean overlords didn't find it so difficult. [BBC News]

On August 31, 2007 an Air Force crew accidentally loaded six live nuclear warheads into a B-52 Stratofortress—stationed in the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota—believing they were conventional cruise missiles. The weapons were missing, without anyone noticing it, for 36 hours until the B-52 landed in Louisiana.

According to the Pentagon, this happened because the nuclear weapons were stored right next to conventional ones, with just an "8.5 x 11-inch sheet of printed paper to differentiate between the two types." I guess the paper was ignored by the ground crew. I also guess that the paper said something like "Maybe this is bad. Really. No touchy! Noooo touchy!" instead of "NUCLEAR WARHEAD INSIDE. DON'T TOUCH UNLESS INSTRUCTED BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF, YOU MORON" because, otherwise, I just can't understand their mistake.

The report goes on saying that "part" of the problem is that nobody really has absolute control of the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal after the demise of Strategic Air Command. After the fall of the Soviet Union, SAC was split in 1992 into three different commands: the Air Force Space Command (which grabbed ICBM control,) the Air Combat Command (in charge of the bombers themselves) and the Air Mobility Command, which "provides airlift, special missions, aerial refueling, and aeromedical evacuation for U.S. troops." Furthermore, the Air Force nuclear capability is also under the control of the USSTRATCOM, along with the Navy's submarine nuclear ballistic missiles.

The report, however, then says that this "near disaster" was a "human error" because there are tight rules in place that weren't followed. Col. West Anderson, second in charge of the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, added that they "handle weapons safely and ensure the highest possible standards of individual reliability and professional competence." I guess that means that the crew at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota are a bunch of incompetent monkeys, but his guys are A-OK. However, it all seems that they are just glad that nothing bad happened, so they can get away saving their asses.

Despite this "human error" excuse, their explanation leaves me with the impression that nobody has a real, definitive grasp of where every nuke is except probably Matthew Broderick and the WOPR. Their conclusion doesn't help either: the Air Force treats nukes the same as disarmed missiles when verifying armament, and there's "no written directive that specifically described the required identifying means" to make the distinction before loading the weapons into the bombers.

In other words: there are rules which are not followed, but they need more rules in writing. Perhaps they just need to stop playing Warhawk in their PlayStation 3 and start printing clearer warning signs. [Military.com, Wikipedia]