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U.S. accidentally sends Minuteman missile parts to Taiwan

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military mistakenly shipped parts from a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile to Taiwan, Pentagon officials announced Tuesday, prompting amazement from nuclear experts.

Top Pentagon officials said the material sent to Taiwan consisted of four electrical fuses for the ICBM nose cones. The fuses, used to trigger nuclear weapons, do not themselves contain nuclear material.

The improper shipment occurred around August 2006 and was not caught until last week, officials said.

Taiwan informed the U.S. in 2007 that they did not get the batteries they ordered. After months of discussions -- the Pentagon said they believed the problem was it and Taiwan were talking about different batteries -- the Pentagon last week realized what had been shipped to Taiwan. The fuses have now been recovered.

"This is really unbelievable," said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, which advocates reducing the number of nuclear weapons. "If the Russians had shipped triggers to Tehran we would be going nuts right now."

U.S. officials notified China of the error, but experts did not expect Beijing to be alarmed because of long-standing U.S. policies against arming Taiwan with nuclear weapons.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, after being notified Friday about the shipment, ordered an investigation.

Taiwan had purchased spare batteries for helicopters. Instead, the Defense Logistics Agency sent four shipping containers officials thought contained the batteries but actually held the fuses.

The Air Force had shipped the fuses from F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming to a warehouse in Utah operated by the Defense Logistics Agency, a separate government unit, in 2005. Officials said they did not know if the triggers had been mislabeled by the Air Force or improperly stored in unclassified warehouse by the logistics agency.

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said nuclear parts in the military warehouses are supposed to be cataloged quarterly and an audit should have discovered that the fuses were missing.

"In an organization as large as the (Department of Defense), the largest and most complex in the world, there will be mistakes," he said. "But they cannot be tolerated in the arena of strategic systems, whether they are nuclear or only associated equipment."

The triggers are part of an older technology, designed in the 1960s, and are similar to fuses on many conventional, non-nuclear systems. The triggers sense the missile's proximity to the ground and send an electrical signal to the warhead.

The Taiwanese probably have more sophisticated triggering devices on their existing non-nuclear missiles. But Ryan Henry, the deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy, said intelligence officers will examine the Minuteman fuses to ensure they were not tampered with.

"This is a case of horrifying mismanagement of the inventory at this location," Leonard Spector, deputy director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told The Washington Post. "But it does seem more like mismanagement rather than a nefarious scheme to get them to Taiwan."

U.S. officials twice have halted Taiwan's attempts to develop nuclear weapons, said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on China and Taiwan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. China frequently objects to the United States providing conventional weapons systems to Taiwan, but Glaser said she doubted that the Chinese would see that the shipment was anything other than a mistake.

"I think the Chinese would have to be incredibly sensitive and paranoid to think the United States would be arming Taiwan with nuclear capabilities," Glaser said. "It runs counter to everything we have done in the past, not to mention is contrary to our interests."