US Air Force Tests New B61-12 Nuclear Gravity Bomb With F-35A US Air Force Tests New B61-12 Nuclear Gravity Bomb With F-35A. The fighter, fitted to carry the bomb, is a first-strike weapon.
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By Dave Lindorff
The US is about to move towards a far more likely first use of nuclear weapons, with word that the Air Force has "completed flight testing" of the cost-and-performance-plagued F35A Lightning fighter, all units of which are being "upgraded" to carry thermonuclear weapons.
What this means, as explained in a new article in Popular Mechanics, is that the world's most costly weapons program (at $1.7 trillion), a fifth-generation fighter, supposedly "invisible" to radar (that actually cannot fight and is not invisible to advanced radars), now has a new mission to justify its existence and continued production: dropping dial-able "tactical" nuclear weapons that can be as small as 0.3 kilotons or as large as 50 kilotons in explosive power.
Now 0,3 kilotons is" just" the equivalent of 300 tons of dynamite, which supposedly makes them "useable," meaning not holocaust-causing, while dialed up to its maximum 50-kiloton power each bomb would be significantly more than twice as powerful as the nuclear bomb that leveled Nagasaki.
The Popular Mechanics article, also published in Yahoo News, quotes Pentagon sources as saying the new F35A capability gives the US flexibility to deliver nukes to targets in a country threatening the US, and to recall them up to the last second before dropping the weapon since the plane would be piloted, but this supposed advantage of a manned delivery system being recallable is a fantasy.
As Daniel Ellsberg has exposed in detail in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, based on his decades of investigation with a top security clearance on behalf of the Secretary of Defense office investigating command-and-control procedures and practices of the nation's nuclear forces, there is no way to guarantee that a pilot ordered on a nuclear strike mission will receive or believe any message or signal ordering a cancellation of the attack order.
As Ellsberg explains, communication systems routinely break down on an almost daily basis between Washington and its far-flung military bases, because of equipment malfunctions, storms, solar flares, etc.. Furthermore, in a period of international crisis, a pilot may distrust even an order to call off an attack which, after all, won't be a phone call from the president, a Pentagon general, or even a known base commander, but rather a short coded signal. As Ellsberg notes in his terrifying book, the other flaw is that a pilot, once sent on such a mission, could decide in the heat of the moment, to just carry on with orders and drop his weapon regardless of receiving a cancellation order. Remember, in times of crisis, countries may be employing jamming systems to knock out enemy military communications, or could even be blinding communication satellites.
Meanwhile the scenario presented in the article a lone pilot being dispatched to deliver one dial-able B61-12 thermonuclear weapon onto some command-and-control center or missile launching site, perhaps is not really what the Pentagon strategists have in mind for its F-35A planes.
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised,collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.
(Article changed on Nov 08, 2021 at 11:43 AM EST)
