General to Nuclear Crews: Get it Right! Or Else...

In certain corners of the military, there's some grumbling, about how impossibly hard the Air Force's nuclear handling tests have become. Major General Don Alston, the Air Force's new man at the Pentagon overseeing all things atomic, has a message for the grumblers: Suck it up.

These are weapons that can destroy cities, and turn the world's political balance on its ear. There's no room, he says, even for the small failures. "You actually have to get out of bed every day and hustle to achieve a certain level of deterrence," Alston tells Danger Room. "Any anecdotal exposure of a weakness, that may or may not be interpreted as an opening for someone who would want to press an advantage."

It wasn't too long ago that the Air Force seemed to have a quite different attitude. Units mistakenly sent nuclear nosecone fuses to Taiwan, and lost track of six warheads. As a result, top officers were disciplined. The service's civilian and uniformed leaders were sacked. Once-relatively-lax Nuclear Surety Inspections became pressure cookers. These days, a few misfiled papers or a few out-of-place troops means the entire Wing flunking the NSI. Which is exactly what's happening, to unit after unit. Some wonder whether these minor flubs are being blown out of proportion.

Not Alston. Given nuclear weapons' potentially cataclysmic impact, it's a good thing "when a single airman can make a single mistake and that consequences of that mistake are absolute failure of the wing for that Nuclear Surety Inspection," he says. "Every failure is not equal -- for sure. But it does expose how dependent we are on every airman to do this job right."

If nuclear weapons are all about deterring potential adversaries -- and to Alston, they most definitely are -- then those enemies need to know that those arms will always be ready to fly, no matter what. Any imperfection, even a paperwork slip-up, "could result in an unsafe, unsure, unsecure or unreliable nuclear weapon system... one that could fail in peacetime and adversely affect credibility of the reliability of the system or fail if tasked to produce a nuclear yield," he says.

"So, tough business. I wouldn't want it any other way," Alston adds. "And I am not encouraged when people can rationalize: 'but for that mistake we were, y'know, kicking ass.' Well, but for that mistake, you would have passed. But you didn't. You failed. Tough business. And it needs to stay that way."