You might have seen this: the US military ‘lost’ five or six live nuclear warheads and ended up mistakenly flying them across the country. The mistake was not discovered for three and a half hours, when the B-52 in question landed at Barksdale Air Force Base.

The initial questions asked in the media were, of course, (a) how the hell did it happen in the first place and (b) how does it take 3.5 hours to realise you’ve lost enough nukes to take out a smallish country?

However, the plot thickens. As this article observes, Barksdale is the US staging post for sorties to the Middle East. The obvious target there being Iran, towards which the US has used increasingly belligerent language of late. The real questions therefore seem to be:

• Was this in fact a deliberate decision to move nukes to a location where they could potentially be used on Iran, and did someone on the inside therefore leak the information to warn those outside the military/Bush administration?
• Alternatively, was this a deliberate decision to stage manage a ‘mistaken’ shipment of nukes to Barksdale and consequently leak the information to the press in order to rattle sabres at Iran?

And of course, those questions go to the more fundamental question:

• Is the U.S. being run by an increasingly belligerent and out of touch administration who realise that nothing can save their party electorally and who are therefore prepared to do whatever they please, however unpopular, in the time between now and the end of the Bush presidency in 2008, including a hare-brained scheme to launch strikes against Iran and send the Middle East into full blown regional conflict?