If the reason to worry about jihadism is the possibility the crazies will aqcuire a nuclear weapon, we should have trouble sleeping. There seems to be nobody in charge of the real thing, up there in the great white north, otherwise known as Minot, ND. 

It wasn't a series of benign errors that added up to an unexpected flight of nuclear weapons across US airspace, it was one major error. The live warheads were stored in the same "igloo" as the dummys.

Some Air Force veterans say the base's officers made an egregious mistake in allowing nuclear-warhead-equipped missiles and unarmed missiles to be stored in the same bunker, a practice that a spokesman last week confirmed is routine. Charles Curtis, a former deputy energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said, "We always relied on segregation of nuclear weapons from conventional ones."

Mistakes happen in wartime, but some mistakes simply can't be allowed, at any time. And why are we scrambling in war mode? Because of  the ill-considered Iraq adventure. It has sucked the air out of many programs, not the least being the original challenge, Al Qaeda and the hunt for Osama.

A report in 2003 found weakness in nuclear-weapons handling at Minot, but a subsequent one in 2006 gave high marks. The poor 2003 performance was attributed, in the report, to the pace of operations in Afghnaistan and Iraq. The reported improvement apparently was not complete.

"Where nuclear weapons have receded into the background is at the senior policy level, where there are other things people have to worry about," said Linton F. Brooks, who resigned in January as director of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Brooks, who oversaw billions of dollars in U.S. spending to help Russia secure its nuclear stockpile, said the mishandling of U.S. warheads indicates that "something went seriously wrong."

The guardians of liberty, under George W. Bush, are distracted and disorganized. The zeal of Cheney is not sufficient to achieve results, but does allow failure, as in Kellogg, Brown, and Root hiring airplanes associated with arms dealer Victor Bout, which airplanes subsequently disappear with a large pile of small arms aboard.