TAIPEI - TaiwanÂ’s defence minister on Thursday said the island did not dismantle and examine nuclear missile parts mistakenly shipped by the United States, in an incident which has angered China and embarrassed Washington.
The U.S. military was supposed to ship helicopter batteries to Taiwan, but instead sent fuses used as part of the trigger mechanism on Minuteman missiles, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. Taiwan returned the parts to the U.S. last week. No nuclear material was shipped to Taiwan, Pentagon officials said.
| Wonder if they re-counted the nukes at Minot ... |
Taiwan’s Defence Minister Tsai Ming-hsien was asked in parliament by Nationalist Party legislator Lin Yu-fang whether the parts had been inspected by the Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, a weapon’s development body in Taiwan. “As far as I know, no,” Tsai said.
| And he'll keep denying it ... |
Lin wondered if that was not a little like looking a gift horse in the mouth. Taiwan has developed a range of weapons on its own, often with U.S. help, because many countries will not sell the island weapons due to Chinese pressure. “Sometimes you can’t have gifts from heaven,” the minister replied.
A Taiwan defence official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters that Taipei had alerted the United States to the fact they had shipped the wrong equipment over a year ago, but only this month received a reply asking for the parts back. “It said on the side of the box it was batteries. Upon opening it was not what we had ordered. We didn’t know what it was as we don’t have that equipment, so we told the United States they’d sent over the wrong stuff,” the official said.
| After they checked it carefully, copied all the manuals that came inside, X-rayed the parts ... |
The erroneous fuse shipment was the PentagonÂ’s second embarrassing misplacement of nuclear or nuclear-related equipment announced in recent months. An Air Force bomber mistakenly carried nuclear warheads over the United States in August 2007.
It was unclear what led to the fuse shipment, and the Pentagon said it does not yet know who was responsible.
The fuses, which send an electronic signal to the device that starts the nuclear weaponÂ’s trigger process, are among a class of sensitive equipment that must be accounted for on a quarterly basis.
| So these aren't missile warhead separation fuses, as first speculated, but real trigger parts. Heh ... |
Based on the information now known, the four fuses, which do not resemble helicopter batteries, were wrongly placed in an unclassified storage area. They were then shipped in late 2006 to Taiwan, which placed them in storage.
| Four? I thought we had shipped fourteen. Or was it forty? Oh well, never mind, Taiwanese would never short us ... |
|