Vandenberg Air Force Base’s most recent missile test launch on July 27 brought with it a bit more drama than usual.
Base officials were forced to destroy an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean for safety reasons after detecting a “flight anomaly” during the last portion of the mission.
“We plan for situations like this, and everything was executed according to the plan,” Col. Matthew Carroll, 30th Space Wing chief of safety, said in a press release. “Established parameters were exceeded and controllers sent destruct commands.”
The exact cause of the anomaly is currently under investigation, Air Force Global Strike Command spokeswoman Angie Blair said. The Air Force has formed a Launch Analysis Group, including members of the 30th Space Wing Safety Office, to look into the issue. According to Blair, the results of the inquiry won’t be released to the public.
Air Force officials said the computer-guided Minuteman III, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, has been extremely reliable in the past, completing 22 of 24 flight tests successfully. The last time mission controllers terminated a Minuteman launched from Vandenberg was in 1998.
Mishaps aside, base personnel also arrested two people for crossing the base’s line of demarcation: Central Coast activist MacGregor Eddy and Father Louis Vitale, a board member of the anti-nuke group Nevada Desert Experience. The protesters crossed the line while attempting to deliver a statement from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to the base’s 30th Space Wing commander, Col. Richard Boltz.
Eddy said she was inspired to go onto base property by the actions of South Korean protesters—who have successfully blocked the construction of a Korean Naval base on a protected coral reef—knowing she and Vitale would be arrested.
“We decided to go in and ask them to stop the launch because it was the right thing to do, not because we thought it would be successful,” Eddy said. “We were pretty astonished when the launch failed.”
Vitale, who has been arrested hundreds of times over the past 40 years for various protests, was recently released from Lompoc Federal Prison, where he served six months for protesting at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga. He said his latest arrest wouldn’t deter him in the least from attending future launch protests at Vandenberg.
“We did walk across the line, but according to the Nuremberg agreement, which says if you’re given a command that’s illegal or against your conscience, you shouldn’t do it,” Vitale said. “We feel in our conscience that this is the wrong thing to be doing, and we should do what we can to stop it in a very nonviolent way.”
When asked if the missile’s destruction could’ve been an act of divine intervention, Vitale, a Franciscan priest, was noncommittal.
“Who knows? I don’t say God did it … or it was the answer to our prayers,” he said. “I just know when we pray, things happen.”
The pair has been arrested and charged with trespassing at Vandenberg on many occasions before. This time, Eddy and Vitale were cited and released pending a trial in federal court. No court date has been set for either arrestee, but Vitale does have a long-delayed hearing scheduled for Sept. 15 in Santa Barbara for a 2009 arrest at Vandenberg.
The case will dispute the “ban and bar” letters issued by base officials to protesters along Highway 1. In May, a federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge ruled the ban couldn’t be applied to roadways where there is an easement and concurrent jurisdiction.
This article appears in Aug 4-11, 2011.