This just fills me with confidence

The U.S. military mistakenly shipped four fuses for nuclear missiles to Taiwan in 2006 and never caught the error, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, acknowledging an incident likely to rile China.

The military was supposed to ship helicopter batteries to Taiwan, but instead sent fuses used as part of the trigger mechanism on Minuteman missiles. Taiwan returned the parts to U.S. custody last week.

What the Chinese government thinks of this is really secondary to the main problem. Which is, how many other client states does the US routinely ship helicopter batteries too? And how many of them could have been receiving the wrong parts? Israel? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Parts that could make assembling nuclear weapons just a little bit easier. Parts that might never end up being accounted for. We arm a pretty big sample of the world's countries, after all.

What led to the misfired fuse shipment is still unclear, Henry and Wynne said. The Pentagon also does not yet know who was responsible.

. . .

U.S. military officials did not understand the nature of the problem until last week.

"We on our side thought we were talking about different sorts of batteries. There was an effort to resolve and reimburse them. It wasn't until this past week that we became aware that they had something akin to a nose-cone assembly," Henry said.

"So there were early communications but we thought we were hearing one thing. In reality they were saying something different."

Good thing the grownups are in charge.