FACTBOX: U.S. military's nuclear fuse mistake

(Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the Air Force's top leadership on Thursday after an investigation into the mistaken shipment of nuclear missile fuses to Taiwan found problems with management of America's nuclear arsenal.

Following are some details of the incident released by the Pentagon. Full investigation findings remain classified.

* March 28, 2005: Four classified fuses are sent to an unclassified warehouse due to a shipping error.

* March 30, 2005: Worker at the unclassified warehouse does not follow procedures that require containers to be opened and contents verified. That worker incorrectly marks the containers as helicopter batteries.

* August 1, 2006: Warehouse fills an order for helicopter batteries from Taiwan by shipping the wrongly marked fuses.

* January 16, 2007: Taiwan says it did not receive the batteries ordered and describes the fuses found in the shipment. U.S. personnel do not recognize the fuses even though Taiwan provides enough information to identify them.

* July 20, 2007: A U.S. defense agency tells Taiwan to throw out the fuses even though U.S. officials had still not identified them as classified fuses for nuclear missiles.

* Late July 2007 to March 2008: Details from this period were not released by the Pentagon. But according to senior U.S. officials, U.S. personnel repeatedly instructed Taiwan to throw the fuses away. Taiwan continued to try to determine what it had received and ultimately identified the objects as fuses.

* March 14, 2008: Taiwan tells U.S. authorities it cannot dispose of the fuses and asks for more guidance.

* March 19, 2008: U.S. officials finally contact an official responsible for the classified fuses.

* March 25, 2008: The United States recovers the fuses.

(Reporting by Kristin Roberts, Editing by Eric Beech)