Near nuclear accident in '61 . . . Brrrrr

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

criticalbass

Sharpshooter
Special Hen
Joined
Jun 11, 2006
Messages
5,596
Reaction score
7
Location
OKC
Comments on this story are interesting too. I know it was a long time ago, and am sure other similar things have happened, but this was real close.

http://news.yahoo.com/atom-bomb-nearly-exploded-over-north-carolina-1961-230654850.html

In case the link fails, here't the text:

LONDON (Reuters) - A U.S. atom bomb nearly exploded in 1961 over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima, according to a declassified document published in a British newspaper on Friday.

The Guardian newspaper said the document, obtained by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gave the first conclusive evidence that the United States came close to a disaster in January 1961.

The incident happened when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina, after a B-52 bomber broke up in midair.

There has been persistent speculation about how serious the incident was and the U.S. government has repeatedly denied its nuclear arsenal put Americans' lives at risk through safety flaws, the newspaper said.

But the newly published document said one of the two bombs behaved exactly in the manner of a nuclear weapon in wartime, with its parachute opening and its trigger mechanisms engaged. Only one low-voltage switch prevented a cataclysm.

Fallout could have spread over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even New York City, the paper said, threatening the lives of millions of people.

In the document, Parker Jones, a senior engineer in the Sandia National Laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons, concluded that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low-voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe."

Jones' report, titled "Goldsboro Revisited or: How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb," was written eight years after the accident in which one hydrogen bomb fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, and the other into a meadow.

He found that three of four safety mechanisms designed to prevent unintended detonation failed to operate properly in the Faro bomb.

When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device and it was only the final, highly vulnerable switch that averted a disaster.

"The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," Jones concluded.

The Guardian said the document was found by Schlosser as he was researching a new book on the nuclear arms race, "Command and Control."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then of course there's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_collision

Pentagon said it wasn't capable of exploding, everyone else involved said it was. Who to believe?
 

criticalbass

Sharpshooter
Special Hen
Joined
Jun 11, 2006
Messages
5,596
Reaction score
7
Location
OKC
That was only one of a dozen times A or H bombs were droped by accident in the US during the 50's and early 60's---Florence SC, Florida everaglades, NV, IND,

I just noticed that you live in Broken Arrow. Ironic.

Yes, we were always dropping nukes, but this one almost went boom. I haven't researched how big it was, but it was an H-bomb and none of those were/are little.
 

Dale00

Sharpshooter
Special Hen
Joined
May 28, 2006
Messages
7,532
Reaction score
4,017
Location
Oklahoma
Read how an OSU grad worked to neutralize the threat at the crash scene:

Jack ReVelle climbed up the steep embankment, the frozen North Carolina dirt crumbling under his weight and mud clinging to his boots.

When connected to the right components - as it had been five days earlier before plummeting at 700 mph towards a swampy field - the pit ReVelle carried contained enough plutonium and uranium to trigger an atomic explosion 250 times more powerful than those that ended World War II.

The pit ReVelle held was the core of one of two identical bombs a B-52 Stratofortress bomber was carrying when it broke up over the small town of Faro just after midnight on Jan. 24, 1961.

“As far as I’m concerned we came damn close to having a Bay of North Carolina,” ReVelle, an OSU alumnus, says more than five decades after the incident. “The nuclear explosion would have completely changed the Eastern seaboard if it had gone off.”....
more at https://statemagazine.okstate.edu/ReVelle_Nuclear_Weapons
 

0311

Sharpshooter
Joined
Jan 8, 2013
Messages
2,293
Reaction score
2
Location
Hell
This isint new information. I've read about this years ago.

Heck, somehow I've missed it. The chute opened and the trigger fired. 3 of the 4 safeties failed. My guess is that it would have been a ground burst. I don't know how much area would still be uninhabitable. We've been criticized by the Revisionists for using nuclear attacks on Japan, but we used air bursts. Imagine if we'd used ground bursts...
 

Latest posts

Top Bottom