Slashdot Mirror
DoD Report On 32 "Nuclear Accidents"
natebjones writes "Remember the time the US Air Force accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on a family in South Carolina? [This DoD report lists] that and 31 other nuclear accidents including: nuclear bombs inadvertently falling through bomb bay doors; the accidental firing of a retrorocket on an ICBM; the vast dispersal of radioactive debris; and the loss of enriched fissile material and nuclear bombs (which are 'still out there somewhere')."
It ain't so new, and it ain't so clear.
Free Martian Whores!
It's specifically a list of accidents with nuclear weapons, not just any old nuclear accidents. (Just mentioning that since there are some of those in the military as well. For example the SL-1 which is notable since it killed 3 people, including one guy who got accidently nailed to the ceiling.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ridiculous amount of safeguards? While permissive action links (requiring codes for launch) were created and deployed at the urging of Defense Secretary McNamara after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Air Force kept the codes set to all zeros until President Carter found out about it. That was over ten years later. The Air Force kept the codes at all zeros so they could launch without presidential authority. Source: http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm. To quote, "And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO." So, when you say ridiculous amount of safeguards, I'm not buying it without verification.
Not really nuclear accidents. Nuke Weapons have a ridiculous amount of safeguards and settings needed to happen to actually go off. So it is impossible for a true nuclear weapon accidents. Maybe call em' accidents that involved nuclear weapons. any other phrase is alarmism
Yeah, British nukes were protected with "Bike Locks"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7097101.stm
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
What are the chances that the detonators and HE charge are still intact? What are the chances that the nuclear charge is still intact? Did it even have the pit installed? What are the chances that there is a battery, still charged and connected to a still functional timing circuit, available to detonate the HE charges?
I've used Composition C4 many of times in my Army career. I know first hand that you can drop, bump, hammer, shoot, and light on fire an M112 block of C4 without detonation.
To set off C4, you need a supersonic shockwave and a lot of heat at the same time. About the explosive power in a double overhand knot of 30-grain det cord, or an m6 or m7 blasting cap.
THL phish sticks
Retrorockets are not necessarily for de-orbiting. They simply fire forwards, slowing to vehicle. There are conventional aircraft and even land vehicles with retro rockets.
I had worked with the guy that did that back in 1964. I had TDY duty there in 1963 to assist in posturing the missiles initially.
What actually happened was that a modification to the communications panels required shutting down the comm gear. He use a screwdriver (instead of a fuse puller) to pop out the fuse and inadvertently shorted the V++ to chassis ground. This in itself did not do anything really bad, however there was a malfunction in the on-board computer that caused a branch in the software to blow the retro-rockets.
When the missile dropped off "strategic alert" the launch crew (located 20 miles away in an underground capsule) asked them to check on the guidance package. They illuminated the launch tube via the collimator port and saw that the warhead and the guidance package was gone... having fallen to the bottom of the launch tube.
Now about the retro-rockets... The range of a minute man is probably still classified but say that it is (as an example only) 5000 nautical miles... but say that the particular target you want to hit is only 4000 miles from the launch facility so as the final stage ( 3rd stage of the three rockets) passes over the proper location then the retro-rockets fire cause the warhead and the on-board computer to detach from the third stage and free fall ( actually it is more of a large parabolic curve from near space to either detonate as an air burst as it approaches nearer the Earth (most damaging) or to continue its flight and detonate at the ground level on impact(most contamination).
The accuracy in which the warhead can contact the target is astounding... even though my description of it sounds like it is trying to hit a basket in center field with a baseball being thrown... more likely is you can determine whether you want to hit the near side of the basket or the far side!
This is based on my working knowledge from the 60's... of course, a great deal has changed in the last 50 years with the merves (multiple entry - reentry vehicle)- means numerous warheads, and the "penetration aids" dropped to confuse the enemy as to which is the real warhead and which are radar look-a-like reflections.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The safeguards the OP refers to are the ones that prevent detonation, not the ones that prevent launch. Different safeguards for different purposes.
PALs are not intended to prevent launch without Presidential authority, PALs are intended to prevent weapons that fall into unauthorized hands from being used. Which is why the USAF kept PALs active on gravity bombs and disabled them on the silos and why the Army used them on their AFAPs - and why USN SSBN's never had them in the first place.
But there's a reason Comp B and C4 are used in place of Commercial Dynamite in military settings.
I may as well argue the fine point that the nitro in commercial dynamite seeps and settles and "weeps" and it gives you a terrible headache by touch and perhaps by fumes, unless you rotate/flip the crates every couple months, and there is no freaking way us guys in at the ammo depot are going to successfully accomplish that. Everything else in the bunkers is absolutely zero maintenance, lock the door and walk away until you need it.
Also wood supposedly gets flammable from the seeping nitro, so we'd end up with some re-usable wood pallets being hazardous flammable waste and some being "safe", or so we hope.
They told us that sometimes we'd have to stock commercial dynamite at a depot anyway, because its cheap, but everyone involved hated dealing with it. Thus, maintenance-free RDX-based military dynamite instead.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You're missing the point. If the charges aren't intact -- and I'm talking about the shape and density -- the boom will be limited to, at most, what you'd expect from a conventional weapon. Since this device is buried over 50 feet down, any resulting explosion will likely be contained for the most part. There have been several instances (some documented in the article) where unarmed nuclear weapons exploded without the Pu core (called the "nuclear capsule" in the report). Made a big hole in the ground but that was it.
I hate to break it to you, but wood is usually flammable.
... too bad it's not accurate, as is the case quite often on /.
If the CmdrTaco had actually read the PDF instead of just the rant article, he/she would have found out that it's a list of already publicized events that sometimes involved nuclear weapons. Quite often the events involved just parts of weapons but mostly bombs without their nuclear material. I had to read up to page 11 to find an incident that involved a bomb in "strike" configuration.
Oh, and the bomb in South Carolina didn't fall on a family. Their house was wrecked because it happened to unfortunately be closest to where the bomb's high explosives went off, not because the bomb fell on it.
Yeah? What harm is that going to be? A bit of environmental contamination on the sea floor? That's harm, sure, but it's pretty tame as such things go. A full-scale nuclear explosion? Not actually on the table. Terrorists with submersibles and scuba gear bringing it up and disassembling the inoperative rusting hulk in some far-fetched attempt to reconstruct a nuclear bomb? That's not "harm", that's a Tom Clancy novel, and it's a dud because they shot their nuclear engineer before he warned them that their tritium needed to be purified from helium-3 so most of us are safe unless the President gets into a standoff with the Soviets and starts World War III.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
he's referring to the risk in aggregate.
Take a license plate. each place has a 1:39 chance of having A.
a plate with 1 character has a 1:39 of having an A.
as you add more characters the probability of *at least one* character being an A approaches 1.
"thanks to the Manhattan project, we now have devices lying around that are designed to split atoms."
Except that it's still not that easy. Its very likely that the mechanisms surrounding the radioactive cores were damaged during the drops, so most will be unusable anyway...
A fully assembled fission bomb (especially a pure fission bomb) is actually rather dangerous - accidental detonation of the high explosives can create a nuclear explosion on the order of a few hundred tons, quite devastating by any ordinary standard. But it is for this reason that all atomic bombs after the wartime models had features that kept them from being fully assembled before combat use (removable fission cores, or internal motorized in-flight assembly). These early safety features were replaced by others in the later compact "wooden" (no field accessible component) bombs, but those took years to develop.
So the bombs were really pretty safe against any nuclear event, but only because special measures had been taken to ensure it.
The 1950s accidents were all (nearly all?, I haven't checked each one just now, and in some cases there are disputes) WITHOUT the fission core installed so not only was a nuclear explosion impossible, so was significant radioactive contamination.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
FTA: In 1961 a B-52 carrying two 24 megaton nuclear weapons (equivalent to 3,700 “Hiroshima bombs”) broke up in the air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb fell as far as 10,000 feet and sunk into the “waterlogged farmland.” The Air Force dug as deep as 50 feet trying to excavate the weapon, which contained uranium, but was unsuccessful. Finally, the Air Force purchased an easement on the land. Reportedly, a Pentagon document stated that five of the bomb’s six safety mechanisms had failed; “only a single switch” prevented the nuclear detonation of this 24 megaton device.
What are the chances of the final safety mechanism ever deteriorating or otherwise failing due to age?
Zero. The OP is confusing the status of two different weapons. The one that deployed its parachute was recovered intact (but with the safety mechanism failures mentioned). The other broke apart and it was only the thermonuclear secondary stage that was not recovered.
The discrepancy between knowing that "five of the bomb's six safety mechanisms had failed" and reportedly not having recovered said weapon should tip one off that the account for the OP was confused.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Actually, no. The situation in Europe was known to be perfectly conductive to a huge war even before Franz got himself shot. There were a lot of incidents happening, any of which could had ignited the poweder keg and started a war, and one of which was pretty much guaranteed to do just that. That it war Franz getting shot that did is, to put it bluntly, completely irrelevant: WWI was caused by opposing alliances and several people actively wanting a war, and using Franz Ferdinand's murder as an excuse to get one.
As for Lehman Brothers collapsing, it should not come as surprise to anyone that a bank that ties a significant amount of its capital into obfuscatingly complex schemes is likely to do just that, altought I suppose it is a bit surprising that the elite didn't bail their buddies out there.
Kid, I've browsed from one side of this Internet to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful equation controlling everything. There's no mystical feather field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple statistical tricks and nonsense.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Several people on this discussion, including LWATCDR and Sanat, make very good points; this is really Old News.
I was a program manager at The Directorate of Nuclear Surety (now AFSC/SEWA) for three years. While there, I read the reports on all of these accidents.
In my personal opinion (NOT the opinion of the DoD or USAF), Nuclear Surety is astronomically better with modern weapons than with those prior to the early 1960s. This is mainly due to better technology such as; one-point safe designs, Permissive Action Links (events in the Jimuh Carter years notwithstanding), modern initiator explosives, Environmental Sensing Devices, and vastly improved computer modelling techniques. Not to mention some fiendishly clever engineering tricks employed in the physics packages of modern designs.
Also, as better technology became available, the DoD employed better procedures and tactics. An example of this is the USAF abandonment of Airborne for Ground Alert in the early '60s.
A few good books pertaining to this subject are;
Chuck Hansen's U.S. Nuclear Weapons (apparently out of print; and with an astronomical price tag)
Operation Crossroads by J. M. Weisgall
Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes
Happy Reading!
Never.
You're confusing the two bombs. The "five out of six safety mechanisms" (actually five out of approximately twelve arming steps) bomb is the one they recovered, because one of those arming steps caused the bomb's parachute to deploy. The other bomb only had one of the arming steps take place (the "bomb has left the airplane" switch was activated), so the parachute didn't deploy, and the bomb hit the ground so hard the plutonium core separated from the conventional explosives.
As for why the bombs have parachutes, it's so the airplane dropping the bomb can get far enough away to survive before the bomb reaches detonation altitude.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.