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Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself

Posted by Soulskill on from the stopping-there-for-brevity dept.

kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"

10 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Um, not quite.... by HotNeedleOfInquiry · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the case of the Travis accident, there was no nuclear disaster precisely because the nuclear core was not loaded. The Air Force was all too aware of the number of B-29's that crashed on or shortly after takeoff and never armed the weapons until they were close to the target area. To call this a "close call" is simply fear mongering to get page hits.

    --
    "Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
    1. Re:Um, not quite.... by ColdBoot · · Score: 5, Informative

      Agree - I used to work on nukes - they are designed to disperse, not detonate, on anything other than a properly sequenced detonation.

    2. Re:Um, not quite.... by zrbyte · · Score: 5, Informative

      A real close call was this.

    3. Re:Um, not quite.... by Shadow+Wrought · · Score: 5, Informative

      "Perfectly safe" is a quote from the Douglas Adams' short story, "Young Zaphod Plays it safe." He is sent to recover the wreck of a starship which was supposed to get rid of phenomenally awful waste. The government flunkies with him refer to everything as being, "perfectly safe," even when it is clearly not.

      --
      If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
    4. Re:Um, not quite.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The basic principle of a nuke is that a mass of fissionable material is put in a sufficiently small volume to create a runaway chain reaction. What makes it a bomb is that the material is "compressed" quickly enough that the beginning chain reaction does not cause most of the material to vaporize and leave the containment early. It's like the difference between a firecracker and a small amount of black powder on a piece of paper. One goes boom, the other fizzles.

      Even though a nuclear bomb will not detonate without the proper application of force through conventional explosives, it still contains plenty radioactive and highly toxic material. I would not call that "inert" at all. One "broken arrow" incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.

  2. nukes do not work that way by klparrot · · Score: 5, Informative

    IANANP, but AFAIK a regular explosion or fire will not set off a nuclear weapon. The trigger explosion has to be carefully controlled, otherwise it'll just blow apart the nuclear material instead of compressing it to supercritical. That's why it's so hard to build a nuke. Crashing with a nuke is at worst going to spread some nuclear material over a small area, in the same way that any other material in the crash would be. No nuclear explosion.

    1. Re:nukes do not work that way by Brett+Buck · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's generally true, and the only weapon ever deployed that was prone to going off in an crash was probably Little Boy (that later went off on purpose over Hiroshima). The Mark IV, however, was probably somewhat more prone to accidental detonation that any of the others, which is why the core was inserted in-flight. Later, preventing accidental detonation became a serious issue and a lot of the later tests were negative tests to ensure that the safety features worked correctly.

                Full details of each type of bomb and the underlying design can be found at : http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

                Brett

  3. Re:The good news by mr100percent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not really. Unlike the UK, almost all doctors in America are private practice doctors and not on government salary. The same with hospitals, a mix of private and local/state public hospitals. The health care reform legislation passed is mainly for insurance; the government won't change its control of doctors or which private plans people choose. So the government really isn't in charge of health care, although they've taken a more regulatory role in insurance.

  4. Wow this is a terrible piece of work. by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Informative

    So none of these times did we almost nuked our self...
    The first on in 1950 at Travis the bomb wasn't armed. AKA it had no nuclear material in it.
    So there was zero chance that we would get nuked.
    The second at Fermi 1. A reactor problem that was contained and couldn't have caused a nuclear explosion as in a bomb going off. It could have been bad but the systems worked.
    The third was another un armed bomb.
    The forth another reactor problem and again the emergency systems worked and no chance of a bomb like blast.
    The last was a when a training tap was played on real systems. Yes air craft where launched and that mistake was never made again but the the safety systems and procedures worked.
    What is this a piece of FUD? Good at scaring children ,people that will not bother to read, and those that are already full of fear mindless fear. Move on nothing to see here.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  5. Re:I am surprised this does list the Spanish one by orphiuchus · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

    Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.

    Only the conventional portions detonated, that's a pretty important omission there.