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Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself
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.'"
>> Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
So now we see why the bomb wasn't "armed with its fissile capsule", don't we?
Seriously, sad about the lives lost at the time an all, but to describe this as "almost nuked America" is facetious at best. This being the example chosen to represent the articles contents (and so probably the "best" of the incidents) I see no reason to read any further.
This is no more "nearly nuked" than the making of the movie "Broken Arrow". After all, they had props that looked like nukes in that. What if there's been a mix-up somewhere along the line? OMG! Nearly nuked America again!
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Agreed. Real lesson of the article: The government is competent at risk management.
But if you take that away, what will the anti-nuke people say? I mean seriously, the people that argue against nuclear whatever tend not to bother with the science and reality and focus on nightmare scenarios which already have reliable procedures in place to prevent.
I would agree with this. We have come far closer to nuking ourselves through intentional political will than any accident.
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
This statement brought to you by the people who brought you the quote, "The government better keep its hands off my Medicare!"
In a word, yes.
A nuke without a pit is like a gun with neither a firing pin nor a bullet in it. Just because it's long, thin, and you can still point it at someone and say "Bang!", doesn't mean it's anything more than a metal tube.
This article is FUD.
It's got nothing to do with group-think. Apparently some people have a persecution-complex, even though their views match the popular opinion. Not sure how that happens, but it seems to be quite common.
I think this Xenu guy tried that once, though I believe it was a different model of airplane.
Pretty much all this shows is that, at least when it comes to nukes, the safety systems are pretty good. Almost nuking yourself means something like "The bomb was going to detonate, but a technician was able to defuse it in time." Not "A bomb was in a perfectly safe condition when the airplane it was on crashed and the bomb did not go off."
Even the NORAD incident. It wasn't a case of one lone guy staving off a nuclear strike while his superiors yelled for launch (as happened in the Soviet Union). It looked like an attack was happening, so things went to high alert. Everyone was ready. What did they do? They WAITED FOR CONFIRMATION. When it turned out that it was a false alarm, they stood down. That is precisely how things should happen. They didn't ignore ti and go "Eh, probably just a bug," but they didn't go full out WW3 for no reason. On the warning, everything got ready to go, but confirmation was needed. For that matter, even had there been confirmation an order would still have been needed.
To me, looks like the US has pretty damn good nuclear safeguards. If the best "almosts" they can find were things when nothing even came close to actually going wrong that is good.
Hell look on the civilian side, at Three Mile Island. The "Worst nuclear disaster in US history." Even with a rather major screwup making the problem so much worse, something the NRC discovered, it still didn't release any significant amount of radiation, not enough to cause any adverse health effects (and it has been studied for decades now). That's pretty fucking good, if the worst it gets is a case of "Nobody got hurt."
Even if it had its core inside, you can't start a runaway fission reaction by throwing the thing into a fire. They needed high-performance switching electronics to even achieve the kind of precision necessary to start a successful detonation. An atomic bomb is just a normal bomb unless the fissile material is held at critical mass for some time.
Yes. They're actually damn tricky things to detonate, that is, if you want any sort of useful yield. And they pulled it off back in 1945: the state of the art in military electronics was a far cry from what it is today.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.