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USAF Almost Nuked North Carolina In 1961 – Declassified Document
Freshly Exhumed sends in a story about how close the United States came to accidentally attacking itself with nuclear weapons just a few days after John F. Kennedy took office.
"A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the U.S. Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima. The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage."
What an improvement for NC that would have been.
Wouldn't it? (Of course I'm being facetious. What disarmament?)
the triple fail-safe worked.
FTA: "the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst."
...if it had gone off? The Ruskies?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
If it had happened, would they have blamed it on the Russians?
Maybe the South would have finally surrendered.
It would've been some ironical justice for what was done to innocent children and women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think all U.S nuclear weapons should on completion have been pointed straight upwards and fired immediately. It would've been the most appropriate use.
Signature intentionally left blank.
and some person will get a fake death as well.
The accident has been known about for some time (I first read about it while researching a story I was writing - the protagonist had to build a nuclear bomb, so I was looking for lost and unrecovered nuclear material).
We have also had reports that one of the bombs was nearly armed. These were officially denied by the military, but it was confirmed by several military members.
The new development is that the documentation saying "yeah, that bomb nearly went off" has been declassified. Basically the same deal as the Area 51 thing a while back - everyone knew, but now everyone is "allowed" to know.
Unlike the article implies, the safety design was just fine - after all, the bombs didn't go off.
Sure, three out of four of them failed - that's why there were four.
I'd be good for someone with actual statistics knowledge to say what the probability of 3/4/5 safeties failing would be.
only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.
Just imagine if there had been a Tin Whisker shorting that switch.
One should still fear ones own government more than that of any foreign power.
Fortunately the B-52 was not carrying horse shoes or hand grenades.
Article says:
"The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast."
If carrying A-Bombs across the eastern coast is a routine flight I would love to know what the USAF considers an exceptional flight.
Well let's give it another shot
right, I agree that the article is completely burying the lead (seriously talk about FUD..."It was a single switch!"...)
but what bothers me is the ridiculous lack of detail about **how the plane 'dropped' the bombs in the first place**
that's the first thing I looked for as I skimmed TFA
this is all we get:
"got into trouble" ok...so...what trouble?
"routine flight along the East Coast" with two nukes...I'm assuming this was part of our Cold War deterrence strategy...always having airborn assests...I can buy that...
"as it went into a tailspin" ok...again...why a tailspin?
what happened on that plane?
**THAT'S THE QUESTION**
I can't help but think sabotage of some kind...it's such a fundamental detail to the story...why isn't it discussed?
Thank you Dave Raggett
A Broken Arrow is when the US Military loses a BOMB, it happen quite a few times over they years, it even kill a Cow once when they drop a bomb but it wasn't armed.
During the Cold War, we had nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7 in case of a Russian strike. When you're doing something 24/7, it becomes routine.
Hey folks, it's just South Carolina. Home of Gamecocks and racists. What's the loss?
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
Go jam a dildo up your ass. You're the dumbest motherfucking douchebag I've seen on shitdot in a long time.
"Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. "The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," Jones concludes."
Lets hear it for the Inanimate Carbon Rod! Um, I mean..., Malfunctioning Low-Voltage Switch!
Seriously, this was new news to me. Makes me wonder how many other near catastrophes also didn't happen due to dumb luck.
If this was an attempt to rewrite history and kill Snowden before he was born, then they sent the time cops back over 22 years too early.
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
I guess those who live by the sword, will die by the sword.
I should consider myself quite lucky that my screw-ups are quite limited in scope.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Implies something other than what actually happened; a simple aviation accident.
It just happened the cargo was nuclear weapons. It could have been pallets of toilet paper instead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Cold war... you know with bombers carrying nukes flying 24/7 as part of the mutually assured destruction.
If that bomb did go off, we would have started a full-out thermo-nuclear war with Russia since our "leaders" would NEVER admit that they were responsible for the disaster! Unfortunately, that mind-set of "not our fault" persists today in the "leadership" of the Congress, NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, and office of the President...
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
The B-52G began its mission from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina, carrying four Type B28RI hydrogen bombs[3] on a Cold War airborne alert mission named Operation Chrome Dome.
Guess where the B-52 that broke up over Goldsboro flew out from? That's right, Seymour Johnson Air Force base!
What the article doesn't make clear is if the detonation of the bomb in Goldsboro would have been nuclear, or whether it would have only set off the non-nuclear charges like the two bombs in Palomeres.
If that's the case maybe they should have flown a little east of the coast then. That way we'd be reading a declassified report that read 'USAF almost detonated an A-bomb somewhere over the Atlantic'.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Goldwater, I wish you were here.
I said North Korea, not North Carolina.
Come on, people. It's a bomb. You have to drop it on the thing you want to blow up. You can't drop it thousands of miles from any target and expect it to kill anything. Faro, NC is the middle of fucking nowhere. You'd probably be having a bad day in Goldsboro (population a few thousand), and the fallout would fall over a swath a few hundred kilometers long. Maybe over the Hampton Roads area and the Atlantic ocean. That would probably suck and kill hundreds or thousands, but it's not going to kill millions of people and cause doomsday or whatever. You've got a Katrina-scale disaster, not a Holocaust-scale disaster. The power of nuclear weapons has been vastly exaggerated.
This was 50 years ago. During the Cold War, there were always B-52s in the air with nuclear weapons on board.
Just imagine the conspiracy theories that would have sprung from this. An accident ? How many people would have believed that.
The reporter has confused his bomb trigger designs. This broken arrow was more about cleaning up the nuclear materials if the krysterons had trigger some of the shaped charges. These were fusion not fission weapons.
Oh, but it could never happen now . . .
I have read many articles about that event. This is not new news. It is old news. The FOIA just provided more details, all previously known. Big deal.
purely my imagination...if I think about it, I have to say it relates to how the story is told and the 'zomg switch!' tone of the article
I checked the wikipedia, and there is plenty of details. The pilot reported a fuel leak in a wing during in-flight refueling. Problem got worse, were told to go into holding pattern to use up fuel to prep for landing...fuel leaks too fast (?) then:
"As it descended through 10,000 feet (3,000 m) on its approach to the airfield, the pilots were no longer able to keep the aircraft in trim and lost control of it. "
They 'lost control'...
Is it from the fuel leak? Are we assuming that the wing had damage and that's why the fuel was leaking?
Sounds plausible for sure...
I guess I buy it, but it is a fact that our government leaks out state secrets like this...just look at the 9/11 Commission Report...or the Gulf Of Tonkein stuff...or the fact that some info about the Kennedy Assasination doesnt' get declassified for another decade at least...
I'm just always looking for messages between the lines...
Can you imagine someone sabotaging the plane somehow?
Russia could get all the benefit of having nuked us with none of the blame or retaliation!
Thank you Dave Raggett
All flights by all the armed services within the US, and most outside, are "routine" or "routine training" flights. where "routine" means "Hey, we do this all the time! What could possibly go wrong go wrong go wrong..."
It should be remembered as a hero.
Joe Isuzu voice:
"Trust Us. We're the Government."
"To stop the terrorists."
In the classified part of the published document was a report about a lonesome cowboy hat discovered near the end of the trajectory of the bomb.
I love the smell of gamma rays in the morning.. nukes rock! But PALs took all the fun out of it.
(no offense to NC)
((okay maybe a little))
the bomb is still stuck in the carolina mud as well.
Maybe the two that the US dropped on Japan were the only two which detonated successfully? If generals are really that gung-ho about this stuff, then I don't call two bombs "Bombing the shit out of Japan"...
Task Mangler
The engineers had decided that since the O-ring had only burned through partway on previous launches, they had a safety margin.
The problem is that it wasn't supposed to burn through at all and they didn't understand what was happening.
If you build a system and 3/4 of mission-critical safety features fail, you take the system out of service for a *thorough* rethink and overhaul.
Why would a switch have to 'prevent' detonation? Should it be designed to fail the other way?
I don't know exactly when, but it was eventually canceled in favor of keeping bombers on the ground with crews ready to go in no time flat and "minimum interval takeoffs".
Eventually SAC realized that airborne alert was too dangerous to continue.
In 1958, a Mark 6 bomb WAS dropped at Mars Bluff, South Carolina. It lacked fissionable material, but had 7,600 pounds of conventional explosives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Bluff%2C_South_Carolina Nuclear weapons are no joke-- on purpose or as accidents waiting to happen.
we need to be put in our place. if that means another 9/11 or a few hundred more of similar style attacks... so be it.
However we must lose.
Then if it is just an accident... pointless. We should have another 9/11 style attack over a nuke simply because it's better to have lost a few thousand lives than millions and have a significant negative impact on the whole world economy.
I think they did most of their flying east of the coast, within an hour or so of Soviet territory, but they launched from and returned to the continental United States. It also sounds like they met fuel tankers over land as well.
Who would volunteer to inspect this "dud"? And where would be a safe place to crack it open to check inside? On the other hand, one "oops," and you wouldn't exist long enough to know it.
Hay!
It's Friday!
Time to get away from the multiple LEDs and churning linux/unix clusters to relive the "Good O'l Days."
Yep-er. I've got the popcorn pop'n and I pushing a dvd, "Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love The Bomb" into my xbox 360 Halo III edition.
Here we GO: Go'na bomb'm all. YEEHAA!
Ah! The 'Fog Of War!' Cap'n Kong was rid'n the M39 down on LaPutta ... Or so he thought! It was Greensboro SC! YEEHAA!
Kubrik had it right! The 'North' known as 'Yankee Town' Washington DC needed to keep the 'South' in line as in toe-the-line-or-die.
So, after Kennedy was ex-facto, the Pentagon Brass launches a 'premptive' on the 'South' to avenge the attack on Ft. Sumpter.
Only natural that the Yankee bastards in DC would do such a dastardly thang.
After all, Washington DC is below the Mason-Dixon Line, meaning it IS Southern Territory!
So, just how does Barak Obama, like being situated in the 'Capital Of Southern States' America.
Curious minds shout, "Tell us dat O'."
O', O', O' ;)
So this was the main feature in a recently published book. It's making the rounds because it is part of the press blurb. Indirectly Slashdot is being used to push the guy's book. Well done viral marketing dude.
Broken Arrow, Dull Sword, Faded Giant, Empty Quiver, Bent Spear... All terms used to describe incidents involving nuclear weapons. Oh its all safe... ok, so maybe not. There have been incidents and then there have been incidents. Sweat and the fear of doing something fatal, final and really stupid seems to be the only things keeping us from nuclear destruction for the bulk of the 70 years that these things have been around.
That's not what Murphy said. Murphy said "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will." Look it up on wikipedia.
Maybe it isn't so OT after all. If that 4th switch had failed...
Free Martian Whores!
http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/
That's comforting. I'm glad no one could hack into B-52s back then. Yeah, think about that.
We all deserve to be shot, for no reason.
This was reported on and known about right after it happened.
Let's say the bomb did explode over NC. Millions died.
A total disaster for the Kennedy administration (it was only his 3rd day as POTUS).
What would the Kennedy administration do ?
Would they admit that the explosion was an accident, or would they place all the blames on the then USSR (sneak attack by them commies)?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Actually, you should go watch/listen to the shuttle design class at MIT. It's over at iTunes U, and is incredibly interesting.
The o-ring was outside of its thermal envelope, but the managers didn't think it would be a problem. That had nothing to do with safeties. Are you confusing safety (mechanisms to prevent an unwanted event) with safety (the lack of injury)?
In the other shuttle disaster, the real problem was they never thought the foam could hit hard enough to do damage. Foam had come off lots and lots of times and bounced off the shuttle with no issues, so everyone reasonably assumed it wasn't an issue - until it was.
Neither incident had any issues with safeties; they had issues with risk management.
I think I peed my pants just a little bit
Actually, I think that the first one was in Port Chicago, CA:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=102;t=000073;p=1
I have a book of nuclear accidents from the late-80's that mentions exactly what is claimed to have been "new information."
I suggest you look at the photos/videos of nuclear tests that the governments of the US and USSR have helpfully provided.
Unless they could fake all that in the fifties, including all the glass-lined craters you can tour now, considerably more than two weapons successfully detonated, even if only those two were fired in anger.
Never has been retrieved and might degrade enough to go boom.
I don't know, I might prefer a nuclear blast over the EMP scenario. This novel has the strange overtones, such as the forward, but it's an interesting and scary prospect.
If carrying A-Bombs across the eastern coast is a routine flight I would love to know what the USAF considers an exceptional flight.
Carrying A-Bombs over other countries and dropping them?
This was 1961, at the height of nuclear proliferation. The US government was selling uranium-235, in blister packs, out the back door of every nuclear power plant. Radioactive material was the iPhone of its day. Nobody knew enough to be afraid of it, yet. We were a small step away from having millions of plutonium-powered cars driving around.
It's only today that we're hyper-sensitive about the risks of accidents... Back then, we were pretty sure we'd be on the receiving end of 1,000 Soviet ICBMs any old day, so a stray US nuke wasn't such a big deal.
Of course, if one nuke HAD accidentally gone off over over US soil, you have to wonder if the military could own-up to their failure killing tens of thousands of dead Americans, or if it would be called a Russian attack and cause a full-scale retaliation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Let's say that the bomber had a problem taking off and crashed. What then?
Bear in mind the incident with the B52 happened over [nominally] friendly territory.
It's rather arrogant to assume that just because you don't understand the reason for the arming switch there isn't a reason.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Your system has only three safety switches! Be careful when using it...
operation chrome dome
This isn't news, it has been known about by people in the area for decades.
Er, the bases they had to TAKE OFF from were in the continental US. So maybe we'd be reading a report that a B-52 transiting from base to Atlantic ocean almost blew up NC.
If the capability to pretty much destroy civilization is deployed, you can't completely eliminate the possibility that a tiny bit of it might accidentally actuate. Even if no weapons ever left the armory, a meteor could strike the armory and one out of the thousands of weapons in the armory might detonate.
Cause maybe that would've spooked the other folk with nukes?
Just imagine the 30 years of documents from now back when they get declassified.
Those should be certainly an interesting read indeed. The amount of deception and sneakery going on. Hell, it might never even happen!
Also damn you Snowden, you released them early! Jesus put spoiler tags on that at least, I don't want to know the story yet, I will wait.
an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.'
With that sort of yield it was a Hydrogen Bomb, not just an atom bomb
this is extremely old news. What is the purpose of having this on slashdot (again) ?
== I question your beliefs, makes me a Troll. You insult my beliefs, you are progressive and mainstream. Okay. Got
Atomic bombs are not hydrogen bombs.
I am from that area and I knew about the two nukes that were dropped.. my dad told me the story as a kid. I also know that the one that behaved properly was the one they RECOVERED. The second nuke's chute did not deploy and it proceeded to auger in... deep into the ground. They found a hole in a corn field and they dug, and they dug and they dug... they never found the damn thing. To this day the government owns a little plot of land in the middle of a farmers field outside of Goldsboro, NC. There is a small monument at a nearby highway intersection... this was just declassified... I think not. By the way... there is another unrecovered nuke somewhere in the marshes of South Carolina... it probably went al least 70 feet into the marsh there. I am a geologist and was fascinated by these tales while in school.
For an interesting declassified report on using the B52/bomb failsafes, see: http://www.ufosnw.com/documents/projectdominic1962/projectdominicreport.pdf
And about a year later the Strategic Air Command was scrambled with nukes on board after the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) in Thule Greenland (I was there) picked up radar reflections from the Moon. The 3 computers agreed it was a missile attack from the USSR. SAC was recalled after the "missiles" failed to enter the upper radar fan. Any local Inuit knew that the Moon passed due north about 7 times a month.
Shows the Air Force's lack of foresight, doesn't it, when they placed their runways on land instead of over the ocean.
Best Instruction Before Leaving Earth (BIBLE)
don't complain unless you have another way of resurrecting. read.
Maximum speed of a B-52 is about 600 miles per hour - maybe 650 in a dive - well below the speed of sound. Sorry, Cusco, but the booms you heard were definitely not from B-52s. You might have been hearing a Convair Hustler B-53 bomber, whish was supersonic-capable
If my understanding of quantum physics is correct, didn't they technically detonate? Just not in *this* universe?
We've had, as some of you who Googled for North Carolina Bomb, our report about the Bomb online since 2000. The new report does have new findings -- our FOIA was never answered -- but our report has a lot of information that I haven't seen in the articles so far including maps and interviews. See http://ibiblio.org/bomb
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
1000 Years? Oh my; you certainly are feeling generous with your prediction today. Actually, I would give the human race more than 150 tops at the rate were destroying our planet
I meant to say wouldn't give.
I can't help but wonder if Devine Intervention kept that damn thing from exploding. Not twice, not 4 times, but 261 times more power that the Hiroshima bomb...and we all know how much damage that did. I can't even begin to wrap my imagination around how much carnage that would have wrot.
There will certainly be very serious consequences long before that. Many people will probably die of starvation or in resource wars along the way, but it would take a very arduous and protracted hardship to eliminate every last one of us, that's why I gave it 1000 years. If agriculture ever becomes very difficult or impossible then those who are still around will know on that day that they are in very serious trouble. I'm still hopeful that that day is far enough into the future that none of us will be around to see it.
I suggest you look at the photos/videos of nuclear tests that the governments of the US and USSR have helpfully provided. Unless they could fake all that in the fifties, including all the glass-lined craters you can tour now, considerably more than two weapons successfully detonated, even if only those two were fired in anger.
Well George Pal was pretty awesome, plus the government was spending a lot of money on SFX back in the 1950s because they knew they were going to need the technology to fake moon landings in the 1960s.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29pPZQ77cmI
This was publicized decades ago. Although simple, the bombs were apparently not armed. Possibly by a single, simple switch. There's one in the mud just off the coast that they haven't been able to find too. There are always those in any profession that live with what if and Might have beens, or Gloom and Doom. I was 21 in 61. Took and passed the pilots test. Sinus problems kept me from flying as they didn't know about salt water spray and decongestants were pretty much unknown..
During the crisis we were a lot closer (within feet) to a much bigger balloon going up than a couple dropped unarmed bombs when the plane broke up.
The incident happened when coming in for a landing.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
So much for quality assurance.
One switch failed to operate properly so the device did not detonate.
What a complete failure for the U.S. Air Force during the cold war.
"Hearing the sonic boom of the B-52s'" Those are subsonic jets. No sonic boom. But loud though.
This is my sig.
They knew about the dangers of radioactive contamination, and radiation in general. They just didn't care. That's the real story.
This is my sig.
That must have been a wonderful 3rd day briefing...
"Seriously guys? Day 3? WTF?"