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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?
Maybe the South would have finally surrendered.
and some person will get a fake death as well.
It wouldn't be justice because those people would have had nothing to do with the massacre in Hiroshima. That logic doesn't follow at all.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, but what should we have done to avenge the millions killed by the Imperial Japanese forces, wiped out every last man, women and child in Japan? Thankfully the US leadership was not as vengeful and bloodthirsty as you.
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.
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.
I've read one of Truman's considerations in nuking Japan is that the Japanese were starving to death about a quarter of a million innocents each month in the various countries the occupied, so you might want to consider that fact in your rush to judgement.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
"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]
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.
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.
Oh, but it could never happen now . . .
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
My "rushed" judgement is that it's not right to use nuclear weapons on innocent civilians.
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No, but the nazi forces would've deserved it. I'm surprised how much confusion my use of the word "ironic" causes around here.
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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.
...if the krysterons...
...had trigger[ed] some of the shaped charges.
I think you mean krytrons.
Has it been made public whether the last switch would have ignited all the triggers or just some of them? It makes a big difference.
These were fusion not fission weapons.
Fusion weapons are triggered by fission weapons.
Finally, your title, Protective Active Links, should be Permissive Action Links.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
It seems my use of the word "irony" confused you and everyone else here.
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I agree. And I think people should work hard and prove they can read and interpret before being allowed to post.
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Joe Isuzu voice:
"Trust Us. We're the Government."
"To stop the terrorists."
Here's a homework assignment for you: Assume that you're in charge of Allied forces on August 5, 1945. This war has been going on for almost six years, and has claimed an average of around 200,000 lives per week for that entire period - most of them innocent men, women and children.
Your task in this alternate world is to figure out how to bring an end to the war with the loss of fewer lives beyond that date than were lost in the real world, but without using any nuclear bombs. Keep in mind that tens of thousands of innocent victims are still dying on a daily basis from conventional attacs. You get zero credit for hand-waving or philosophical rants. Actionable strategic plans only.
Japanese killed millions of Americans?
Can you read? Where did I say Americans?
US leadership was and is The single most bloodthirsty entity ever to have occurred on this side of the Universe. You can drink any cool-aid you want but that is a fact, you can check the list of illegal aggressions by the US.
The Nazi invasion of the USSR killed over 30 million people. The Japanese invasion of China killed between 20 and 35 million. The Rape of Nanjing alone killed more people than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. What are you smoking?
I love the smell of gamma rays in the morning.. nukes rock! But PALs took all the fun out of it.
My "rushed" judgement is that it's not right to use nuclear weapons on innocent civilians.
Regardless of whether it prevents more civilian deaths than it causes? Because that was probably the case.
You deserve to be shot.
You too deserve to be shot, for treason.
You guys both deserve to sit down and have a beer and a pizza -- you'd probably each find that the other is a perfectly agreeable person. It's silly to rhetorically condemn people to death over a difference in opinion about the meaning of justice.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Actionable strategic plans only.
Unleash the Red Army. Ok, that was done, but it didn't last long. Given their track record, I've no doubt that they would've finished off the Imperial Japanese forces. And given their track record, they would have killed a lot more civilians than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings did. We would also have had a communist Japan and South Korea, to the delight of the inhabitants there, and with more fun in the Cold War.
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
> What about the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki then, what did they do to deserve getting killed?
What did they do to deserve being singled out by clueless bleeding heart morons and elevated above all of the other civilian casualties of the war including those that died in Dresden and Tokyo and many other places?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
You know squat about the war in the Pacific. You are clearly the one drinking the kool-aid.
"Drinking the kool-aid" is an especially ironic metaphor considering how the Japanese conducted themselves in those battles.
Clueless idiot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
An incredibly murderous, careless and risky bet, wouldn't you agree? What about dropping the bomb on enemy forces instead of civilians, wouldn't that have gotten the message across? There is no way to justify dropping nuclear weapons on civilians.
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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.
> My "rushed" judgement is that it's not right to use nuclear weapons on innocent civilians.
Yes. It would have been better that we repeated Iwo Jima and Okinawa across the entirely of Japan.
Clueless idiot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> An incredibly murderous, careless and risky bet, wouldn't you agree?
Based on an understanding of the actual facts involved, no.
Although there's just the absurdity of the idea, that you can cleanly separate out the military targets from the civilian casualties. Even now that's an extraordinarily difficult thing to do and really only possible for 2 or 3 nations on the entire planet.
Any target of military interest is likely to come with unavoidable civilian casualties. Some armies even go out of their way to make this unavoidable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No you're the clueless idiot. Read my original post and note particularly my expression "ironic justice" and let it hit you this time around. It completely flew over your head the first time.
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F: philosophical rant.
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.
Do you have something hard? All Americans had to do was negotiate a surrender with the Japanese, who were trying to do so while keeping their Emperor as a face-saving gesture. The idea that we just HAD to occupy the country was a joke, as the two most powerful navies in the world no longer had to focus on containing Germany, and Japan's was destroyed.
Instead, we nuked two cities to get our "unconditional surrender", and then....let the Japanese keep their Emperor.
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.
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.
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/
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 !
More civilians were killed in Tokyo from Allied bombing. Why do you hate the people living in Tokyo?
Learn to love Alaska
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 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.
Actually, the bomb was aimed to put as many enemy war factories, including munitions and aircraft plants, as well as a logistically critical bridge, in the predicted blast zone. Or it was aimed so as to cause as many casualties as possible and hamstringing the enemy's munition plants was just gravy. Either way, targeting munitions plants is allowed under Just War Theory.
Bombing enemy forces probably would have been just as effective at getting the message across, if sinking a carrier battle group without a trace allowed damage assessment. Like it or not, they needed to make a crater since most of Japan's forces were naval.
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.
who were trying to do so while keeping their Emperor as a face-saving gesture.
No, a faction of their leadership was considering an armistice as long as the government was left in place largely intact. Other factions were intent on fighting on until the death of the last soldier.
Do you really think that these leaders who certainly faced executions for war crimes were willing to turn themselves over to the Allies within the next couple of days, but hesitated only because the cared about whether the emperor was saving face?
No matter what, any negotiations to settle this would have dragged on for weeks, all while the Soviet Union staged a bloody invasion from the north, and the Americans continued fire bombing cities to keep up the pressure. Far more would have died than from the atom bombs.
I see some are chiming in here wondering why there is focus on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not other cities fire bombed by the Allies.
Fair enough. The novelty of the weapon does not change the morality of the act.
However, a more apposite counterpoint to the fatalities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the 200,000 Chinese civilians dying each month at the hands of the Japanese government via its army in China, more than who died in the two atomic bombings combined. And then there were the contemporaneous actions of the Imperial Japanese Army in Vietnam, where it was in the process of organizing a tropical repeat of Stalin's Great Famine. In the summer of 1945 the IJA was busy confiscating all of the food from the Vietnamese in the areas it controlled. This was in effect sentencing some 7 million Vietnamese to a likely death by starvation during the winter-spring of 1945-1946. (The civilians of Japan were also doomed to a great famine during the winter-spring of 1945-1946, though not so through, and that due the choices of their own government.)
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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...
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.
He is smoking the pipe of gross ignorance. Oblivious to history.
My friend, the task you set upon me is not a difficult one at all. I sue for peace. With close to 100% probability I could gain an almost immediate cease-fire. I could then obtain a peace treaty where both the Japanese and the US get to keep their respective sovereignty, government and armed forces intact, with territorial lines in place de facto. The existent naval blockade that would have strangled them unaided before too long would be ended. OK, I might have to give them Okinawa back. By August 5 1945 the Japanese were looking for a way to stop a fight they could not possibly win. EVER.
Hey, you didn't specify that I had to be able to claim complete victory.
I am using it correctly, it's just you who have a strangely ingrained understanding of it. Dipshit.
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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
If you kept the Japanese sovereignty, government and military intact in 1945 then what would have changed there? Would you have ended up with a misgoverned, starving populace like Germany after WWI, so just setting the stage for Great Pacific War II by about 1965, or a glorious Socialist revolution by about 1955? One problem with the end of WWI is that the allies did not occupy Germany afterwards -- for that reason the German people could be told by their leaders later that they had not lost WWI -- that traitors in the German forces had given up. I know it sounds patronizing, but occupying post-war Japan was best, especially for the Japanese populace. The post-war Japanese democracy has turned out quite well for everybody. As far as putting a quick end to the war -- the Soviets were already invading Japan from the north -- it would have been bad news if they had gotten very far and it had ended up with a partitioned Japan like Germany (and later on Korea and Vietnam -- those didn't work out well). So Japan in 1945 is probably one of the very few examples where 'nation building' after defeat in a war worked well. It wouldn't have happened without post-war occupation.
That assertion would have more credibility if you could cite even one inaccuracy in what was written. Bluster doesn't hide ignorance very well.
Atomic bombs are not hydrogen bombs.
He/she is just standard left wing parrot who has never read history in his/her pathetic left wing little life.
As far as bloodthirsty is concerned, there is Ghenghis Khan, Tamerlane, Stalin and Hitler. In that order.
The left tends to forget that the Soviet Union was a really nasty piece of work.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
For an interesting declassified report on using the B52/bomb failsafes, see: http://www.ufosnw.com/documents/projectdominic1962/projectdominicreport.pdf
That's completely outside the scope of the question posed, but yes, all those are additional points to consider. Was the demilitarization of Japanese culture worth the over 100,000 Japanese lives lost after August 5? That's another good one to consider.
ebno-10db already dismantled our anonymous hero so thoroughly that the latter is now at -1 and you probably didn't bother to read it. All I was doing was applauding ebno-10db (obviously).
Even in NYC a single warhead would not kill millions. Anywhere else and it wouldn't be even close to a million.
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
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
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.
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
"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?"