---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: WILTON <wilt...@nc.rr.com>
Date: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: [MBZ] OT: Bombing Goldsboro
To: Mercedes Discussion List <mercedes@okiebenz.com>
'Nother case of an author filling in gaps in his "knowledge" with his
imagination. No release lever was "triggered," and there was no such
lever. Bombs were wrenched out by extremely unusual centrifugal forces.
'Even had to make up prevailing winds and crossing wires.
Mattocks flung himself in desperation toward co-pilot's open hatch on the
right; again, extremely unusual centrifugal/rotational forces redirected
him accidently through pilot's hatch on the left. Aircraft likely inverted
when mattocks exited.
Pilot landed in swamp; one bomb landed in edge of field with parachute in
tree; second bomb landed in farmer's field and made deep impact crater.
"Optimum blast altitude" was not a factor; both were "ground contact."
Wilt
On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 2:49 PM, arche...@embarqmail.com <
arche...@embarqmail.com> wrote:
>
> Nuclear bomb nearly detonated after falling on North Carolina -
> declassified report
>
> In a scenario that could've been extremely devastating, the United States
> narrowly averted a nuclear disaster in 1961 when an atomic bomb nearly
> detonated after falling out of a B-52 bomber that broke up in the sky.
>
> According to the Washington Post, the incident took place on January 21,
> 1961 - less than 20 years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and
> Nagasaki - and is explained further in a recently declassified report
> published by the National Security Archives.
>
> When the US Air Force aircraft went into a tailspin and broke up, the two
> bombs fell towards Goldsboro, North Carolina. The parachute for one of the
> weapons failed to deploy, and the plane crash had actually pushed the bomb
> into "armed" mode by the time it hit the ground. Luckily for North
> Carolina, the plane's destruction also damaged the switch necessary to
> trigger detonation
>
> /"The report implied that because Weapon 2 landed in a free-fall, without
> the parachute operating, the timer did not initiate the bomb's high voltage
> battery ("trajectory arming"), a step in the arming sequence,"/ wrote Bill
> Burr of the National Security Archives.
>
> /"For Weapon 2, the Arm/Safe switch was in the "safe" position, yet it was
> virtually armed because the impact shock had rotated the indicator drum to
> the "armed" position. But the shock also damaged the switch contacts, which
> had to be intact for the weapon to detonate."/
>
> Burr noted in his report just how fine the line was and is between safety
> and destruction.
>
> /"Perhaps this is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had in mind, a
> few years later, when he observed that, 'by the slightest margin of chance,
> literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was
> averted,"/ he wrote.
>
> These details are just the latest to surface about the incident, which was
> first revealed by nuclear weapons expert Eric Schlosser last year in a book
> titled, "Command and Control." Through a Freedom of Information Act
> request, Schlosser was able to obtain documentation regarding the incident
> for the first time, and helped shed light on just how close the Air Force
> came to witnessing an atomic bomb explode on US soil.
>
> The documents revealed that three of the four safety switches on the other
> bomb failed to work properly, meaning, as Schlosser noted, that only "one
> simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United
> States and a major catastrophe." The parachute on this one deployed, but
> when the bomb struck the ground the final firing signal triggered, only to
> be halted by that fourth safety switch.
>
> The bombs contained a payload of four megatons each and could have
> generated explosions 260 times more powerful than the one that occurred in
> Hiroshima.
>
> Before the documents related to the Goldsboro incident surfaced, the US
> government had denied that its nuclear weapons stockpile had ever put the
> nation at risk.
>
> *www.digitaljournal.com*/article/358759
> or Google: Goldboro Incident
>
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