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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