Most of my blog posts are about nuclear power generation. I did do a series on nuclear weapons but it has not been my focus. The world is trying to get rid of nuclear weapons and a lot of people are working on it. I think most people would agree that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. On the issue of nuclear power, unfortunately, a lot of people still think it is a good energy source and a lot of money is being spent to promote it. In any case, I thought that I would post an article today about a near disaster involving nuclear weapons inside the United States back in the 1960s.
On January 26, 1961 a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air while flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina. On board the bomber were two four megaton Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. The bombs fell from the wreckage of the plane. The U.S. government said that there was no danger of detonation and no threat to public safety. In the decades since, there has been speculation that the government was being less than honest about the danger.
One of the bombs functioned as it was designed to do when dropped on a target. Its parachute opened, the trigger mechanisms engaged. Three of four safety systems in the bomb failed to operate as intended. When the bomb hit the ground, a signal was sent to the core of the bomb to detonate. The only reason that the bomb did not explode was the fourth safety feature, a single low voltage switch that did not trip. If the four megaton bomb had detonated, the resulting explosion would have completely obliterated Goldsboro. There would have been lethal fallout over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city, threatening millions of lives.
An engineer detailed what happened in a report written eight years after the accident. He concluded that that the safety systems on U.S. hydrogen bombs were inadequate and needed to be improved. He said that the final switch could have been shorted out by an electric surge and the bomb could easily have detonated. The report was classified and never made public before last Friday.
As part of his research for a book titled "Command and Control", Eric Schlosser filed a Freedom of Information request with the U.S. government and found the report written eight years after the Goldsboro incident. The Guardian, a British newspaper, published an article about the North Carolina accident on Friday, October 13, 2013..
A little over fifty years ago, the U.S. came perilously close to a major nuclear catastrophe on the East Coast. The effect on people, property and the U.S. economy would have been devastating. While I understand the motivation the U.S. government had for keeping critical information from the U.S. public, I can't help but think that if people had known how close we came to nuking an American city in 1961, the entire Cold War era and nuclear arms race might have turned out very differently.
