Posted on 06/17/2014 8:39:43 PM PDT by QT3.14
A newly-declassified report reveals that two nuclear bombs accidentally dropped in North Carolina were much closer to detonation than previously reported.
On January 21, 1961 a B-52 bomber went into a tailspin, breaking apart mid-flight over Goldsboro, N.C. The plane was carrying two nuclear bombs, both of which were pushed into free-fall. The parachute for one of the bombs was safely deployed, but the other continued to plummet.
It had been previously believed that, though nerve-racking, the incident was not nearly as dangerous as it sounded as neither bomb was armed. But documents released Thursday by the National Security Archive reveal that the bomb that was in free-fall was in fact armed, and only failed to detonate due to a technical malfunction.
(Excerpt) Read more at military.com ...
Evidently so.
I wonder what the yield on that sucker was…?
This was ‘61 so that was a real monster, I’d wager….
Attack? How about accident?
"Weapon 2" was an armed 3.8 megaton nuclear bomb. By comparison, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that devastated Japan for over a generation weighed .03 megatons combined. If "Weapon 2" had detonated, the fallout would have been 190 times worse than the explosions that ended the World War II.
Read the article.
Fascinating. I’ve never read this on FR before, except for the other 1213 times that it was posted in the last few months. LOL! :)
“Weapon 2” was an armed 3.8 megaton nuclear bomb. By comparison, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that devastated Japan for over a generation weighed .03 megatons combined. If “Weapon 2” had detonated, the fallout would have been 190 times worse than the explosions that ended the World War II.”
Though I'm not a big JFK fan (except for the tax cuts:), I'll concede it must have been less than pleasant to have to deal with this during his first full day in office.
190 times worse than Hiroshima???? Zoinks!
I would have been 1 or 2 - just down the road in Raleigh. This is one of those “things that make you go hmmm”
Read the posts, horse’s ass.
1961. Wow. That’s just.........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
There was a 4 second diff in our posts moron.
Dude, that was like 53 years ago.
Goes to show how much God loves NC> and you.
My smell detector is calling BS on this STORY.
What people today fail to appreciate is how hard SAC pushed itself in those days. In ‘61 we lost an average of one B-52 a month, -in training-.
Two days before this incident another B-52 “Felon 22” broke up and went down over a remote area in southeast Utah. It was January 19th, 1961. An airman who was able to bail out and made it to the ground, gathered his parachute around him to try to protect himself from the bitter cold. He froze to death shortly before the rescuers located him.
As he laid freezing under that tree in a wasteland, JFK gave his inaugural speech in DC. This is the “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any challenge,,,,, Ask not what your country can do for you speech”.
The next day this one went down over North Carolina. Today in the USAF crashes are more rare than ever. But in those days, they were out there over the edge, pushing the limits of men and machines. SAC was a national hero, and is sorely missed today.
The S.Carolina accident was a few years earlier. From Wikipedia:
# March 11, 1958 – Mars Bluff, South Carolina, USA – Non-nuclear detonation of a nuclear bomb
* A USAF B-47 bomber flying from Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah, Georgia accidentally released an atomic bomb. A home was destroyed and several people injured but the bomb’s plutonium core did not explode.
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