
US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina in 1961 - gmac
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961
======
CapitalistCartr
We dropped bombs all over the place during the Cold War, until about '70 when
we stopped carrying them in the bomb bay. North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Arkansas, California, Greenland, Spain (4), In the Atlantic, Pacific,
etc. Broken Arrows, Bent Spears, Dull Swords. As they say in the movie, scary
it happens so often we have a name for it.

Personally, I was only involved in one Bent Spear, and two Dull Swords.

~~~
cynwoody
Have we ever had an Empty Quiver? Or come close?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_incident_terminology)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Not yet. The guarding of our nuclear stockpile was, during the Cold War,
excellent. I don't know how it is now. I hear not-so-good things. Damn kids,
get off my lawn.

~~~
BinaryBrainz
Around 2008 the Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff were fired due
to a massive screw-up regarding the transport and handling of our nukes [1].

The summary that I got from the situation was that a plane heading through the
heartland of America accidentally transported a nuke, when instead they
thought it was just some other type of bomb which basically means a nuke was
accidentally transported across the US without anyone controlling the shipment
or noticing until much later.

The current chatter and inclinations are that things have improved due to more
rigorous checks and inspections. For me this is very believable due to the
amount of news that is made when one of the nuke squadrons fail a regular
inspection due to minor mistakes [2].

[1]
[http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20080605/NEWS/806050301...](http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20080605/NEWS/806050301/Moseley-
Wynne-forced-out)

[2]
[http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20130819/NEWS/308190013...](http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20130819/NEWS/308190013/Unit-
failed-nuclear-missile-inspection-raring-second-chance)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The summary that I got from the situation was that a plane heading through
> the heartland of America accidentally transported a nuke, when instead they
> thought it was just some other type of bomb which basically means a nuke was
> accidentally transported across the US without anyone controlling the
> shipment or noticing until much later.

I believe the 2008 actions were fallout from the 2007 Bent Spear involving six
nuclear cruise missiles on a B52 (not a single bomb), described in the
Wikipedia article cited upthread [1].

[1] here again:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_incident_terminology#Bent_Spear)

------
tlb
The author seems to think people aren't very familiar with electrical
switches. But normal people are frequently only one switch away from likely
death. Like if you turn off your electric lawnmower and reach inside. It's
recommended to have a fail-safe, but switches don't spontaneously turn on at
even 1 in a billion and most people don't write breathless articles about the
one time they were only one switch away from death 50 years ago.

~~~
wnevets
> Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to
> prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly

3/4 of the safety mechanisms on a 4 megaton bomb failed over US soil.

I would hardly call this a breathless article.

~~~
stevetursi
> and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity

What does "highly vulnerable" even mean? Could it have been triggered by the
wind? If I'm the guy at the control panel, am I accidentally hitting that
switch a couple of times per week? Maybe the only way that switch gets
triggered is if I black out from the stress and my nose hits it on my way to
the floor.

I get the significance of three/four barriers failing, but if the fourth one
has a one-in-a-billion chance, is it really fair to say North Carolina was
"dramatically close" to being nuked?

~~~
wnevets
> the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by
> an electrical jolt

I would say its fair, would you feel safe if all bombs only had this switch
from the 50s?

~~~
smsm42
That's like comparing losing a lottery by guessing only 3 numbers out of 4 and
playing a lottery where you need to guess only one number. These are
statistically very different events, since you don't guess other 3 numbers
correctly every time - and all fail-safes aren't failing at the same time.
That's the point of having many of them - if each of them fails one-in-a-
million time, you get 10^24 of security.

~~~
nostromo
Here we have a sample of 8 safety measures across two bombs with 3 failures.

That's not 1 in a million, that's 1 in 3.

~~~
corin_
That's not how probability works, though. I could go and buy a lottery ticket
tomorrow for the first time in my life and win the jackpot, it wouldn't mean
that the odds of winning are 100%.

~~~
nostromo
No, this isn't a problem of probability, it's a problem of "not enough data."

Based on this tiny sample, here's the lottery analogy:

The lottery will flip 4 coins that have a 37.5% chance of being heads.

If you roll 4 heads lots of people die. So, just using this very inadequate
sample from a single declassified document, you could estimate that a misfired
bomb has a 2% chance of detonation (37.5%^4).

Obviously none of us know the real dataset, but my point is simply that it's
not comforting that so many safety measures failed. (Which, as it happens, is
also the opinion of the author of the original report in the article.)

~~~
corin_
> _No, this isn 't a problem of probability, it's a problem of "not enough
> data."_

That was exactly my point, that with such little data you cannot judge the
probability.

------
narfquat
Looks like the other bomb disintegrated on impact.

From Wikipedia:

The second bomb plunged into a muddy field at around 700 miles per hour (310
m/s) and disintegrated. The tail was discovered about 20 feet (6.1 m) below
ground. Parts of the bomb were recovered, including its tritium bottle and the
plutonium. However, excavation was abandoned as a result of uncontrollable
ground-water flooding. Most of the thermonuclear stage, containing uranium,
was left in situ. The Army Corps of Engineers purchased a 400 feet (120 m)
circular easement over the buried component. The University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill determined the buried depth of the secondary component to be
180 feet (55 m), plus or minus 10 feet (3.0 m).

------
BrandonMarc
Terrifying question: had this thing detonated, would the powers that be - with
only a few minutes to decide whether to defend the homeland while they still
could - have realized it was an aircraft accident and not a hostile surprise
attack? I think you know the answer.

~~~
mpyne
The answer is that they had both aircraft-tracking radar and "early warning"
radar designed to pick up incoming ICBM re-entry vehicles by that time, so it
would have been fairly easy to verify that a single nuclear detonation around
a militarily and strategically innocouous site was an accident.

But don't let that stop you from panicing.

~~~
Osiris
I would be highly skeptical that the President would have told the American
people "Oops, our bad. That was just an accident". It's very likely that the
government would have blamed the attack on someone other than the U.S. even
with the evidence in their hands that it was an accident. Seriously, can you
imagine a U.S. President admitting to the public that the military just
'accidently' killed millions of people?

~~~
Dove
In 1961, JFK would have been president. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when
an American U-2 was shot down and the pilot killed, he chose not to retaliate.
Not to. Just let the Russians shoot down one of ours, and did nothing.

He did the right thing, too. It was an already tense situation, and letting it
escalate into all out war . . . no one can say where it would stop.

Whatever you think of current politicians, JFK was a great man. There's no
way, no way at all, he would have started a global hot war out of sheer pride.

But beyond that, it was a very different time. The US really was in mortal
combat, which is not something this generation has witnessed. "We will find
those terrorists" was a popular message on 9/11\. "The Russians hit us for
real and we have to hit back," during the Cold War, would not have been. It
would have sounded like the end of the world. The political temptation would
not have been to make an accident look like a real strike, but -- if anything
-- to make a real strike look like an accident.

~~~
lostlogin
Interesting phrasing. Wouldn't Cuba be the one expected to react? A spy plane
was sent at them and they kill it and the US is the wronged party? Don't get
me wrong, I don't side with Cuba over the enormously provocative way they
behaved, but I don't fell sorry for the US either. The Turkey part of the saga
is just as bad.

------
acqq
Weirder than fiction. A decade ago it was published that the "president's
code" that should be the last permission before firing the nuclear rockets was
for many years "0000" and that all army officers in charge knew it.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-
action-links.cfm)

I remember thinking "that would be the nice gag in James Bond movie, but it
was real"!

This time, all this "we dropped bombs all the time" doesn't sound crazier that
"Dr. Strangelove."

------
tptacek
Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6389633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6389633)

------
Mindless2112
The idea behind the design of fail-safe controls is that there are _enough_ to
prevent accidental detonation when an atomic weapon is in a hostile
environment (in this case falling out of a disintegrating aircraft). Given
that the number of tests that must be done to ensure that a bomb doesn't
detonate when any _k_ of _n_ bad events happen grows exponentially, you can
only guarantee that the bomb is fail-safe to a certain degree; so it's not
unreasonable that 3 of 4 switches failed to prevent detonation; the last one
was designed in just as much as the first 3.

Given that there haven't (as far as I know) been any accidental nuclear
detonations despite the ridiculous number of accidental drops, I'd say the
fail-safe control engineers are doing a pretty good job.

~~~
JackFr
Alternate title for article: Nuclear Weapons 65-Year Flawless Safety Record

------
bitops
Growing up in Scandinavia, I remember reading about these as a kid and being
fascinated. It's amazing how far the Cold War reached globally.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash)

------
runarb
Another interesting article on nuclear security in the real world:

"British nukes were protected by bike locks" \-
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm)

------
rwallace
The lesson I draw from this incident is that when you want the highest degree
of safety, you want many layers. The plane failed, three safety mechanisms in
the bomb failed - but the very last safety mechanism worked.

~~~
tomjen3
I always want more safety on those damn things. Put at least ten safeties on
them, the price is basically nothing compared to an accident.

------
coldtea
"Using freedom of information, he discovered that at least 700 "significant"
accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded between
1950 and 1968 alone."

That's nice for when one uses official statistics to defend the safety of such
things...

------
ImprovedSilence
I wonder if any espionage/sabotage was the cause of this. I've been around the
block enough to see through articles like this that overlook things LIKE HOW A
B52 JUST "BROKE UP" WHILE CARRYING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That shit really doesn't
just happen at random, and the article is suspiciously void of information on
how/why one of the most proven aircraft of the time just fell out of the
sky... I find THAT the more interesting/terrifying object of the story here.

------
dm2
Picture of one of the bombs taken with a GameBoy camera.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goldsboro_nuclear_bomb.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goldsboro_nuclear_bomb.jpg)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash)

> "large enough to have a 100% kill zone of seventeen miles"

Wow, this quote makes you realize the scale. Nuclear bombs are discussed so
frequently that it's easy to forget their potential.

> "Five of the six arming mechanisms on one of the bombs activated, causing it
> to execute many of the steps needed to arm itself, such as charging the
> firing capacitors and, critically, deployment of a 100-foot-diameter (30 m)
> retard parachute. The parachute allowed that bomb to hit the ground with
> little damage."

What would cause any of the "arming mechanisms" to activate?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuze#Fuze_safety.2Farming_mecha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuze#Fuze_safety.2Farming_mechanisms)

[http://cryptome.org/nuke-fuze.htm](http://cryptome.org/nuke-fuze.htm)

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is sort of a side note, but that 17 mile kill zone for a 3.8 megaton bomb
would depend on it exploding in the air, which would allow more of the energy
of the bomb to hit the ground rather than be forced out along the ground or be
directed into excavating a useless crater or up in to the air. A ground-level
blast would have a much shorter radius of lethality but it would also create
vastly more radioactive fallout.

~~~
dm2
If the final safeguard wasn't in place, rather than just "5 of the 6", then
wouldn't the bomb detonate at the proper altitude automatically? One of the
two floated down with a parachute like it was suppose to.

Would there be any evidence of what even happened if the nuclear bomb had
exploded? The plane and bomb would be completely vaporized. It would be
nothing but conspiracy and rumors as to why a nuclear bomb went off that day
in Goldsboro.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's hard to say without knowing all of the details, which won't happen for a
while due to the extreme secrecy surrounding the technical details of the bomb
design among other things. However, the implication of the reports about the
accident are that the collision with the ground was what caused most of the
other safeguards to have failed, even though one of the safeguards appears to
have failed during the breakup of the aircraft.

------
sehugg
The declassified document is new, but this has been well known for some time
and corroborated by multiple trusted sources:

[http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/story.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/story.html)

Mr. Schlosser is doing a good job promoting his book though.

------
frank_boyd
I'm curious, assume the detonation had happened:

Would you see any of the past/recent administrations blame themselves for it?

Wouldn't the blame instantly be put on terrorists/russians/iranians/etc? And
wouldn't this have lead to some kind of WWIII?

------
MichaelMoser123
I think Superman intervened personally in this case and fixed the fourth
switch while the bomb was descending; However this detail is still classified
;-)

------
vezzy-fnord
Reminded me of other nuclear hijinks, like Project A119.

------
ovoxo
Well, that explains why Michael Jordan was such a freak of nature.

------
bsullivan01
The headline is kinda accurate but definitely misleading. 'Accidentally'
should have been added to it, the way it is now it seems like they planned on
doing it and then changed their mind last minute or something like that.

Accidents do happen.

------
madaxe
What the article neglects to mention is that after months of searching, they
never found the bomb. It's still somewhere under the silt near Tybee island,
biding its time.

~~~
Zikes
If they never found the bomb, how did they determine what safety mechanisms
did and did not fail?

~~~
fhars
According to wikipedia, they found most of the second bomb:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsboro,_North_Carolina#Histo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsboro,_North_Carolina#History)

------
MWil
TIL Hacker News is Reddit

~~~
Zikes
Something else I hope you'll learn today:
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
Ihmahr
Surprise surprise...

