A U.S. atom bomb nearly exploded in 1961 over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima, according to a declassified document published in a British newspaper on Friday.
The Guardian newspaper said the document, obtained by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gave the first conclusive evidence that the United States came close to a disaster in January 1961.
The incident happened when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina, after a B-52 bomber broke up in midair.
There has been persistent speculation about how serious the incident was and the U.S. government has repeatedly denied its nuclear arsenal put Americans’ lives at risk through safety flaws, the newspaper said.
But the newly published document said one of the two bombs behaved exactly in the manner of a nuclear weapon in wartime, with its parachute opening and its trigger mechanisms engaged. Only one low-voltage switch prevented a cataclysm.
Fallout could have spread over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even New York City, the paper said, threatening the lives of millions of people.
In the document, Parker Jones, a senior engineer in the Sandia National Laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons, concluded that “one simple, dynamo-technology, low-voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.”
Old news, yet relevant. It did lead to us making the safeties on the nukes much safer. We even shared some of this information with the Soviets so they could make their nukes safer. Had this weapon gone off at one mile up the primary fireball would more than have made contact with the ground (simple math means the primary fireball would have been more than 2 miles across and more than two miles up and down). North Carolina would have been the first state in the union to have a man-made lake made in just a few seconds. Large sections of the state would, if this had happened, be as uninhabitable as Bikini Atoll is today.
As good as we were in handling nukes, it is a wonder that no (known) accidental detonation ever occurred in either England, France, People Republic of China, the US or former Soviet Union.
When the technological genie gets let out of the bottle we’ve got to take responsibility for it.
Nearly everyone I have know within the military has known about this for over 40 years.
Wonder why the Guardian is just getting around to publishing it now?