L
LequteMan
Guest
According to The Guardian, UK a declassified document, part of a new book titled Atomic Gaffes by Eric Schlosser, reveals how a defective hydrogen bomb, some 260 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, came dramatically close to flattening a large swathe of the US county of Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 23, 1961.
Eric came upon the document doing research for a new book.
The incidence happened three days after President John F Kennedy had made his inaugural address as President.
It was the Cold War and the U.S. had B-52 bombers in the air as a precaution, ready to strike if the Soviet Union made a move. Two Mark 39 four-megaton hydrogen bombs were aboard a B-52 bomber which encountered difficulties shortly after taking off from the Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro.
The heavy, multi-engine jet went into a tail-spin and broke up in mid-air and the two bombs broke free.
One of the free-falling weapons automatically deployed its parachute and armed its trigger mechanism. There were four "fail-safe" devices built into the bomb. Three of them failed.
All that prevented the plummeting super-weapon from going off was a single electronic switch.
Both hydrogen bombs ended up burying themselves deep in fields in the North Carolina countryside.
The radioactive fallout could have affected millions as it drifted over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even New York.
Parker F. Jones, a senior engineer responsible for the safety of nuclear weapons conceded in a secret 1970s study into the accident,: "One simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe".
This final line of defence could easily have been shorted by a simple electrical spark, he added.
Rudolph Herzog said in his bookA Short History of Nuclear Folly that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did say in 1983 that the bomb had gone through six of the seven steps needed for detonation.
Using freedom of information, Eric said he has discovered that at least 700 "significant" accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded between 1950 and 1968 alone.
"The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," he said. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."
