I knew about this years ago and read about it in books. I am pretty sure this was the incident...
Thanks, Kennedy.
Little bit of hyperbole there, I don't think that bomb was going to go off if two random wires crossed when it hit the ground.
Good grief, it isn't like the movies where they say "DON'T CUT THE RED WIRE!"
When the United States still nominally put God first. The only thing the article didn’t say was that it was a miracle, which it was.
Haven’t read the book, but at first thought, it doesn’t make sense. Why would a b-52, flying over the eastern US, have two nukes in a state that could even remotely possibly make them go off. They can be completely “safed”..in that even a devastating impact..which breaks the bomb open...would cause local area contamination..but there is no chance of an explosion..
I love nukes and eat up a I can about the nuke testing era. I had never heard of this particle incident either. The article is sensational though, because it sounds like the safety systems worked as designed. They got banged around a hell of a lot and didn’t detonate. That’s what was supposed to happen.
There’s another one still lost in the mud off the coast of Savannah.
There is a history of the SAC called 15 minutes. It details this and many others. One is in the ocean off the coast of Georgia. A B-50 lost two engines in a storm over the Saint Lawrence seaway in the early 1950’s. It jettisoned a nuke that detonated.
There is a book recently out called Command and Control that covers this and many other incidents.
I suspect this is newsy only because of association with the book. The author has been making the talkshow rounds.
I saw it on the news ticker on CNN this morning but hadn’t read about the details. Pretty scary stuff.
After this incident they started putting fail safe devices on the cores to prevent an accidentally nuclear device going off...
We shared that technology with the soviets after a rogue submarine lanched a nuclear attack against Pearl Harbour.....in May,1967...
Thank God...the detonation device to start the nuclear explosion failed and sank the sub...
The CIA thinks the KGB was behind it....
These are the official reports that provide the details of what happened. It was general news when it happened.
Nearly went off because of an extraordinary event that caused the safeguards to be wrecked.
I think my dad was stationed near Goldsboro then. Means I would not be here today.
i’d like to know what happen last october 8th when two 4.5s popped off the coast of south carolina
I have actually driven past the site. It is out in the middle of the country not far from Goldsboro and Seymour Johnson AFB.
The state put up a historical marker two years ago. This is in a tiny town called Eureka, but the actual crash site is in an unincorporated area called Faro.
I was a nuclear weapons specialist in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. A friend of who was also in the field, M H Maggelet said it best in his post to this article.
“The two Mark 39 Mod 2 bombs could not have detonated in a nuclear manner due to several factors.
First, the high voltage thermal battery on bomb 2, the one with the damaged switch that appeared to show “arm”, was in fact never activated and thus could not charge the X-unit to subsequently fire the weapon detonators.
This fact, along with dozens of others, has been declassified for nearly two decades and is not “newly discovered”. Jim Oskins and I printed these facts in our book “Broken Arrow, The Declassified History of US Nuclear Weapons Accidents” in 2007.
Our book contains the actual air accident report, Explosive Ordnance Disposal render safe, and Atomic Energy Commission post mortem which shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the weapons could not have detonated due to “stray voltage” or any other nonsense (compliments of anti-nuclear activist Eric Schlosser).
The electrical arm/disarm switches could not, and did not function after high speed impact with the earth (which led to the destruction of the bomb and no high explosive detonation).
Additionally, each bomb had TWO electrically operated solenoid safety switches which were designed to be turned via power supplied by the aircraft monitoring equipment and two physically separate crew members on the B-52.
There were an additional six components and processes which would have to have taken place for the X-unit to charge and fire.
None of these occurred, as was designed, and despite the hand wringing and “expert” analysis by folks who were never in the nuclear weapons field (such as Schlosser, Burr, et. al.), the bombs could not have detonated and certainly weren’t “one step” away from detonation.””
Very old news.
I read about this decades ago.
I appreciate hyperbole as much as anyone but.
Good grief!
The ignorant fear everything.
These bombs were harmless and eventually found.
Must be a slow news day.
Two hydrogen bombs, or twenty, would not “wipe out North Carolina”. Stupid rhetoric.
Cueing the MSM lackeys to blame GW Bush in 3...3...1....