Atom Bomb almost detonated in NC

The actual (formerly) classified document, referenced in the news reports, has now been published here:

Goldsboro revisited: account of hydrogen bomb near-disaster over North Carolina – declassified document | World news | theguardian.com

 

You may want to check your sources. The articles are about a book written by an investigative reporter. The reporter used freedom of information reports for some of his source material. But a freedom of information report does not make someone a technical expert in a field. So I would prefer to hear from a nuclear weapons expert, an engineer, critique what has been reported.

Given the book is about weapons 40 and 50 years ago, it is a fair thing for Congress to ask if current nuclear fusing allows a disintegrating aircraft to live-fuse today's weapons. A fair question but unlikely to be answered with technical details.

We're still left with this fact: there have been USA nuclear weapons accidents and crashes yet . . . no unexpected nuclear explosions. The explosives used to initiate a nuclear reaction have gone off but not with the timing needed to initiate a nuclear explosion.

Bob Wilson

 

Check out the link I just posted a few minutes ago. It shows the actual 2 page document written by a Sandia National Labs nuclear weapons safety expert 45 years ago that is the focus of the recent news articles.

No need to speculate what the reporters based their stories on -- just go read the government document yourself.

 

The way I'm reading the linked document, I see no claim that any safety mechanisms within the bomb failed.

One simply wasn't useful in the air. Two are not effective for the aircraft breakup scenario. So there was really only one safety mechanism within the bomb to address this scenario. It didn't fail. But it seems that even it could have been bypassed if the aircraft's wires were crossed in a certain reasonably plausible fashion as part of the aircraft breakup.

The single remaining safety of this and other bombs was recognized is seriously inadequate, allowing a single point failure in future aircraft accidents. Subsequent designs somehow addressed this inadequacy. Whether or not those improvements are sufficient for our sensibilities is probably a state secret.

 

So according to the article:

1. safety - ??
2. safety - ??
3. safety - ??
4. safety - ??
5. safety - ??
6. "Alt 197 was performed on these bombs to provide additional safety, but it only interrupted (additionally) the lines between the bisch generator and the low voltage thermal battery." - sounds like "alteration 197" worked.

The other five safeties don't come with much detail and there is the claim an exact sequence required. So I'm curious as to how this was determined. But by golly, whatever they had worked.

Now there was another nuclear power in the 1960s, the Soviet Union, and we know their planes also crash. Yet their nuclear weapons did not detonate either. Suggesting these things are not easy to detonate.

Bob Wilson

 

I think you are misreading the first page of the Sandia document.

On the left side it has a quotation from a book published in the 1960's by a Dr. Ralph Lapp. On the right side of the page there is commentary and corrections from the Sandia guy. For instance, there are only 4 safety devices and the order in which they function is apparently not essential.

This document obviously wasn't written for public release but possibly for internal inter-departmental distribution given its informal style. The description of the safety devices and why 3 of the 4 devices did not effectively function to prevent an explosion is ambiguous.

One device is apparently "not effective in the air" for some reason. Later it says (presumably that same device) was "set off" by the fall. I'm going to guess that device prevents detonation unless it senses the drop in air pressure caused by the bomb being released from the airplane.

Two other safety devices were "rendered ineffective by aircraft breakup" whatever that means.

 

During the cold war the Soviet Union had control of all its nukes. What happened to all the Soviet nukes located in what are now unstable republics?

I'm not too worried about India, but some of the generals in the Pakistan army are very sympathetic to al Qaeda. There's a lot of fear mongering about Iran, but the Iranians are very smart. Smart enough to know that launching nukes would assure their own destruction, and they are not suicidal.

The cold war may be over, but nukes are proliferating, and it's only a matter of time until some pack of suicidal nut jobs gets hold of one.

 

Hiroshima, Little Boy!
Nagasaki, FatMan, what was the third city???????
How many Japanese Military, civilians, kids, every man, woman, and child was preparing to die to save the empire. How many 100's of thousands of American troops are you willing to sacrifice in the invasion of Japan?
Or , do you take a desperate gamble, drop the only two nukes on the planet at that time and kill two cities in order to save millions American & Japanese? It was the key factor that stopped Japan!
Truman made a tough choice, I support it!
Besides there was that Pearl Harbor thing......
The Brits took it out on Dresden.....

 

If it had gone off, forensic evidence to find out how the safeties failed would have been very hard to come by.

 

The Russians took control of all the nukes and moved them out of the republics and back into Russia.

 

Battle of Stalingrad, 850,000 killed on the Axis side, approx. Russians 1,150,000 killed.
Britians bombing of Dresden, a minimum of 22,700 killed.

The idea of a negotiated peace was a pipe dream, Japan already had every man woman and child ready to die.... and take as many Americans etc with them. Many in the military thought the invasion of Japan would make Okinawa seem like a cake walk, whose losses were.....
American losses...
12,520 killed
38,916 wounded
33,096 non-combat losses
Total: 84,577

Japanese losses,
110,000 killed
16,000 captured
Total: 126,000
And don't forget the local inhabitants. ...
~42,000–150,000 civilians killed!
That was a small invasion compared to what the island of Japan would have endured!

Sadly another 80,000, was just a drop in the bucket, and at the time, considered completely acceptable!

 

... and we did the same to Tokyo ....

... would have, could have, should have, ...

 

Nobody can answer the "what if?" questions. But there are several points that are difficult to dispute:

At the time of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese had been forced back to their home islands. They were at that point a threat to no other nation. A delay of a week or a month would not have cost a single American life.

In the chaos following the dropping of the first bomb, it was unreasonable to expect the Japanese government to be able to respond immediately. Dropping the second bomb before they had time to respond was an act of unmitigated savagery. Had the U.S. waited another week or two, the threat of a second bomb probably would have been sufficient to gain their surrender, and NOTHING would have been lost by waiting.

In the laws governing warfare, both international, and in the U.S. rules of conduct, a distinction is made between combatants and non-combatant civilians, and intentionally targeting civilians is illegal. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian cities, with no military significance. Targeting them, rather than anything military, was unquestionably a war crime of ghastly proportions.

Any statements concerning the ferocity with which the Japanese would have defended their homeland, or the number of casualties, is pure speculation, and I could speculate that the numbers would have been low, or that the majority of Japanese soldiers would have thrown down their weapons and surrendered, with equal validity to the apologists' assertions of large numbers. We cannot know.

Many wars end with neither nation being utterly subdued, and there would have been no reason why the U.S. HAD TO invade Japan once the Japanese were effectively defeated everywhere outside Japan itself.

With this in mind, it is reasonable to suggest that the U.S. could have made a show with the first bomb in an uninhabited place.

But Little Boy and Fat Man were bombs of different types, and the U.S. military wanted to try them both out, so they did not want to give Japan time to surrender and deprive them of their experiment. And with the destruction that had already been visited on all the Japanese military targets, rendering Japan essentially incapable of significant war effort going forward, only the relatively untouched civilian cities could provide the U.S. military with the grisly opportunity it so desperately wanted: To see how these bombs would affect an intact city.

My conclusion: The atom bombs were dropped on Japan, not to end the war, but as an experiment in death and destruction. Hiroshima was probably not necessary, and Nagasaki was definitely not necessary, and a short delay would have cost nothing and might possibly have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Now, we must live with the fact that our country has shown itself willing and able to commit mass murder of civilians, and is the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons in an attack on another country.

 

Agreed about the former Soviet Union being careful and stable-minded.

The other thing is generally we had 30 minutes to decide if the attack was real or not - India and Pakistan will not have that much time.

 

Good point. OTOH, the only reason we needed to make such a snap decision was that both sides had the numbers of nukes and the accuracy of missiles needed to wipe out the ability of the other side to retaliate. With India and Pakistan, an attack by either on the other would leave the other with the ability to retaliate. And an attack on either would be presumed to be from the other, and result in retaliation.

Before the fall of the USSR, my biggest fear was an error in that snap decision, exacerbated by the fact that both sides regularly tested the other by encroaching on their respective air space.

My bigger fear now is that with the technology and the weapons-grade nuclear materials proliferating, it becomes easier with every passing decade for some nut jobs to get hold of a nuke, and the global economy makes it easier and easier to smuggle that nuke to the target location. Hide it in a container of electronics or drugs, truck it to the city you want to blow up, and set it off.

People being what people are, all the military might in the world will be useless against a determined lunatic who has once gotten hold of a small, dirty nuke. And the more we throw our military might around in countries across the globe, the more people we make angry enough to be willing to nuke one of our cities. Our own insistence that we are justified in waging wars and conflicts in a manner that causes civilian deaths will come back to bite us on the nice person. What we regard as "acceptable collateral damage," our victims' loved ones regard as cold-blooded murder.

 

My understanding is that the Japanese still had several thousand military and civilian prisoners under their control.