Road Guy
Well-known member
Good Job chAIR Force!
http://www.newser.com/story/188338/yup-we-nearly-blew-up-north-carolina.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=united&utm_campaign=rss_topnews
North Carolina came dangerously close to becoming the country's second Grand Canyon in 1961. A newly declassified report discusses a US bomber that broke in half while flying over the state in January of that year, causing the two nuclear bombs it was carrying to plummet to the ground near Goldsboro—and reveals that those bombs came much closer to detonation than was previously known. A parachute opened for one of the bombs, which landed intact; the safing pins had been pulled to prevent a blast. Still, it completed five of the six steps to detonation, Fox News reports. Had two cockpit wires touched as the plane disintegrated, it could have exploded. As for the second bomb, it landed in a freefall, which caused the switch to flip to the "armed" position, RT reports.
What kept it from going off? "The shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to detonate," the National Security Archive's Bill Burr explains. The incident was first mentioned in a book by Eric Schlosser last year, but the report confirms just how close the US came to devastation. As CNN points out, the MK39 bombs had an explosive yield of 3.8 megatons; they could have caused an explosion 260 times worse than Hiroshima, where the bomb dropped had a yield of just 0.01 megatons. "By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted," Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said at the time.
http://www.newser.com/story/188338/yup-we-nearly-blew-up-north-carolina.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=united&utm_campaign=rss_topnews
North Carolina came dangerously close to becoming the country's second Grand Canyon in 1961. A newly declassified report discusses a US bomber that broke in half while flying over the state in January of that year, causing the two nuclear bombs it was carrying to plummet to the ground near Goldsboro—and reveals that those bombs came much closer to detonation than was previously known. A parachute opened for one of the bombs, which landed intact; the safing pins had been pulled to prevent a blast. Still, it completed five of the six steps to detonation, Fox News reports. Had two cockpit wires touched as the plane disintegrated, it could have exploded. As for the second bomb, it landed in a freefall, which caused the switch to flip to the "armed" position, RT reports.
What kept it from going off? "The shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to detonate," the National Security Archive's Bill Burr explains. The incident was first mentioned in a book by Eric Schlosser last year, but the report confirms just how close the US came to devastation. As CNN points out, the MK39 bombs had an explosive yield of 3.8 megatons; they could have caused an explosion 260 times worse than Hiroshima, where the bomb dropped had a yield of just 0.01 megatons. "By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted," Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said at the time.
