lspencer534
09-24-2013, 12:38pm
There's a new book out called Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser (in which I have no financial interest). Here are a few of the stories about America's nuclear arsenal:
On March 11, 1958, a faimily in the small town of Bluff, S.C. was understandably startled when an atomic bomb exploded in their yard. A B-47 was passing overhead when the pilot noticed that the locking pin of the Mark 6 atomic bomb in his hold wasn't engaged. He sent the plane's navigator to re-engage the pin by hand. The navigator had no idea how to do this, and while he was climbing around the bomb bay, he accidentally grabbed the release lever. Bombs away!
This particular bomb hadn't yet been equipped with its radioactive core yet, so only the bomb's conventional explosives detonated. This was fortunate: The Mark 6 had a yield of 160 kilotons, a dozen times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
One study found that at least 1200 nuclear weapons had been involved in "significant" accidents between 1950 and 1968, including being burned, melted, sunk, blown apart and smashed into the ground, sometimes in populated areas. Sometimes people just plain dropped them. Another happened in 1980 at a Titan II missle silo in rural Arkansas. The Titan II warhead carried a 9-megaton warhead, which is three times the explosive force of all bombs dropped in WWII, including both atomic bombs. A workman doing routine maintenance dropped a wrench down the silo.
In the late 1970s it was discovered that the same secret code could be used to unlock every Minuteman-missle site in the U.S. That code was OOOOOOOO.
Sleep well!
On March 11, 1958, a faimily in the small town of Bluff, S.C. was understandably startled when an atomic bomb exploded in their yard. A B-47 was passing overhead when the pilot noticed that the locking pin of the Mark 6 atomic bomb in his hold wasn't engaged. He sent the plane's navigator to re-engage the pin by hand. The navigator had no idea how to do this, and while he was climbing around the bomb bay, he accidentally grabbed the release lever. Bombs away!
This particular bomb hadn't yet been equipped with its radioactive core yet, so only the bomb's conventional explosives detonated. This was fortunate: The Mark 6 had a yield of 160 kilotons, a dozen times the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
One study found that at least 1200 nuclear weapons had been involved in "significant" accidents between 1950 and 1968, including being burned, melted, sunk, blown apart and smashed into the ground, sometimes in populated areas. Sometimes people just plain dropped them. Another happened in 1980 at a Titan II missle silo in rural Arkansas. The Titan II warhead carried a 9-megaton warhead, which is three times the explosive force of all bombs dropped in WWII, including both atomic bombs. A workman doing routine maintenance dropped a wrench down the silo.
In the late 1970s it was discovered that the same secret code could be used to unlock every Minuteman-missle site in the U.S. That code was OOOOOOOO.
Sleep well!