Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself 384
kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"
Insulting to real nuke victims at worst... (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
So now we see why the bomb wasn't "armed with its fissile capsule", don't we?
Seriously, sad about the lives lost at the time an all, but to describe this as "almost nuked America" is facetious at best. This being the example chosen to represent the articles contents (and so probably the "best" of the incidents) I see no reason to read any further.
This is no more "nearly nuked" than the making of the movie "Broken Arrow". After all, they had props that looked like nukes in that. What if there's been a mix-up somewhere along the line? OMG! Nearly nuked America again!
If, if and more if (Score:4, Insightful)
And maybe that's the reason the fissile material wasn't inserted into the bomb? And in any event I'd be very surprised if the fire caused the explosives to detonate sufficently simoultaneously to actually cause anything more than a fizzle.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am surprised this does list the Spanish one (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash [wikipedia.org]
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The good news (Score:5, Insightful)
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
This statement brought to you by the people who brought you the quote, "The government better keep its hands off my Medicare!"
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a word, yes.
A nuke without a pit is like a gun with neither a firing pin nor a bullet in it. Just because it's long, thin, and you can still point it at someone and say "Bang!", doesn't mean it's anything more than a metal tube.
This article is FUD.
Re:The good news (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean the people who through prudent safety protocols managed to not have a single accidental detonation of the most dangerous weapons ever made? It's too bad they won't actually be in charge.
Instead, we've left health care in the hands of the civilian sector which HAS had actual accidental radiation leakage from time to time (though to be fair it wasn't that much) and isn't trusted with the weapons.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as medical insurance goes, it really hasn't been handled well by private industry. Ideally, we all pool, and all receive care. The private insurance industry has caused a health class divide to develop; on one side, we have people who get medical care, and on the other, those who don't. Like education, healthcare is a basic need.
Sadly, the legislature really didn't do what those who elected them wanted them to do, which was get the insurance companies out of the system entirely. The current half-measures... they're not going to work.
Re:The good news (Score:5, Insightful)
It's got nothing to do with group-think. Apparently some people have a persecution-complex, even though their views match the popular opinion. Not sure how that happens, but it seems to be quite common.
Re:I am surprised this does list the Spanish one (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called modern journalism ...
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:3, Insightful)
With the newer designs, yeah, that's how it works. Some of the older designs were a lot easier to detonate, though. The gun-type would be particularly easy to set off.
Re:Darwin awards (Score:3, Insightful)
So the safety features worked as designed.
Bombs were not armed. The critical igniter capsule which was designed to be installed just prior to attack was not in the bombs, as per design and regulations, yet you are handing out Darwin awards?
Re:curious (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this Xenu guy tried that once, though I believe it was a different model of airplane.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Which people? The ones who died? The ones who survived?
Or maybe you mean the ones whose nuclear handling procedures successfully prevented an accidental detonation in the even of an airplane crash?
Sensationalist story with absurd summary is absurd. Trying to twist that story into a 'government is incompetent' narrative is like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. The incident in the summary is a prime example of government properly instituting and following critical safety protocols--or are you going to suggest that only government planes have ever crashed?
Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much all this shows is that, at least when it comes to nukes, the safety systems are pretty good. Almost nuking yourself means something like "The bomb was going to detonate, but a technician was able to defuse it in time." Not "A bomb was in a perfectly safe condition when the airplane it was on crashed and the bomb did not go off."
Even the NORAD incident. It wasn't a case of one lone guy staving off a nuclear strike while his superiors yelled for launch (as happened in the Soviet Union). It looked like an attack was happening, so things went to high alert. Everyone was ready. What did they do? They WAITED FOR CONFIRMATION. When it turned out that it was a false alarm, they stood down. That is precisely how things should happen. They didn't ignore ti and go "Eh, probably just a bug," but they didn't go full out WW3 for no reason. On the warning, everything got ready to go, but confirmation was needed. For that matter, even had there been confirmation an order would still have been needed.
To me, looks like the US has pretty damn good nuclear safeguards. If the best "almosts" they can find were things when nothing even came close to actually going wrong that is good.
Hell look on the civilian side, at Three Mile Island. The "Worst nuclear disaster in US history." Even with a rather major screwup making the problem so much worse, something the NRC discovered, it still didn't release any significant amount of radiation, not enough to cause any adverse health effects (and it has been studied for decades now). That's pretty fucking good, if the worst it gets is a case of "Nobody got hurt."
Re:Fear mongering? (Score:3, Insightful)
Any theorizing about the possible results of a nuclear detonation ignores the basic fact that the military wasn't incredibly stupid. The bomb wasn't armed and therefore there was no possiblity of it going off.
Now in the bad old days "arming" the bomb did not consist of throwing a switch but actually putting the uranium or plutonium into the bomb. So there was no dependency on any sort of fail-safe mechanism. It was impossible for a crash to detonate the bomb. These things were shipped and transported taken-apart so nothing like an accidental detonation could possibly occur.
When a plane was sent out to drop one on an enemy installation the bomb would be armed on the way, after the plane was flying and everyone was reasonably certain it would continue to do so.
Yes, in the area of nuclear stuff some fairly silly things were done, but the military was quite well aware of the consequences of a plane crash and what would happen if there was a nuclear detonation anywhere on US soil. So it was made certain that nothing like that could happen, period.
Now, could something bad have happened if a plane was carrying an armed bomb over Russia and it got shot down? Sure. Anywhere up to and including an absolute certainity that the bomb would go off because the crew set it off rather than have it and the plane fall into enemy hands. But remember, no nuclear armed bomber ever went into Russian airspace.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Correction: It IS conventional munitions at that point.
Re:it's difficult to set off a nuke (Score:3, Insightful)
With a implosion bomb [...], all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds)
Citation needed. A good one.
True, the timing has to be very accurate, but I'm pretty sure
microsecond accuracy is enough, or a million times less accurate than
your claim. I don't think detonating a chemical explosive to the
picosecond is even possible, chemical reactions are slower than that.
Are you maybe confusing this with the timescale of the nuclear reactions themselves?
Re:Wew, thank god. (Score:3, Insightful)
An alternate scenario where the two bombers are not total retards and actually manage to blow some shit up seems pretty plausible. On the other hand, there's absolutely no way that an Air Force plane would be attempting a landing with an armed nuke on board. So no, not quite the same thing.
My child almost shot himself (Score:2, Insightful)
The only reason he didn't die is that there weren't any bullets around.
Re:The good news (Score:3, Insightful)
except we've had more and more government involvement over the last 50 years, and healthcare, in many ways, gets worse and worse. The real problem is we encourage third party payment. Imagine if employers gave out food insurance because the government gave them tax breaks for doing so, we'd eventually have the same situation, and everyone would blame the insurance companies then.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it had its core inside, you can't start a runaway fission reaction by throwing the thing into a fire. They needed high-performance switching electronics to even achieve the kind of precision necessary to start a successful detonation. An atomic bomb is just a normal bomb unless the fissile material is held at critical mass for some time.
Yes. They're actually damn tricky things to detonate, that is, if you want any sort of useful yield. And they pulled it off back in 1945: the state of the art in military electronics was a far cry from what it is today.
Re:The good news (Score:1, Insightful)
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states
And what do you think we are fighting to preserve? That's right! It is the world's last bastion of choice health care.
Still not happy, and do NOT have lots of money? Nothing is stopping you from moving to a country where the system run by one man telling all the doctors what they can and can't do. Don't worry, a lot of procedures are covered. Just don't get sick with something we don't cover, (which is inevitable if you have to stretch the government dollar to cover EVERYONE).
No, the U.S. didn't almost nuke it self (Score:1, Insightful)
kdawson, you dumbass. You need to learn about a subject before you start making stupid comments.
Here, let me enlighten your stupid ass. A nuclear device will not cause a nuclear explosion unless it is armed. It can cause a conventional explosion but it can not cause a nuclear explosion.
Now, please shut the fuck up about shit you know nothing about, you pathetic shithead.
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I agree.
There are other sites with half-decent systems and reasonably intelligent commenters (Gizmodo for example) but what sets Slashdot apart from most of them is that the editors don't regularly apply holier-than-thou moderation/banning/etc to posts/posters they don't approve of. If we want to complain about stupid stories or editors, we can do so freely, and only when other readers are more tired of the complaints than the editors do you get moderated down.
Slashdot leaves it up to the readers to moderate into oblivion, and though it's not always fair, it is fairly democratic...
Re:The good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Liberals don't think government has no problems. They just think the solution is to fix them.
Problem: Inadequate response to Katrina/Gulf oil spill.
Liberal proposal: Better funding and training so next disaster gets a better response.
Conservative proposal: Disband FEMA and cut taxes.
Only one of these proposals is actually a solution.
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:4, Insightful)