North Carolina nearly nuked.

@Walter Hinteler,

You would need the full engineering report of that accident not this non engineering report to know the truth of the matter.

All we got now is some claims contain in a very small part of a declassify report that go against all logical and understanding of how such weapons function.

It would had been interesting to have been able to bring up the subject when I was doing a tour of the Nevada national nuclear test site a few years ago. The tour guide we happen to had been assign to was a old retired gentleman that at one time held a fairly high position at the site when it was doing most of it nuclear testing.

Maybe, I will write a note to the La Vegas nuclear testing museum to see if I can get some comments from them.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter, The safety controls on nukes are pretty accident proof. There's no way for a bomb to go off "accidentally." Trust me. The controls require human input as well as other safeguards.

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@izzythepush,

The bombs we worked on including thermonuclear ones had enough safety processes that precludes 'accidental' detonation.' Two of the safety processes requires human input.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter, Whether you wish to believe me or not is of no concern to me!

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@cicerone imposter,

Was that before or after 1961? How old do you think the bomb might have been in 1961?

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@izzythepush,

Good question. During the four years in the air force, they made great strides in improving the bombs in many of its process. I was in the USAF fraom 1955 to 1959.
We had to handle the uranium by hand at the beginning, but that lprocedure eas no longer necessary when I resigned.

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@cicerone imposter,

Not discounting anything you've said, but why would the government stonewall for years, only to produce a heavily redacted statement saying there was an near accident? I don't see why anyone would do that.

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@izzythepush,

How the US gover.nment does anything is a mystery to me!
I also remember hearing about a bomb that was dropped, but don't remember the details.
Rense.com has the article. As with the previous article, it's not only about the "rod."

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I don't know what we are supposed to take away from this account of an incident that took place over 50 years ago.

Is anyone suggesting the US government should have revealed the incident at the time?

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

Is anyone suggesting the US government should have revealed the incident at the time?

As this was the time period of the worst of the cold war we could not had stop flying hundreds of nukes constantly without inviting a first strike from the USSR so all that revealing such an event would had cause added worry in the population.

To say nothing of causing problems with our allies that was allowing us to base nukes on their soil.

All this is assuming that those few words from a nor engineering report was valid concerning how close we might had come to a accidental nuclear explosion.

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@JTT,

JTT wrote:

cicerone imposter wrote:
I worked with nuclear weapons in the air force,

Right alongside Robert Oppenheimer.

Actually, lots of people in the military worked directly with nukes during the cold war. Nukes require regular routine maintenance of varying forms.

While I cannot vouch for the veracity of his claim, I can vouch that it is reasonable and plausible.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

roger wrote:
hawkeye10 wrote:
I dont think that the USA learned much, just two years ago we had several high ranking Airforce Officers relieved because of massive nuke security failures...I want to say in Louisiana but my memory is foggy on this. I do remember several experts shocked at how lackadaisical command was.

That might have been the time when a couple of nukes were sent cross country on transport catagory aircraft. It was kind of a big deal for a while.

sounds right for the start, then there was an emergency study ordered by SecDefense that that showed massive problems with nuke security procedures in the Airforce. So far as I remember the Navy come away clean.

It didn't seem all that big a deal to me. Someone just made an innocent mistake. No big deal so far as I could see.

I tend to think that Obama used the event as an opportunity to get rid of the head of the Air Force, who had been insisting that we need more F-22 fighters. Obama prefers to have the Air Force headed by people who say we don't need any more F-22 fighters.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

Actually, lots of people in the military worked directly with nukes during the cold war. Nukes require regular routine maintenance of varying forms.

I wonder how many people it did take to keep somewhere in the range of 10,000 nukes maintenance?

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

roger wrote:
hawkeye10 wrote:
I dont think that the USA learned much, just two years ago we had several high ranking Airforce Officers relieved because of massive nuke security failures...I want to say in Louisiana but my memory is foggy on this. I do remember several experts shocked at how lackadaisical command was.

That might have been the time when a couple of nukes were sent cross country on transport catagory aircraft. It was kind of a big deal for a while.

An during the cold war we would be flying hundreds of nukes in bombers 24/7 day in and day out and no big deal.
Love the news media in so many ways.

The problem wasn't so much that nuclear warheads were shipped across the country. It was the fact that nuclear warheads were shipped across the country when the US did not intend for them to be shipped.

But yes, I too think it was blown out of proportion.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Whackeye is in here pretending to remember things which happened before he was in kindergarten and Bill has latched onto this subject with a death grip, never letting ignorance or incomprehension deter him. This thread is well and truly f*cked.

Hawkeye10 is referring to events that happened during George W Bush's second term. How young are you suggesting that he is?

BillRM has not made any errors regarding nuclear weapon technology that I can see. He did initially misunderstand what the media was claiming, but that misunderstanding has been cleared up.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

All we got now is some claims contain in a very small part of a declassify report that go against all logical and understanding of how such weapons function.

I don't see any contradiction. But I think it possible that there is no story here and everything is being blown out of proportion.

It has long been known that severe damage to a bomb in an accident could lead to the bomb "concluding" that it has just been legitimately ordered to explode. Because of this, they design components into bombs that are frail enough that they will fail before the bomb sustains enough damage for that to happen.

So to hear that a bomb sustained enough damage that it concluded it was supposed to explode, but that the explosion was then thwarted because of the failure of certain delicate components, sounds to me like "everything working as intended".

However, we are talking about a pretty early generation of bomb here. This bomb was designed and built in the 1950s. It is possible I guess that this bomb did not fail due to an intentional safety system, but rather due to dumb luck.

It is also possible, if the bomb did fail due to dumb luck, that it served as the inspiration for later bombs to be designed with weak components that would fail in a severe accident.

But another possibility is that the weak component was intentionally designed into the system even with that early bomb, and that the safety system functioned exactly as it was supposed to.

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@oralloy,

With an engineering background I just do not see this happening.

First there would never be a reason to have the complex trigger circuit power up until you was ready to drop the bomb for real. In fact the triggering of a nuclear device take a lot of electric power so you would not wish to be running down the internal power sources of the bomb.

Then the sensors would need to be told when to tell the triggering circuit to do it thing and that is unlikely to be set until the bomb is about to be drop.

As you would normally wish for an air burst at a few thousand feet and in that year bomb it would likely be just pressure sensors. In a bomber that is changing it attitudes all the time those sensors would not be allow to function either until the bomb is about to drop.

Now add in a few safety devices that common sense would call for and a plane breaking up and the bombs falling free to the ground should be no danger to anyone unless the few thousand pounds bomb happen to land on your head.

Even the few hundred pounds of conventional military explosives around the core can not be set off by fire or impact with the ground as you need a shock wave of thousands of feet per second to set them off.

You can use military C4 for example to cook with as no fire will do anything but cause it to burn.

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@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

I tend to think that Obama used the event as an opportunity to get rid of the head of the Air Force, who had been insisting that we need more F-22 fighters. Obama prefers to have the Air Force headed by people who say we don't need any more F-22 fighters.

Obama not forthright? that just cant be! I mean when he says that he demands new coal power plants meet emission standards that science can not meet and does
not expect to be able to meet in the forseeable future he is not outlawing new coal plants......he would have just said "new coal plants will not be allowed" because he is an honest man. Obama is just being very, very, very, very, very optimistic about the bang up new technology that our crack scientists will deliver fast.

right? he is our president, and he has respect for the rule of law and for the citizens. he would not stoop to the cheap trick of lieing.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

First there would never be a reason to have the complex trigger circuit power up until you was ready to drop the bomb for real. In fact the triggering of a nuclear device take a lot of electric power so you would not wish to be running down the internal power sources of the bomb.

That's a good point, and I don't know what the answer is.

However, they do design the bombs with components that will fail before the bomb can be damaged to the point where the firing system believes it has been ordered to explode.

Note:
"It is possible for an accident (rocket explosion, airplane crash, accident while weapon is being moved) to disrupt the weapon and break the integrity of the exclusion zone. As a safety mechanism, a weak link is also built into the system. This is a set of components designed to fail at lower stresses (thermal, mechanical, and electrical) than will cause failure of the strong link mechanisms. The weak link acts to break the connection to the detonators before the strong link could be disrupted and fail by the stress of an accident."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_link_weak_link

BillRM wrote:

Then the sensors would need to be told when to tell the triggering circuit to do it thing and that is unlikely to be set until the bomb is about to be drop.

A signal from sensors would not be necessary. The claim is that damage to the triggering circuit made it erroneously conclude that it had just been triggered.

BillRM wrote:

Even the few hundred pounds of conventional military explosives around the core can not be set off by fire or impact with the ground as you need a shock wave of thousands of feet per second to set them off.

Remember we're talking about a weapon designed and built in the 1950s here. Modern insensitive high explosives were a ways into the future yet.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

right? he is our president, and he has respect for the rule of law and for the citizens. he would not stoop to the cheap trick of lieing.

All politicians lie.

If we are unable to build new coal plants, and renewable energy sources fail to supply enough for what we need, we'll just build more nuclear reactors.

1 Reply

North Carolina nearly nuked.

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