Recent Featured Videos and Articles | Eastern “Orthodoxy” Refuted | How To Avoid Sin | The Antichrist Identified! | What Fake Christians Get Wrong About Ephesians | Why So Many Can't Believe | “Magicians” Prove A Spiritual World Exists | Amazing Evidence For God | News Links |
Vatican II “Catholic” Church Exposed | Steps To Convert | Outside The Church There Is No Salvation | E-Exchanges | The Holy Rosary | Padre Pio | Traditional Catholic Issues And Groups | Help Save Souls: Donate | ![]() |
Nuclear bomb nearly detonated after falling on North Carolina, declassified report says
Dan Lamothe and Walter Russell Mead
smh.com.au
There are few things in this world that can change the course of history faster than a nuclear bomb exploding. The devastation is immediate and lasts for years.
That makes the latest details to emerge about a January 24, 1961, incident involving two nuclear bombs all the more jarring.
A B-52 bomber broke up in the sky over North Carolina, and one of the two bombs on board was in the “armed” setting by the time it hit the ground near Goldsboro, North Carolina, according to a newly declassified report published on Monday by the National Security Archive.
If the switch had not been damaged by the impact of the crash, the weapon could have detonated, the report said.
A South Carolina doctor treated a family for injuries sustained when a sudden, inexplicable explosion tore through their backyard. The injuries were not serious, and after spending the night at the doctor’s house they returned home to discover that the object in the 15-metre crater left behind their house was an atomic bomb that had fallen from the passing B-52.
The so-called “Goldsboro incident” received widespread attention in September last year, when details about the incident were published in a new book, Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser. And it sounds just as ominous as described on Monday by Bill Burr of the National Security Archives.
“The report implied that because Weapon 2 landed in a free-fall, without the parachute operating, the timer did not initiate the bomb’s high voltage battery (“trajectory arming”), a step in the arming sequence,” Burr wrote. “For Weapon 2, the Arm/Safe switch was in the “safe” position, yet it was virtually armed because the impact shock had rotated the indicator drum to the “armed” position. But the shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to detonate.”
Burr concluded: “Perhaps this is what Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara had in mind, a few years later, when he observed that, ‘by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.’”
Three US Air Force personnel in the B-52 died after the plane broke up that day. They were Sergeant Francis Roger Barnish, Major Eugene Holcombe Richards and Major Eugene Shelton.
That incident, which led to an anti-nuclear movement in Britain, where the plane was bound, is one of many stories Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, tells in Command and Control.
to read more: smh.com.au
Sign up for our free e-mail list to see future vaticancatholic.com videos and articles.
Recent Content
^