Only One Carolina In The Morning

The breaking news this week is that the US nearly had a "Dr Strangelove" moment in 1961, when it dropped two atomic bombs, on Goldsboro in the state of North Carolina. Each were four-megatons, that's 260 times powerful than the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The event occurred in January 1961, when a B52 on a routine flight when it began to break up in the sky, both bombs fell to the ground, one was still unarmed when it hit the ground, as all the safety protocols worked. But the second "assumed it was being deliberately released over an enemy target - and went through all its arming mechanisms save one .... only the failure of a single low-voltage switch prevented disaster".

If either bomb had gone off, it would likely have wiped a large swathe of the state off the map, and rendered the rest of the state uninhabitable .... it may even have triggered a nuclear war, if politicians or military had misinterpreted the event at as an attack by the USSR.

So thank your lucky stars that US manufacturing was already in decline, because it was the failure of just one simple dynamo-technology low voltage switch, that stopped a disaster that could have had cataclysmic consequences.

Broken Arrows - North Carolina 1961 - Palomares 1966 - how many more?

Of course this wasn't the only 'Broken Arrows' incident that the US have reported under 'freedom of information' requests, but apparently it was the closest we came to lighting up the sky .... well, that they have admitted to.

But what's even more disturbing is that the USSR was notoriously even more inefficient in its technology at the time, so how many close shaves did they have in that period? I guess we will never know ... perhaps its better we don't.

Broken Arrows

I guess its surprising how many things, which aren't conspiracies, are still secrets. The reason, the narrative of our lives moves on, the press lose interest, and the story dies. So it only rang a vague bell when I read a story about 4 nuclear weapon carrying war-planes colliding over Spain in the 1960's.

Broken Arrows - Palomares 1966

By some miracle only 7 US airman were killed, and the nuclear bombs didn't explode (they weren't armed) ....... but the 'nuclear' wreckage was scattered wide and far, with three of the bomber's H-bombs landing in or around Palomares, the fourth landed about five miles offshore in the Mediterranean ... a reporting ban was assisted by the fact that Spain was so poor in 1966, that there was only one telephone in Palomares in 1966, and no running water, so a recovery operation remained secret.

The weapon from the sea bed was recovered. One of the other three was undamaged (its safety parachute had opened as designed) but two more fell 31,000 ft to the earth and split open, scattering waste in the form of radioactive dust over a largish area.

"What they decided to do was remove the contaminated dirt from the most contaminated areas," says science writer Barbara Moran, author of 'The Day We Lost the H-Bomb'. They literally scraped up the first three inches of topsoil, sealed it in barrels, and shipped it to a storage facility back in the US .... but they missed bits. And although there has been no evidence that the food or water supplies were ever contaminated (checks are made very year), the locals want the US to come back and do a proper job of finishing the clean up.

No one really knows how much plutonium was unrecoverable, as the US never admitted how much was lost, but there is still some out there, and locals want rid of it. A local barman summed it up, "Every time the story hits the media, it hurts tourism," he said. "A lot of people don't want to come here because they think the quality of life must be low, that cancer rates are higher, when that's not the case at all." ... discussions are apparently under way to get the final clean up completed.