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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
