An obituary for the man who saved North Carolina from Nuclear Disaster
ncrabbithole.com
ncrabbithole.com
> “Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,” he told Jack.
> “Great,” Jack said.
> “Not great,” the sergeant replied. “It’s on arm.”
> There’s far from a consensus on how close those bombs were to going off. Jack himself couldn’t say. But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well (The military refers to this as a “sympathetic detonation”). Each bomb was 250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an explosion that large would have permanently altered the geography of this state. Even thought it would have been at least 50 miles from the Pamlico Sound, Jack says the blast would have been powerful enough to create a new “Bay of North Carolina.” There would have been a 17-mile-wide “kill zone” around the blast site. Heavy fallout would have spread as far north as New York.
This is one of those moments that could have been a turning point in history. Consider the implications of these bombs exploding. Tens of thousands of Americans dead at the hands of their own military. Imagine how it would change the JFK presidency; he would have been in office for a total of three days at this point. Imagine the effect on the state of North Carolina; Raleigh is just 40 miles from blast site, and millions would be evacuated. Imagine how it would change the Cold War. Imagine how it would change the perception of nuclear technology not just among the American public, but among the British (who have had the bomb for eight years) and French (who have had the bomb for one). It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.
They would have launched bombers to hit the Soviets immediately and pinned down Kennedy to give a thumbs up with only a few minutes to think.
Joke? Thoughtless hyperbole? Political ax to grind?
Come on.
This stuff is published now and terrifying.
LeMay was the architect of the firebombing of Japan and the North Korean population that killed as much as 20% of the population. Applying air power to kill until capitulation was the basis of strategy.
A common belief among the Air Force leadership was that nuclear weapons were a wasting asset that would be rendered moot once the Soviets were able to build out their arsenal. At the particular point in time, the US had an overwhelming superiority that was shrinking. There was a serious belief the preemptive war was critical while the window of superiority was open. That position was pushed strongly during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pushback to President Eisenhower’s moves to control planning escalated to the point where Eisenhower demanded compliance or resignation from SAC leaders.
Was that all serious or just bluster to scare to Soviets? It could be - fear of an uncontrolled madman might discourage escalation. Fortunately, we didn’t find out.
"Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
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I was most acutely replying to the “no way he would…” framing. Top objection (besides the real, if pedestrian, point about certainty) is that, whatever a leader’s public messaging and/or bluster might include, the decision to kill millions as an organizational cover-up doesn’t seem like something one could easily project. Especially when retaliation risk would include the possibility of further detonations on home soil.
I’m not well versed in military history, but I understand LeMay’s story to be more complex than ‘bloodthirsty war criminal’ (and that’s including his own comments ~ “if we lost, I suppose I’d be a war criminal”). The Pacific theatre was nightmarish on all sides.
Some guy/gal wonders what would have happened, another guy/gal gives a concise clear answer. It's all good.
It's certainly an interesting counterfactual to consider how the US would react, and SAC in particular, to the exploding of a hydrogen bomb in the North Carolina.
Launching a full retaliatory response (and there was only one plan) certainly seems like something that might have happened - probably because they would genuinely believe it was an attack.
So I don’t see it as such a ridiculous idea that such an accident might not have been a convenient excuse to bomb the Soviets…
This was actually a safety design feature:
> Walske also stipulated that all nuclear weapons in the stockpile must be “one-point safe;” that is,the weapon must have a probability of less than one in one million of producing a nuclear detonation if a detonation of the high explosives originates from a single point
In fact this entire article seems to not recognize this fact. Even if one of the bombs detonated, it was always going to be bad for the people near it but not catastrophic or anything. It would almost certainly not have been nuclear.
But that's in 1 atm! The initial wavefront of a fission device is going to be conservatively about 4 inches a microsecond (based on early above-ground test photos, modern high-yield devices would probably be faster still). This could very well turn the entire physics package of the secondary weapon into a thin pancake on the blast front, the plutonium can't get out of the way fast enough to avoid compression. This is a totally different scenario than a one-point-safety fizzle. The HE explosives in the second bomb might as well not exist relative to the overpressures faced from the first bomb's detonation.
Almost certainly not!
On the other hand, I have heard that a non-trivial part of the yield of a hydrogen bomb comes from the fast neutrons from the fusion causing a much more complete fissioning of the fissile material. Maybe, if the buried bomb was not damaged to the point where it was incapable of fusion ignition, the second bomb would contribute to the explosion in this way, without acting as a hydrogen bomb itself. With a high enough neutron flux from the first bomb, maybe the core of the second one would not have to undergo implosion, or even stay intact.
The article also talks about a 17-mile kill zone, and the creation of a new "North Carolina bay" despite the crash being 50 miles from Pamlico Sound. These seem to me to be incompatible claims, and surely the second, at least, must be hyperbole?
https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/The-fir...
Richard Rhodes, "Dark Sun."
I believe in almost all "H-bomb" designs most of the energy produced comes from the fissioning of various uranium components by those neutrons (mainly the "pusher" surrounding the secondary and sometimes the surrounding case enclosing the primary and secondary - e.g. in the W88).
https://jocoreport.com/75th-anniversary-of-catch-me-eye-expl...
It really wouldn't have looked good to have a second one and a few magnitudes bigger.
I think the impact of 9/11 is exaggerated. It may have been traumatic for Americans, and to a lesser degree Europeans, but in the grand scheme of things its impact has been limited.
In short, it pretty much fucked every good thing the fall of USSR achieved on this planet.
All of those conflicts started decades earlier, with oil in the Middle East and the creation of Israel. 9/11 did not profoundly change things.
The main immediate impact of 9/11 was demonstrating the USA was vulnerable. Before, they always managed to do their fighting in other countries.
As a result 1) the USA had a serious need to prove their power. They received a challenge which could not stay unanswered. 2) Europe and the 1st world in general tried to let the US kick around and prove themselves, without starting a world war, and without being dragged into it themselves. They all had similar moments in their own history, and understood how other nations would just not care as much as the receiving nation did. 3) The moslim world saw their biggest enemy receive a kick in the balls, and loved it. It was a great morale booster for them. The US could be hurt.
Long term impact was reducing the values of the enlightenment and western civilization. The US was seen torturing random people, starting a war against the wrong enemy, and limiting all kinds of freedom while claiming to be still free. They lost claims to moral superiority almost anywhere. The overton window shifted away from 'everyone has rights' and towards 'might makes right'.
- financial: the forever wars of Iraq / Afghanistan are somewhere around, per google, 8 trillion dollars. In terms of global warming mitigation then (yeah, it would never have been spent on that) or in terms of opportunity costs of budgeting now and the near future, that is a huge loss. That is a quarter of the current US debt (31.5 trillion dollars). It is a almost a third of our annual GDP.
- freedom: it instituted dangerous protocols for surveillance, jailing of US citizens without trial, assassination of US citizens without trial (Obama), the "enemy combatant" designation, mainstreamed use of torture and extraordinary rendition. I'm no war historian, but I think the only other war that resulted in such massive expansion of federal government power, and the creation of agencies to exert such power, was WWII with the beginnings of the CIA and NSA. Did Vietnam or Korea result in such expansions and institutions?
- trust: granted we always had an iffy relationship with this with banana republic atrocities, supporting dictators, the Shah of Iran, etc, but Iraq really destroyed a lot of American standing worldwide, and considering the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a surge of sympathy/support, that says something. America arguably lost a huge amount of it's soft power. Everyone knew it was an imperialist grab of oil by oilmen in charge of the White House. Consider that this was the early days of the EU and China was on the rise. Iraq likely lead to countries seeking leadership and aid from those rather than America as a serious option.
If your two other points are the only consequences you can think of then it has indeed all been very limited in the grand scheme of things.
Your other points are also 'limited impact' (if not small impact, frankly) in the grand scheme of things...
In any case, lest we forget: the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-cont...
By the way, this caught my eye with respect to Jack Revelle's leukemia:
> "Jack earned the Bronze Star during the Vietnam War, where he was exposed to Agent Orange."
While Agent Orange's active agent was supposed to be a mixture of two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the manufacturer ran a sloppy synthesis which produced a lot of dioxin as a side product. The herbicide mix was effective, but dioxin has a lot of nasty side effects related to interference with various cellular processes, and promotion of cancers such as leukemia and myeloma appears to be an issue. (The US govt and Agent Orange manufacturers tried to block VA care for veterans exposed to Agent Orange by promoting bogus studies done with highly purified 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T showing no such effects). See for example:
(2009) Cancer incidence in the population exposed to dioxin after the "Seveso accident": twenty years of follow-up.
Exposure to ionizing radiation could of course also be involved, either via ingestion of small amounts of those radionuclide species that are incorporated into human tissues and bone (cesium-137, etc.) or by short-term exposure to high levels of gamma photons, neutron fluxes, positrons, alpha particles, etc.
This is a minor plot point in the Ringworld series. Humans are psychically lucky and as a species we have managed to avoid the utmost brink several times. The alien race keeps humans around hoping to exploit humanity's luck.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906339
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103831
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277537
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607491
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910
''I remember a talk about North Carolina and a strange, strange pond'' -- ''Hypnotized'', Fleetwood Mac, 1973
I thought this needed more explanation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/old-w...
> When he arrived at the front gate, his uniform was torn up, his military ID was gone, and he was banged up from his escape. His parachute was still on his back. He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was. So, the airmen arrested him for stealing government property.
Brilliant. Racism slowed response to a broken arrow situation. You'd think a guy showing up having clearly just survived a plane crash, with witnesses bringing him to the scene would be sufficient to at least place a phone call.
Nope. Arrest the black guy.
Apparently "a cuban candidate" became "a cuban spy" by the time he had sat down to wait by the door for his escort.
standard procedure, but yea I was waiting for the race baiting of the article, it isn't usual to be a whole 6 paragraphs down!
But the difference is so close to semantics that it might just be a little bit of hyperbole in the article.
Really? Because everything we have been told about nukes so far is that this does not happen.
But if they're sitting next to another nuke which detonates, the core doesn't even have to go critical for it to release a bunch / most of its energy due to its neighbor's neutrons flux. Similar to how in thermonuclear (fusion) weapons a simple blanket of unenriched uranium can provide a huge boost to the weapon output.
Just from a physics point of view, let's be generous and say that a single fission releases four neutrons, and I'm pretty sure that's an overestimate. If the fissile material in the second nuke has a radius of 0.1m (r), and sitting 5m (R) away, then it would be exposed to at a maximum πr^2 / (4πR^2) = 0.0001 of those neutrons. If we imagine that every single one of those neutrons causes a fission in the second nuke (and that won't be true either) then the yield from the second nuke will be less than a thousandth of the yield from the first nuke. Secondary fissions from the neutrons released from those fissions may increase this a little, but the second nuke is subcritical, so it won't be by much.
I'd love to hear from someone who actually knows the answer for sure, though.
Where does it say that this is impossible?
Still not great of course! Now you’ve spread the second bomb’s worth of Pu or U over a wide area with the energy of the first one. Toxic /and/ radioactive. What’s not to like!
(I may have been digging up a partial memory of muclear missile fratricide by Pu predetonation during compression due to the extra neutron flux, which IIRC is a real thing, but would require the second warhead to go through a full conventional explosion.)