[1]: The missile itself exploded, not its nuclear payload. See Wikipedia for an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
Had relatives who lived not too far off from Damascus. I remember driving that way past the silos. Even as a kid, you could easily pick out the silos. They were hidden behind foliage with no identifying signs. But each and every one had the exact same driveway and culverts. Very different than the farm entrances and dirt roads. It was a weird time. Driving past a bunch of possible world-enders on the way to see Aunt Gloria.
That scene in The Day After, when the ICBMs were launched from the silos based out of a farm, hit me particularly hard. That’s what rural central Arkansas would have looked like.
July 28, 1957, two nukes jettisoned from airplane into the Atlantic, never recovered. February 5, 1958, bomber collides mid-air, jettisons nuke off coast of Georgia, never recovered. July 6, 1959, cargo plane crashes on takeoff, explosives do not go off in the fire. January 24, 1961, bomber catches fire while in air, two hydrogen bombs dropped over North Carolina, one comes close to detonation.
And on, and on, and on. America in the Cold War kept nuclear weapons continuously aloft along the Soviet border, but the program experienced so many crashes that it had to be scuttled. In the final one, the nuclear payload ruptured: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
I think this part is BS. Nuclear weapons don’t detonate on accident, it requires delicate synchronized process, guarded by authorization codes which aren’t normally present on the launch platform itself. Without authorization codes a nuclear weapon is just a big slightly radioactive pile of metal.
> [the] bomb did not possess adequate safety... The unalterable conflusion is that the only effective safing device during airborne alert was the ready-safe switch
> If a short to an "arm" line occurred in a mid-air breakup, a postulate that seems credible, the Mk 39 Mod 2 bomb could have given a nuclear burst.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/796426-goldsboro-rev...
Parker Jones, nuclear weapons safety specialist at Sandia National Laboratories in a formerly-classified 1969 document obtained by FOIA in 2013. Request was actually made by Eric Schlosser during his writing of Command and Control, the book GP mentions: https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/20/go...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/warfare/id1526490428?i...
Specific to the incident here, only 1 of 4 safety mechanisms prevented an catastrophic incident. The details in the wikipedia page [1] about this incident is well worth a read.
t. DOE contractor
The DoD has refuted the claim made by Dr. Blair also insisting that he was never in a position or authorized to know these codes. Furthermore, the House Armed Services Committee which investigated this matter was unable to find anyone else to corroborate the claim. If Dr. Blair's claims were true, there would certainly be one other officer (retired by now) who would be able to confirm it as part of a Congressional investigation, and yet everyone who was in a position to know this has said the claim is false.
They certainly were! Once we had a working bomb, we first used it to blow up cities and people. After that, we decided that uninhabited islands and atolls were our real enemy, and bombed those instead of cities and people. Now we don’t even blow up the bombs anymore, we just pretend to blow them up on computers.
> The W53 thermonuclear warhead landed about 100 feet (30 m) from the launch complex's entry gate.
Crazy to move that much weight and Lucky to have the warhead intact.
You'll love the fact that you can still play Red Alert online for free!