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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

Looking up broken arrow incidents is pretty horrifying. Wikipedia's "military nuclear accidents" list isn't even a full list - just notable ones - and it's still absurdly long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

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

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These days it's just easier to do accidental population scale brain damage with a twitter account.

> two hydrogen bombs dropped over North Carolina, one comes close to detonation

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.

Codes were probably just 0000 anyway

This situation doesn’t seem to be widely known.

Because it's almost certainly false. The source for this is Bruce Blair, who while is a credible source on matters of nuclear armament, would not have been privy to this information.

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.

Were they guarded by authorization codes in 1961 when that incident happened? Kennedy's executive order to install PALs on nuclear weapons just in Europe was in 1962. The early days of nuclear weapons were the wild west.

> The early days of nuclear weapons were the wild west.

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.

> One simple, dynamo-technology low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe!

> [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...

Iirc, 3 of the 4 safety systems had tripped. This switch is an actual, wired switch.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/warfare/id1526490428?i...

The book referenced in the original comment (Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety) specifically digs in to the limitations behind the safety mechanisms.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

Older nuclear weapons were not nearly as hardened as modern ones. For a good introduction, I recommend Sandia’s three part documentary Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability.

t. DOE contractor

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