We spent the Cold War in perpetual fear that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would start an intentional nuclear conflict. The truth is, we came far closer to blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons than we ever came to WWIII. […] There are actually dozens of instances like these, but here are five major ones that happened in the U.S. If we were to consider Soviet activity, the list could go on for hours.
Here are two of the more interesting comments from the piece:
The worst was still to come. Several days later, rescue crews found the third operator. He had been standing atop the reactor when the incident occurred, and the force of the explosion had blasted a control rod up and through his chest, pinning him to the ceiling.
An honorable mention goes to the Duluth bear, in which a guard saw a bear climbing a fence at an Air Force base and rang an alarm. The alarm connected to other nearby bases, but one of them was wired wrong, so instead of “intruder alert!” they got the “Nuke Russia Now!” alarm. Nuclear armed jets were on the runways ready to take off before the mistake was rectified.
If that doesn’t seem scary enough, there are dozens more incidents like these on the U.S. side alone. We haven’t even touched on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The sad lesson is that we have less to fear from naked aggression than we do from incompetence and bad engineering.
I have this odd feeling we haven’t yet overcome that problem in a whole lotta areas.
ONE nuke bomb/plant going off by accident is NOTHING compared to a nuclear exchange with Russia. As Obama cogently noted recently regarding terrorists attacks: we can absorb one.
Even “armed” nuke bombs won’t explode in a fire or crash. The initiating conventional explosion must be initiated by the timer device itself for all the explosives to go off at the same time to create the critical mass to set the nuke off. The same explosives going off at slightly the wrong time result in only a dirty conventional bomb==no big in Geo Political Parlance==not that I Parley Geo Politics, don’t ya know?
FUD.
Anybody who has a passing knowledge of science history, or watches the history channel is already aware of these incidents. Much ado about meh.
Our friends in Iraq are shortly going to bring this discussion back to the forefront.
Reminds me of a comment Stephen Hawing made about trying to contact intelligent life outside our solar system. We’d have to get to them before they learned that e=mc2. ‘Cause shortly after that, they’d blow themselves up. It’s kinda like giving a loaded gun to an infant.
Regarding the bomb dropped in the waters of Tybee Island, I saw a show about it on the Science Channel. The bomb is ten times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima and the U.S. Military called off the search for it a long time ago. Now just some retired civilians are searching for it. It’s interesting that the military supposedly said that they were surprised the anti-trigger mechanism worked on the bomb. At least they dropped it in the water where the explosion might have been reduced.
#6. Heheh.
That bomb was diverted to israel for reverse engineering. The Tybee Island incident was a coverup.
Just south of Tucson, AZ is a MInuteman missile silo museum that you can visit. I’ve been there a couple of times. They take you down into the silo and you can stand there at the launch console. If you are ever in the area and have the time, I recommend you stop by.
What struck me when I’ve visited is that nothing in that silo is there to enable or detonate the nuclear warhead. Every safety system in there is designed to prevent the missile from launching either accidentally, or without proper authorization. Yet the staff do not arm the warhead in any way. The nuclear warhead it self contains its own independent system for deciding when and where to detonate.
It is weird. There is nothing they can do to prevent, or allow, the warhead to work. It is just sitting there waiting to explode.
I asked the guide what system actually started the detonation sequence. Guess what it was? Nothing but pressure. If the warhead detected that it had gone really, really high (low pressure), then back to sea level pressure again, it would detonate.
I found that scary as hell. So all it would take is a faulty air pressure sensor to trick the warhead, while sitting in the missile that is just sitting there in its silo, into detonating the nuclear warhead.
Cuban Missile Crisis-That came as close to becoming a full scale exchange of ICBMS as it can come without happening.
That would have killed or resulted in the early death of everybody north of the equator.
Something like 30,000 nukes would have gone off or failed to go off.
deowll–you mean everyone in the Northern Hemisphere dead in the first hours of the nuclear exchange and everyone else in the world dead in the weeks and months that followed in the Nuclear Winter.
The same recognition George C Scott had in Strangelove: “Going toe to toe with the Russkies……”
Great Movie.
Kubricks best.
My parents experienced two world wars, aerial bombing of their cities and the nuclear standoff with the Russians. Twenty five years of foreign armies trying desperately to kill them. When the nuke came along, they honestly believed that it was all over.
Ah yes, the nuclear weapon. The only weapon ever built that was only used TWICE in all of history….
#5: The new National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is well worth the trip. My college age daughter and I went there on Father’s Day, and toured the museum and the outdoor exhibits, like an old B-52 (the plane, not the band). Good exhibits, some of them a bit macabre (“Duck and Cover” from the 50s or 60s), but worth seeing.
The gift shop is a hoot, with good books, souvenirs and T-shirts. They still have the Fat Man and Little Boy earrings that ticked off some visiting Japanese tourists.
The most interesting souvenir (since I’m a computer scientist) is a processor board from a Cray computer. Maybe sometime when I’ve got $75 for that board…
Look at it this way bobo, the nuclear winter would have taken care of that whole global warming problem. See there is always a silver lining. While most of the human population would be toast (burnt toast) it is unlikely that the entire human race would have been wiped out.
Scadragon the bombs used were fission (atomic) weapons. The others were nuclear (fusion). significant jump in yield between the two. The atomic bomb is essentially the trigger for the nuclear device. The trigger explosion of the conventional explosives causes an atomic explosion which is focused to provide the pressure and heat for a fusion explosion. So nuclear weapons have yet to be used in anger. However the laws of probability say that it will probably happen as long as the devices are around. Particularly when so many countries are working so diligently to acquire them.
You whiny kids today are so lucky, when I was a kid we had to worry about planet wide total nuclear annihilation. Mutual assured destruction was the national security policy of the day. Nowadays we just worry about losing the downtown part of a major city or two. I’d say that’s progress.
Yes the chances of a nuke going off in populated area today is probably just as high as during the cold war but the chance of a nuclear exchange that will wipe out must of humanity, slim to none sleep easy kiddies.
at least in 64 we “Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”
You can have my “nucular” bomb when you can pry it out of my could dead hands! ~ Moses
I remember when we studied the SL-1 accident in our nuclear engineering course, the military theorized that the guy on top of the core(the one who got impaled), in the midst of a dispute with the others, intentionally pulled the control rod out too fast, causing the core to go super-critical.
We refer to this as “Shimming for Jesus”