North Carolina Almost Nuked In 1961

I don't think the headline is correct.

It was a hydrogen, not atomic, bomb that almost detonated.

Still scary to think....................................

Pick, pick, pick . . .

No, it's tick, tick, tick. One more tick and BOOM!

Care to elaborate?

http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/hydrogen-bomb.html

How does it not involve a nuclear reaction?

The first sentence of your atricle pretty well sums up my point.

"hydrogen bomb or H-bomb, weapon deriving a large portion of its energy from the nuclear fusion of hydrogen isotopes. In an atomic bomb, uranium or plutonium is split into lighter elements that together weigh less than the original atoms, the remainder of the mass appearing as energy

The headlne says "atomic" bomb. It is a "hydrogen" bomb.

You added the red herring "nuclear".

either way............ its basically the same results......... only much worse in the H-Bomb......... you can settle it with St. Peter.

It is semantics but, the term "atomic bomb" or "A-bomb" refers to a fission bomb in common usage. The Hydrogen bombs discussed in the article are fusion weapons that are orders of magnitude more powerful. They are both nuclear weapons.

That's what I thought.

http://inventors.about.com/od/nstartinventions/a/Nuclear_Fission.htm

One hopes that LynDoor™ has improved its product range since then.

I can't wait for the articles of near biological and chemical weapons accidents........

^{I said near,....... HA}

Just think - if the accident is big enough, no-one will hear about it, though.

It's the "missing" stuff, that's the scariest.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article33778.html

I have to wonder why they keep hashing up these old news stories again and again?

it takes the focus of the latest screw ups maybe...........

That's simple.

Eric Schlosser is writing a book, and that stuff makes for real titillation of the reader.

I'm sure there are many more we don't know about.

When I got my high level security clearance in the late '70s we were admonished to never talk to anyone, not even our wives about what we did, ever.

There are things I've never told anyone. I wouldn't call anything that I knew really sensational, but we knew things most didn't, and still don't.

My point is that the actual released (declassified) story is many years old, not just the event.

This is not the first instance where old stories were rehashed as new news. I guess those news organizations just assume that people have only short-term memory and they may be right after all.

Yes. Case-in-point, the OP.

It's the short term memory that gets old timers, like me.

How do I go about getting a job where I am required to not talk to my wife?

It was new to me. I hadn't heard of it before.

Did we previously know how close to detonation they were?

It looks like the release of the document is fairly new, but there was no real secret, since McNamara told everybody how close it was, back in 1983.

To be fair, as Herzog notes in his book, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did say in 1983 that the bomb had gone through six of the seven steps needed for detonation.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/20/224514980/doc-sheds-new-light-on-the-time-the-u-s-almost-nuked-itself

What's one more bomb more or less? The US has detonated over 1000 nuclear warheads in the various test sites in different states, and at various levels in the atmosphere....with another ~1000 detonated by other countries around the world....If you were in the right place at the right time, you could of watched them yourself....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_National_Security_Site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing

I have to admit...watching those tests had to be pretty cool.

I think we all like things that go BOOM.

I imagine it would scare the crap out a ya....lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_o65B1JTiw

This is a description of the Tsar Bomba the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested with a yield est at 50-58kt....

"The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away from where it ascended. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (over seven times the height of Mount Everest), which meant that the cloud was above the stratosphere and well inside the mesosphere when it peaked. The base of the cloud was 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide. All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 kilometres (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 kilometres (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 kilometres (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 kilometres (560 mi).^[10] Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. The seismic shock^{[verification needed]} created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth.^[11] Its seismic body wave magnitude was about 5 to 5.25.^[9] The energy yield was around 8.1 on the Richter scale but, since the bomb was detonated in air rather than underground, most of the energy was not converted to seismic waves. The TNT equivalent of the 50 Mt test could be represented by a cube of TNT 312 metres (1023 feet) on a side, approximately the height of the Eiffel Tower."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Good video leading up to and including the test.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxtD8pma2d8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwlNPhn64TA

Somehow, they are beautiful.

Of course, the knowledge of the destruction that they cause, kind of ruins it.

They say that, damage from the explosions can only get so big. Any bigger the blast would basically enter and be dissipated in space.

Jim, Jim! Jim, come in Jim......... You have the bomb defuse yet? Jim, Jim come in!

I gotta wonder who the poor saps were, whose job it was to defuse them!

Now that would have been scary.

Was it the red wire or the green wire we were supposed to cut?

Jim, cleanup on aisle 4!

When the first atomic bomb was detonated at trinity site in New Mexico the wind was blowing and it was raining. The explosion scattered plutonium into civilian areas that still have hot spots.( http://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00318776pdf) The scientists present were betting on the chances of the explosion cracking the earth in half.

The link didn't work. I have doubts about these statements, anyway.

Apology for the link, try this one library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/mainindex.html then go down the list to la-10256-ms The report is very informative. Please be confidant in that I would not have referred to this report if I had not read it myself. As for my claim of the behavior of the scientists present, I have read several accounts all of which were different, but here in the Land of Enchantment it is common knowledge.

My point being they had no idea what was going to happen when the device was detonated, and set it off anyway. Could have been the end of the world, but I guess they had their fingers crossed.

Same things were said when the Large Hadron Collider was about to come on line. Mini black holes were going to gobble up the Earth.

It's a good day to die - I say start it!

I don't think any of them entertained thoughts of the world splitting in two...at least not the scientists.

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/atomictest.htm

I read your link, amusing. So they thought it might end the world. Written by a general. Reads more like a press release.

Whoa, that is scary. That would be during the cold war time frame. Would Russia have been blamed??? Could that have been the beginning of WW 3 if it had detonated???

Sure doesn't give an credence to the statement: "We're from the government, trust us!!!!!

At the very least, there would today be an eerie silence in some engineering-cum-political discussions.

"The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage."

Is there any way we all could have a look at this hero, the low-voltage switch?

The OEM of this switch deserves a global salute.

Maybe it was defective....

Good point. I hadn't thought of that.

If we had been deploying the bomb on an enemy target, it would have been a dud, and that single switch would have been to blame.

With Slim Pickens riding it down like a cowboy.....

The OEM of this switch deserves a global salute

for making a switch that actually worked?.......... what of the other OEM 6 fail-safe devices that didn't work. ^{Speaking of fail safe.....}