Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell on North Carolina

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2021/01/remembering-night-two-atomic-bombs-dropped-on-north-carolina/

by longdefeat • 5 years ago

116 110 5 years ago

LatteLazy4• 5 years ago

Do any other countries routinely fly nuclear weapons the way we (US, UK, Russia etc) used to? I mean Pakistan, India, China maybe?

Also, I thought that: at atomic bomb is pure fission, a thermonuclear bomb is Fusion driven by a fission bombs heat and pressure wave? The article seems to use the term "atomic" to refer to thermonuclear weapons.

pdonis• 5 years ago

atomic bomb is pure fission, a thermonuclear bomb is Fusion

Strictly speaking, the term "atomic bomb" shouldn't even be used for a fission bomb since the reactions involved are nuclear reactions, not chemical ("atomic") reactions.

However, in non-technical contexts, I have seen "atomic bomb" used for both fission and fusion bombs.

klyrs2• 5 years ago

Do you have a source supporting this distinction?

philipkglass• 5 years ago

The people of the Manhattan Project used the term atomic bomb internally and externally for their invention. "Atomic" was widely used as a synonym for "nuclear" in both lay communication and technical literature for at least a generation afterward. The International Atomic Energy Agency is still called such and never felt the need to correct this imagined terminological mistake.

walrus012• 5 years ago

you'd have to be a madman to fly around with 'live' ready to use nuclear bombs in the modern era, but then again, strategic air command was headed by a madman, curtis lemay... and they did it from the early 1950s for 25+ years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command

tyingq3• 5 years ago

They do still maintain the ability to launch nukes from various aircraft.

There was a famous oopsie in 2007 where they mistakenly flew some live nukes around. In this case, cruise missles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_n...

tyingq3• 5 years ago

Israel comes to mind. Not much is known about what type of nuclear weapons they have.

LatteLazy4• 5 years ago

I think their doomsday scenario is covered by nuclear subs (supposedly, no public info...)...

neartheplain• 5 years ago

The educated guess is somewhere between 80-400 warheads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel

They nearly used them in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option

nostrademons5• 5 years ago

Colloquially "atomic bomb" usually refers to both fission and fusion weapons. Almost no weapons currently in use by major nation-states are pure fission devices. Two-stage thermonuclear Teller-Ulam designs are more stable, easier to control the yield, capable of scaling up to 1000x the power, and cheaper to manufacture once you have the technology. A major part of the cost of nuclear weapons is enriching uranium or producing plutonium; fusion weapons can use a much smaller amount of these expensive materials and get the bulk of their yield from deuterium, which is distilled from water. Pure fission weapons were used in some artillery shells (where there isn't enough room to get a second stage in) and by emerging nuclear powers that haven't yet developed the technology for fusion weapons.

Non-colloquially, scientists would probably refer specifically to "fission" and "fusion" weapons, or to specific design used (eg. gun-type linear implosion, explosive lens, Teller-Ulam).

LatteLazy4• 5 years ago

Thanks for your excellent comment! I didn't know most advanced powers were using fusion weapons but it makes perfect sense when you say it (cost, stability, power and controlability).

pinewurst• 5 years ago

There's also the intermediate case of boosted fission, where tritium gas is introduced into the fission core, generating neutrons via fusion, that in turn accelerate/enhance the fission process (e.g. allowing more fission energy to be released in the interval between detonation and when the device blows itself apart).

Koshkin• 5 years ago

”atomic bomb" usually refers to both

You must be talking about “nuclear weapon.” Never in my life I heard “atomic bomb” being used in reference to a hydrogen bomb.

Almost no weapons currently in use by major nation-states are pure fission devices.

All tactical nukes are pure fission devices.

arethuza3• 5 years ago

I suspect the main distinction in weapons designs is whether staging is used or not. Single stage designs will use some fusion through boosting and multi stage designs have multiple fission and fusion components (primary fission boosted with fusion and the secondary has a fission "spark-plug", the main fusion fuel mass and surrounding mass of fissionable material acting as a tamper and the main source of energy).

Most of the energy from most "H-bomb" designs actually comes from fission.

ufmace3• 5 years ago

It doesn't really make sense to fly armed weapons around as a strategic deterrent now, since you can mount them on missiles instead, which can be stored in safer and faster to launch silos and are harder to intercept anyways. And put them in submarines that are even harder to locate.

Before all that, it seemed much more reasonable to do so, if you were concerned that your enemy might sneak their bombers close enough to destroy your bomber airfields before you could get your bombers airborne.

nataz• 5 years ago

It's a lot harder to get a missile to turn around.

In theory (specifically US nuclear deterrence) each leg of the nuclear triad has a different purpose (and institutional stakeholders).

Bombers flying at a target are slow enough that in theory you can convince someone they are about to make a serious mistake, while still maintaining the ability to deescalate/give the adversary an off ramp.

Bombers are visible, verifiable, and put a clock on negotiations. They are a form of communication. They signal premeditated violent intention. ICBM/SLBM are an act of war.

There is lots of literature on the practical use of nuclear weapons. All of it thankfully questionable and untested. It can get pretty wonky pretty fast. Countervailing, decapitation, C4ISR, escalation ladders, tactical vs. strategic nukes, etc.

rtkwe3• 5 years ago

No one really does it any more and the practice only lasted a around a decade even in the US. Once ICBMs became reliable enough they largely replaced bombers because it was much easier to dig a bunker than to constantly have bombers on standby or in the air and they provided a better strike capability because there's no real defense vs bombers that could be intercepted.

Giorgi• 5 years ago

There is defense and it's pre-emptive strike, being static is one of the weakness of such system, that's why there are subs and Russia (S.U.) has some of the nukes on the trucks.

There also was a railway version, SS-24 Scalpel (РТ-23 УТТХ) which was mounted inside always-on-the-move train locomotion. Decommissioned in 2005 but they have new version in development.

mkehrt• 5 years ago

FWIW, I would use your distinction as well. "Atomic" to me means fission only, where "thermonuclear" means fusion and "nuclear" could mean either. But other comments seem to show this is not universal.

LatteLazy4• 5 years ago

Yeah, I think that's the case.

stretchcat• 5 years ago

The way I've seen it, atomic bomb and nuclear bomb are synonyms which refer to any sort of fission, boosted fission or fusion bombs. Fission bombs can be specifically referred to like that. Fusion bombs can also be called hydrogen bombs or thermonuclear bombs.

blakesterz• 5 years ago

Interesting story.

There's also one missing off the coast of GA:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=185876...

"On Feb. 5, 1958, a B-47 bomber dropped a 7,000-pound nuclear bomb into the waters off Tybee Island, Ga., after it collided with another Air Force jet. Fifty years later, the bomb -- which has unknown quantities of radioactive material -- has never been found."

noja• 5 years ago

"unknown quantities" - sure!!

foobarian• 5 years ago

Another scary event off the coast of Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

Two of the four bombs exploded due to conventional fuses detonating, spreading radioactive material over land.

MaanuAir• 5 years ago

And case not closed still today.

tyingq3• 5 years ago

Makes me curious if the radioactive material eventually gets exposed by corrosion or erosion.

laumars• 5 years ago

I couldn’t explode. You’d need the detonator to do that. However the radioactive content could still pollute if the shielding were to corrode away.

yabones• 5 years ago

There's also the Damascus incident, where a Titan II missile silo exploded during a fuelling accident and sent a 9 megaton thermonuclear warhead out of the silo and several hundred meters away. They don't officially say whether or not the core was inside the weapon, or if it was armed at the time... Either way, it's terrifying. Humans don't deserve these weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

erdos4d• 5 years ago

Humans don't deserve these weapons.

You sure? Nuclear weapons are guaranteed to bite you eventually, being stupid enough to have them sorta implies you deserve your eventual reward.

1MachineElf• 5 years ago

Dimitri Khalezov says the Kursk was loaded with P-700 Granit mini-nukes when it sank during 2000: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster

umvi• 5 years ago

The U.S. Government soon announced its safe return and loudly reassured the public that, thanks to the device’s multiple safety systems, the bomb had never come close to exploding.

Okay but seriously. How good are the safety mechanisms? Is there significant risk an unarmed nuke could explode if going fast enough or with enough vibrations?

nickff• 5 years ago

Most warheads are actually very safe, and require either a detonator, or very high heat/pressure to set them off. The most dangerous part of most weapons is actually the propellant (which free-fall bombs obviously do not contain).

This is a product of what weapons are designed for; the warhead is designed to resist premature detonation, but the fuel (and oxidizer if present) must be readily and easily combustible in an engine.

Mindless2112• 5 years ago

"Always/Never" shares the story of the national labs’ history of work for the safety and security of nuclear weapons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQEB3LJ5psk

harywilke• 5 years ago

related video on Compliant Mechanisms they briefly talk about a device to safety nuclear warheads. about a minute in and again at 10:20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97t7Xj_iBv

kryogen1c• 5 years ago

a relatable analog is a piece of firewood. there is enough combustible energy in a section of dead tree to kill or maim you and set off a chain reaction that will destroy everything in your house, but you neednt worry if you have wooden furnitire, even if theres a lighter on it.

dghlsakjg• 5 years ago

That doesn’t make me feel better at all. Uncontrollable fires happen all the time for predictable and unpredictable reasons

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

Really, really, really good.

Making a nuclear weapon actually detonate in a nuclear manner is one of the hard problems of making a nuclear weapon. Basically you have to set the explosives off just right. An accidental detonation of the conventional parts of the bomb can't do that (short of like space re-entry speeds or some other thing that could provide the force needed even without an explosion). The fear has always been around the detonation systems since those are the only thing realistically capable of setting off a nuclear explosion. Since the 1950s as detonation systems have gotten more reliable they've added more and more redundancy so those have all sorts of interlocks to prevent them from going off if not armed and fired. It's not like an airbag where if you hook up 12v to the right pins it goes bang. They actually need to be armed and then fired which requires a whole bunch of systems doing their thing in a specific order. The systems that arm weapons (like the aircraft and rocket side hardware) are relatively sophisticated and robust and a hell of a lot of man hours have been put into them over the years because the last thing you need is a risk of ordinance going off when you're already trying to fight a fire.

rtkwe3• 5 years ago

Though a conventional detonation would turn it into a dirty bomb which while almost infinitely better than a full blown nuclear detonation would still ruin a good number of lives.

monocasa3• 5 years ago

Adding to this, I've heard on the grapevine that the parameters of the detonation sequence are generated from a hash of the arming code number. The arming code number isn't like a traditional code lock where there's a chip that's doing "strcmp(entered_code, CORRECT_CODE)", but instead the arming code number is a fundamental piece of how the bomb works. Without that you need the kind of state nuclear apparatus you'd need to build a bomb in the first place to reverse engineer (think a state run nuclear research lab), or at best you can remanufacture it into a much crappier bomb that probably duds to just being a dirty bomb.

_jal• 5 years ago

Really, really, really good.

They made up for it elsewhere, though, with the sort of behavior everyone expects:

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/us-nuclear-wea...

lostlogin4• 5 years ago

Really, really, really good.

Are they though? This accident had 5 of it’s 6 safety switches arm during the accident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

If I understand correctly, atomic weapons have a "strong link" and a "weak link". The detonation won't happen without everything firing correctly and on time; the signal to do that has to pass through both the strong link and the weak link. The strong link isn't in place until the bomb is armed. But couldn't a violent-enough accident knock the strong link into place? Yes, but that same amount of violence would destroy the weak link. (That's the point of the weak link.) So even if an atomic bomb had an accident hard enough (and lucky enough) to arm it, it still couldn't explode, because the weak link would be broken.

megous5• 5 years ago

I suppose this was tested by throwing the non-armed bombs on the ground from various altitudes? :)

jhayward• 5 years ago

These days, very safe.

Back then? We came within one safety of h-bombing North Carolina.

"The bomb’s arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go through to detonate, and it went through all but one.”

dreamcompiler4• 5 years ago

Sandia National Labs spends huge amounts of time, energy, and money making sure US nuclear weapons turn into bricks if they are damaged or tampered with, while also being ultra-reliable if the President orders their use.

It's a level of safety and reliability engineering that exists nowhere else; you simply cannot comprehend it unless you've worked there.

It wasn't always this way but it's been true since the 1970s. The accident described in the article was one of several that created Sandia's engineering culture.

If you somehow got your hands on a modern nuclear weapon and you had a team of PhD engineers, a year of time, and the best tools in the world, you might be able to get the radioactive material out, but you absolutely would not make it explode.

haswell• 5 years ago

This is all fascinating (and comforting).

I'm curious about non-US nuclear weapons and how many of these safety measures are present in those weapons.

nohat2• 5 years ago

That last sounds wildly implausible. Are you saying they booby trap it to set off the high explosive if someone tampers with it (making it a booby trapped dirty bomb)? Because otherwise there's really nothing stopping some dude with an angle grinder from getting the 'radioactive material' out in a day or two.

Generally this sounds nice, but I don't really believe it without some evidence of actually motivated red teams testing the system.

walrus012• 5 years ago

there's also this event with a B-36: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_British_Columbia_B-36_cra...

joshuahedlund• 5 years ago

Obligatory recommendation of the riveting book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...

ubermonkey• 5 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who immediately came into this thread to rec that book. It's fascinating and TERRIFYING.

brightball• 5 years ago

Also one that fell in South Carolina.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2018/03/31/the-atomic-bom...

monoideism• 5 years ago

Also one in Georgia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_co...

So both the Carolinas, and Georgia.

cf100clunk• 5 years ago

Obliquely referenced by Bob Welch in 1973 on the track Hypnotized, by Fleetwood Mac:

"I remember a talk about North Carolina and a strange, strange pond

You see the sides were like glass In the thick of a forest without a road

And if any man's hand ever made that land Then I think it would've showed"

ggm• 5 years ago

I believe the Spain incident informed Gerry Anderson's decisions making "Thunderbirds" along with some more peaceable non weapons emergency collaborations

outlace• 5 years ago

This was a great read - I recommend reading it all the way through

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

If you read this story and were disturbed by it, I strongly suggest you contact your local Vault-Tec representative for a serious discussion.

sgt1012• 5 years ago

A few weeks before, the Air Force and the plane’s builder, Boeing, had realized that a recent modification—fitting the B-52’s wings with fuel bladders—could cause the wings to tear off. Tulloch’s plane was scheduled for a re-fit to resolve the problem, but it would come too late.

plus ca change

hu3• 5 years ago

Faced with a disheveled African-American man cradling a parachute and telling a cockamamie story like that (he had just bailed from a crashing B-52), the sentries did exactly what you might expect a pair of guards in 1961 rural North Carolina to do: They arrested Mattocks for stealing a parachute.

Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell on North Carolina

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