Worse than Chemical Assad

John F Kennedy had been president for two days. January 23, 1961. The Strategic Air Command still kept B-52s in the air, 24/7, armed with nuclear bombs, to counter any potential threat should the Cold War turn hot, should the Soviets mount a first strike. It was the heyday of MAD, mutually assured destruction. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a year away. U.S.-Soviet relations were tattered and getting worse.

Nobody knew. Somewhere over North Carolina, above Goldsboro, a B-52 began to have mechanical problems…. really big mechanical problems. The plane fell into an uncontrolled tail spin, plunging towards earth, breaking apart as it dropped.

High powered atomic and hydrogen bombs are measured in “megatons” – one megaton carries the explosive power of one million tons of TNT. The blast that leveled four square miles of Hiroshima at the end of World War II was a “Little Boy,” carrying the blasting power of about a mere 15,000 tons of TNT. Nagasaki was a “Fat Man,” slightly larger at around 20,000 tons. They were measured in kilotons in those days… a hundred thousand tons of TNT. They were a fraction of a megaton, pop guns compared to the two hydrogen bombs carried aboard that doomed North Carolina flight.

Each bomb measured four-megatons. According to information secured by journalist Eric Schlosser, as the plane descended violently, one bomb fell to earth and landed harmlessly. It never armed itself. The other “‘assumed it was being deliberately released over an enemy target - and went through all its arming mechanisms save one, and very nearly detonated over North Carolina,’ Mr Schlosser told the BBC…” BBC.co.uk, September 21^st. The only thing that saved pretty much most of North Carolina was a fairly primitive, last ditch, lower power “dyno-technology” voltage switch, the fourth and last remaining failsafe mechanism. Boom never happened. But oh, it was  so close.

The declassified report “was written on 22 October 1969 by Parker F Jones, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons safety department at Sandia national laboratories [New Mexico]… In the document, Jones gives his response to a passage in a book by Dr. Ralph Lapp, a physicist involved in the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear bombs, that describes the accident in 1961 in which two hydrogen bombs were dropped inadvertently over North Carolina.” The Guardian (U.K.), September 20^th.  There has been no official U.S. governmental reaction. It just happened… a long time ago?

Each bomb on that aircraft was hundreds of times (200 – 266 to be more precise) more powerful than each of the two detonations in Japan noted above. How many of my readers would not be here today if that blast had taken place… either from the explosion or the massive nuclear contamination that would have killed so many more? And what if somehow, someone thought we had been attacked… and countered? WWIII? MAD?

While there are a couple of dozen nations with nuclear power generating capacity, the above CNN map shows you who’s got the bomb/warhead (red), who’s pursuing it (checkered yellow and red – North Korea), who probably has it but has not admitted it (orange – Israel) and who is suspected of pursuing it (yellow – Iran).

There are mumblings of a possible détente between the United States and Iran, an exchange of greetings and the creak of an opening door. The big issue: Iran’s potential development of nuclear arms. It might just get worked out… Iran wants sanctions over, the U.S. wants the nuke program to die. These are despicable weapons, overkill to a magnitude that can find no further justification in a world living on eggshells and hair triggers. Fukushima and Chernobyl are accidental contamination blips on the earth’s surface… there is so much more and so much worse that can happen… on purpose or by accident.

I’m Peter Dekom… and just think about what almost happened and, more importantly, what could happen with this explosive capacity.