Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser has uncovered near disaster of epic proportions after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request confirmed that a 4 megaton nuclear bomb almost exploded over North Carolina in 1961 — an explosion that would have been 260 times more powerful than Hiroshima and would have devastated the United States. What is amazing is that, once again, the government used classification laws to hide that fact that it almost destroyed the large part of the country and was saved by a simple low-voltage switch that fortunately was able to deactivate the armed bomb. The details were hidden for over fifty years by the government.
The incident occurred when a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air. For years, many objected to the flying of such weapons over populated areas due to the danger of accidents, which occurred repeatedly in this country and other countries. In this case, two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs fell to Earth on January 23, 1961 and one of the bombs went “hot” with a deployed parachute, trigger mechanism engaged, and ready to explode. Only the single low-voltage switch stopped the explosion. If that little switch had malfunctioned or was damaged, the Air Force would have unleashed the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive on this country — sending lethal fallout over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city.
One would have thought that such an accident would have led to a public debate over safety protocols and flight patterns. However, that did not occur because the public was never told. Instead, Congress and the military repeatedly assured the public that such flights were entirely safe and subject to overlapping failsafe systems.
You will notice that there is no call in Congress to investigate the use of classification laws to hide the incident for over 50 years. Indeed, the story has been barely reported at all.
We do however have a picture of our military safety team responding to the mishap:
Source: Guardian
@Mike Appelton –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0K_LZDXp0I
My USN submariner friends used to say: “The way to react to a nuclear attack… Go to the lowest part of your home or business. Then put your head between your legs. Then kiss your candy-a$$ GOODBYE!” 😉
DUCK AND COVER!
This is notion of yours is fraught with danger…
Remember a POTUS saying “..break them up and scatter them into the wind”? Remember Sen Frank Church nosing around their turf and actually made some headway? Remember Congressman Leo Ryan’s ill-fated junket to Guyana trying to “check THEIR hand”? Where are these heroes today? Do you think they are all gone due to natural causes? All 3 would only be advanced-age senior-citizens today alive and well if it weren’t for their meddling in a certain man’s private world. He’s still alive and well and still allegedly at the helm (i.e. invisible hand?). Got an aircraft carrier named after him PRE-HUMOUSLY. Yes I’m talking about him.
“Babs? That’s it… I’m tired of this little one-fodder-unit mouthing off about me… Where’s my little black book with the skull & bones on it?” 🙂
sonof…:
I do remember duck and cover. Our classroom “under the desk” drills came along about the same time that our teacher had us add “under God” to the pledge of allegiance.
Some people on JT think I’m a Obama-lover and think USA can do no wrong. Not in the least! Yes I support both because right now there is nothing better – and One World Government aka Globalization) is not really practical (but seems inevitable now).
Our country’s desire to keep Plum Island NY open this long and now move it to Manhattan Kansas is insane if not criminal.
Our government allowed US Army BIOLOGICAL-AGENT EXPERIMENTS ON US CITIZENS BACK IN THE 1960’S. I’ve recently found out that I was an unwitting victim to the NYC subway system experiment with light-bulbs filled with “Serratia marcescens bacteria” being thrown on the tracks. I was sick a lot back then too.
Then there was the incident in Minneapolis at the famous hospital pumping some sort of organism into the smoke stacks. So no I don’t NOT agree with everything THEY do. I still don’t like Snowden and the other traitor. There is a limit to whistle-blowing. It should be done only to save lives. I still think Mr. Obama and NSA is only trying to save ours…
Here’s the PBS link “Secret Testing in the United States”. Standby to be even more horrified:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/
There is some scuttlebutt going around that Hitler planned on doing this in 1945. Actually had Admiral Dönitz dispatch a new style U-Boat complete with a A4B missile towing rig sneak into Atlantic City NJ waters just 60 miles. Also had the subs registry say it was lost at sea in the Med. If it weren’t for a Kriegsmarine sailor (whistle-blower?) who sicked-out before launch we would not even have known about this.
Evidently our USN just happened to have spotted her and fired on her. But what actually happened she was sunk by her own acoustic-seeking torpedo turning back on her (hand of God or what?). The 2 USN vessels took credit for the sinking though.
The top-secret NAZI mission was part of the ill-fated insane NAZI Brooklyn-Washington Rocket Operation that history claims never saw the light of day. Also we were told Hitler never had the atomic bomb or anything close to it. Yeah right… Washington DC literally dodged a bullet that day. I’ll venture a guess and say “THANK GOD!” (for real this time) 🙂
We can thank Dr. Alan Mathison Turing for this… His memory should not be sullied by an old and now repealed 1885 British law that just recently would not give him a pardon for “buggery” – 2 months ago they finally did.
What he did in his bedroom is none of our business. He saved the world (literally) by helping invent Colossus and the “bombe” which actually decrypted the infamous NAZI Enigma Machine. We (USA) actually knew Hitler’s every move and thanks to our SIGSALY Machine he never knew ours. There’s a rumor that Turing helped us build SIGSALY too.
If Sir Elton John can receive a knighthood so can Dr. Alan Turing who literally saved the world from Hitler. What did Elton John do? showed us that buggery can make you famous?
Wow! So you “know” about the infamous “football”? Oh I forgot SIS-ter… 🙂
I think this is why USAF came up with so many code-wards for this type of incident like Broken Arrow, Bent Spear, etc.
===============================
@Jill – I think there’s a very good reason Shahzad Akbar is on the TIA-NFL… I mean Ted Kennedy was on it too wasn’t he? 🙂
I vaguely remember CBS-TV doing something on it on my black & white TV back in 1961. I was really too young to appreciate the newsworthiness of it. My dad was too busy slowly building a bomb shelter with all the scuttlebutt from his alphabetic-soup and USN friends talking about Cuba and Fidel Castro (or as JFK used to say in his Cape Cod accent “Cuber”). The following year 1962 dad stepped up the shelter operation telling me he was building a BBQ pit, a really big one. I fell for that line as back in the 60’s we Americans usually believed everything we heard on the news and from friends & family. Remember “duck & cover”?
Of course it was probably just a small mention in newspapers and hardly any follow-up on TV. Back then it was not a slow news year. It just got buried in the other stuff like JFK talking about going to the moon and stuff. A JFK betraying his own men in the Bay of Pigs Operation (that did not get much ink or TV either). Back then everyone was scared shiatless about Soviet Union and Nikita Krushchev banging his shoe on the podium at the UN a year before this NC incident.
I don’t think the news people said anything about the incident involving any H-bombs. I think they just said a B-52 crashed in Goldsboro NC swamp. I mean if they had said anything about H-Bombs then Goldsboro would have been covered by KGB agents looking for the broken arrow still in the swamp. I think this was one of those Pentagon MSM news sanitation moments?
SOTB
A switch in time saves 9,000,000. A low voltage one on a nuke that is.
Kraaken, 🙂
But, but, but… Iran!
Had we known in 1964 what was going to happen in N.C. in 2013, we should have let the place blow up and, if it took Washington along with, so much the better.
OT but important: “The US government is being accused of derailing a congressional hearing that would be the first to hear testimony from survivors of an alleged CIA drone strike by failing to grant the family’s lawyer a visa.
Shahzad Akbar, a legal fellow with the British human rights group Reprieve and the director of the Pakistan-based Foundation for Fundamental Rights, says the state department is preventing him from taking his clients to Capitol Hill next week. The hearing would mark the first time US lawmakers heard directly from drone strike survivors.
Akbar’s clients, Rafiq ur-Rehman, his 13-year-old son, Zubair, and his nine-year-old daughter, Nabila, are from the tribal regions of north Waziristan. The children were injured in the alleged US strike on the village of Tappi last year. Their grandmother – Rehman’s mother, Mamana – was killed.
Rehman and his children have spent months making preparations to visit Washington after being invited by US representatives to testify in the ad hoc hearing on drone strikes.
According to Akbar, his clients’ visas for the trip have been approved, but his has not. He believes the hold-up is political.
“It’s not like my name is scratched because there is some sort of confusion. My name is blocked,” Akbar told the Guardian. “Before I started drone investigations I never had an issue with US visa. In fact, I had a US diplomatic visa for two years.”
This is the third tangle Akbar has experienced with US authorities over a visa since 2011, a year after he began investigating drone strikes. In April, Akbar said he was being prevented from speaking at a human rights conference in Washington because of a delay processing his application. He was eventually granted entry.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/24/us-accused-drone-hearing-lawyer-visa-pakistan
sonofthunderboanerges:
I don’t know why I don’t remember that. I was born in 1946.
@Mike Appleton – Actually it was part of MSM at the time. We Americans have a annoying habit of FORGETTING stuff when other things come in to back-fill the memory. Maybe you weren’t born back the either.
That was the year of the Space Race, Black Racism, Berlin Wall, Bay of Pigs, etc. With all that happening it’s hard to remember 2 H-bombs falling in a NC swamp.
Believe it or not FOX NEWS is the MSM leader in revealing big stories but then killing it when it conflicts with the GOP agenda. Case in point was the Israeli telephone company in Washington DC (e.g. AMDOCS) that spies on American Internet (everybody including intell community and LEO) and telephones almost as bad as NSA. But then the story gets sanitized off the Internet. Thanks to MEMORYHOLE and WHATREALLYHAPPENED we would never know about it.
See time stamp 05:27 for AMDOCS scenario:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H20Naj176M0
SOTB
So that’s why the state of North Carolina still conducts periodic radiation testing on local ground water around the crash site.
Wasn’t this incident part of the accident prone “airborne-alert” activity that Kennedy modified and then added permissive action links (PALs)
This is the most terrifying disclosure I have heard in my lifetime, not only because of the horrible consequences had the bomb detonated, but because the government hid the information from the public for over 50 years. There is absolutely no legal or moral justification for the cover-up.
@OS – You wore many hats in the past. Here is one of my “hats” and my first love of boats… I was a civilian aboard the SSBN-640 in 1964. Can a dude love a sub like that? 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0piET4w_pmY#t=95
I am NOT a warmonger! I just like high-tech stuff with a passion… 😉
@OS _ Yup from all the clues you gave about “Jim” I’m pretty sure this was the broken arrow he was talking about:
“13 February 1950: While flying a simulated combat mission from Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska to Carswell AFB in Texas, a B-36 Peacemaker bomber experienced engine problems. The aircraft was carrying a single Mk 4 atomic bomb containing depleted uranium but the plutonium core required for a fission reaction had been removed. Ice buildup on the carburetors forced the pilot to shut down three engines and reduced the power output of the remaining three. As weather conditions continued to worsen, the crew decided to abandon the aircraft. The unarmed (aka dummy) bomb was jettisoned over the Pacific Ocean and its conventional explosives either detonated in mid-air or upon impact with the water. The plane then turned over a nearby island where the crew bailed out. Twelve were rescued from the frigid conditions but five were never found. The B-36 apparently continued on autopilot for a considerable distance before crashing in northern British Columbia. The wreck was later located and studied to confirm that no nuclear material remained aboard. ”
They were picked up by SAR at Princess Royal Island. Islanders said it FELT like a nuclear detonation but it was just the HE package exploding.
sotb,
Jim was very close mouthed about that, but I had the impression it was sometime in the late 40s or early 50s and in the north Atlantic. I could have been wrong. He was one of the few B-17 bombardiers who shot down a Zero. He grew up hunting squirrels and was a superb shot, so not surprised at his marksmanship. However he crewed on both B-36 and B-47 as well, so the B-36 incident could be the one he was referring to so cryptically. Got to remember, it had just happened when he was at our house and told me about it. Here is a brief bio from the EAA archives of “Timeless Voices of Aviation.” He audio recorded an interview, but they only have the video interviews online.
http://www.eaa.org/apps/timelessvoices/VoicesDetails.aspx?VoicesID=753
Here is his marker:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=gates&GSfn=james&GSmn=f&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSst=26&GScntry=4&GSob=n&GRid=16329000&df=all&