Pretty interesting day in North Carolina 61 years ago

Not sure if this incident, or the one in Italy, made LeMay, stop flying those 24/7.

7 Likes

I remember reading about that…
“A 50 cents switch stopped the bomb from exploding” or something like that…
The other two safety disengaged/failed.

Scary!

1 Like

Holy :poop: !

There is a disconcerting number of nuclear weapons around somewhere in the world.

1 Like

Yep, and the glowy bits with the Uranium and Plutonium are still buried in that field.

I took a national security class in undergrad, taught by an adjunct finishing his PhD in nuclear security issues- this was discussed a couple of times in class, and he especially enjoyed throwing shade on the Air Force and Navy for their tendency to lose their bombs (he had been an Army officer).

EDIT:

Date: Spring 1968
Location: At Sea, Atlantic
Details remain classified.

I wonder if that was the loss of USS Scorpion (SSN-589). She was carrying at least two nuclear-tipped torpedoes when she was lost.

1 Like

One of the weirdest ones is when the US DoD at some point in the 1990s (IIRC) published a list with those, and the Japanese learned from a newspaper article that the USN had lost an A-4 with a nuke near their coast.

Edit: it was this one. Lost in 1965 and the Japanese were never told until 1989.

1 Like