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Please note this does not mean the USSR wasn’t that way. Just want to clarify I’m not a tankie, lol.
You know how you hear stories sometimes about shadowy government agencies converging on an area for no apparent reason, and then leaving just as fast as they came? People usually assume it's aliens, but I wonder how many of those incidents have been stupid shit like this.
The army/airforce actively spread rumors of aliens to hide their activities.
Probably all of those, because it's really unlikely that aliens have come to earth and even less likely that an advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel, would ever get busted.
Military term for this is "broken arrow"
It happens more than you would think mostly by the US but also Russia. Usually they find the things pretty fast but a few are just missing and at least one I remember was underwater somewhere it couldn't safely be recovered so the area is patrolled.
Are you referring to bombs the Air Force accidentally dropped or the Navy losing nuke subs? Cause we’ve done both and no one has explained what happened to the USS Scorpion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines
I think one of these armed hydrogen bombs they dropped on NC was never recovered. Someone said that online I didn't read it in a publication so idk.
But there was an incident in Portugal, they sent in these service members to clean up this wreckage with no safety gear and they all died of cancer and the government denied it all. Also plutonium I believe.
Source? EdIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
Both of the weapons began their firing sequences upon separation from the aircraft, despite safeguards meant to prevent that from occurring.
This also happened in South Carolina a few years earlier. Unsure when it was revealed to the public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Mars_Bluff_B-47_nuclear_weapon_loss_incident
Continuing...
The other bomb did not get as far into its firing sequence, but became deeply embedded in a muddy field, and one of its major weapons components (the thermonuclear "secondary" stage) was regarded as irrecoverably lost after an extensive, failed effort to recover it.
Me: "IT'S STILL THERE?!?!"
Continuing...
In 1962, the landowner was paid $1,000 to grant the United States of America a perpetual 200-foot (61 m) radius circular easement over the remains of the buried second bomb.[56][57] The site of the easement, at 35°29′37″N 77°51′30″W, is visible as a disturbed area, and lies approximately 250 feet (76 m) north of an obvious circle of trees (and disused cemetery) in the middle of a plowed field visible on Google Earth.
$1,000 to grant the United States of America a perpetual 200-foot (61 m) radius circular easement
worst deal than selling Manhattan for some beeds.
Time for spicy pilgrimage!
Thermonuclear secondary stages, A.K.A. the "Fusion" portion don't detonate unless the first stage has been propperly ignited. While Lithium Deuteride (the second stage fusion fuel) is not safe to handle (corrosive and explodes on contact with water) it's not going to cause a blast comparable to even a fision bomb.
Holy shit, that close to Raleigh?! Most of the state would have been wiped off the map twice. Maybe parts of VA and/or SC!
Edit: Apparently it would have only taken out a few cities. Hollywood is wrong again!
Raleigh would have been fine. VA and SC would have heard the explosion but nothing worse. I checked it with a nuclear blast simulator. Even the Tsar Bomba would have killed less than 5% of the population of Raleigh.
"260 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb" sounds impressive, but most of that energy is wasted heating the nearby air rather than increasing the blast radius. This is why modern nuclear weapons use cluster munitions with smaller yields.
Half my immediate family has cancer from undisclosed testing causing nuclear fallout over swaths of the southwest US..
US is run by assholes.
🌏 👨🚀 🔫 👨🚀
It would really only be comparable if they nuked north Carolina then tried to cover it up.
It’s not shocking that the military keeps classified that sort of thing, they’d have been hard pressed to keep an actual nuclear detonation classified/hidden 🤷♂️
A near miss and a disaster are worlds apart in terms of consequence, but very close in terms of what went wrong.
Tbh the bomb exploding would be worse because you’d have the kinetic blast and death from that PLUS fallout (though on the east coast that fallout would likely be headed to Europe)
They didn’t drop the bombs by accident, there was a plane crash, the plane broke apart and the bombs began arming themselves as part of the separation process, but didn’t detonate due to the failsafes.
To be clear the failsafes barely did.
Of the steps in this diagram the only one that prevented a nuclear detonation of the first bomb was the arming switch. In the swiss cheese model of accidents, out of 17 layers of protection, 16 failed. The safety mechanism that succeeded in this case had a history of failing because nuts in the plane could fall down and short the switch, arming the bomb unintentionally in flight.
The pilots who bailed out were both arrested by base MPs for 'stealing parachutes' while trying to get to the base and warn about the unsafe condition of the crash site. It probably didn't help that the first pilot to make it to base was black in NC in the 60s.
Making a mistake with something intended to kill people vs making a mistake with something that provides a public good show different levels of intent. One of them was a city destroyer on purpose and the other was a city destroyer on accident.
There was a plane crash. It wasn’t some “whoops we dropped ze bombs” situation.
There were catastrophic failures but still failsafes prevented the disaster.
These events aren’t comparable at all.
Three mile island is much more comparable.
For us not to qualify as a backwards ass country we'd also have to pretend that three mile island wasn't one lucky accident away from doing just what Chernobyl did.
Isn't the US Air Force still missing like 5 bikes that they lost over the decades?
I could go over mk ultra and other fun little government projects but I guess people already got the point
I was wondering where those neighborhood kids got those air force bikes...
At least it was bikes and not nukes.
But speaking of nukes I don't get why they didn't continue the lie. If I was an asshole I sure as fuck would not let that go public.
That explains so much about North Carolina.
~ngl, sometimes I kinda wish they had exploded a little bit.~
The largest population of Marshallese people in the continental United States is in Springdale, Arkansas, just a short drive from where I live.
Why is there a large Marshallese population in Arkansas?
Well, you see, between 1946 - 1958, the US government detonated sixty-seven (yes, 67) nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands, rendering dozens of the islands uninhabitable.
I suppose you could call it a "big whoops" except for the part a where they were fully aware of the dangers of radioactive fallout and just did it anyway.
Turns out the USA has a long list of nuclear near miss and minor disasters, we just don't like to talk about them. Well There's Your Problem podcast just did a lengthy episode chronicling the more notable publicly-disclosed ones, including the ones in North Carolina. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqJR6kgwCio
If Chernobyl had almost exploded and melted down, I wouldn't blame the USSR for trying to hide it.
same thing happened in Spain, they dropped a couple nukes and one actually detonated but I'm such a way it didn't trigger a nuclear explosion, just fill the area with highly radioactive material.
Yeah... the US track record is completely blank, nothing to see here. It's a long episode but also pants shittingly terrifying...
Accidentally dropping a nuke is wild.
It wasn't even the only time. They also accidentally dropped 4 more nukes in Spain, 3 of them over land. And the bombs actually detonated (but failed to trigger a nuclear explosion), spreading radioactive material around.
And we've done it several times. On domestic soil.
they're called Broken Arrow incedents
