MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

BROKEN ARROWS - ATOMIC FUNINA COLD WAR WORLD

WHYDIDTHE US GOVERNMENTKEEPLOSING ATOMIC WEAPONS?

You would think that the one thing that the United States and other nuclear powers would have on a short leash would be their Atomic Weapons.

And, in truth, they do – but as we know kaka happens and when it does things can go sideways very quickly.

In the small town of Eureka, North Carolina, at the crossroads of the main streets running through town is a small historical marker.

It simply and rather nonchalantly says…

NUCLEAR MISHAP and that widespread disaster was avoided.

This was not a simple mishap – but something that would have changed the face of America forever.

On January 24, 1961, a B-52 bomber was en route to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base (Love the name!), and the pilot decided to keep ying in an attempt to burn off some gas – an action he likely hoped would help prevent the plane from exploding if the risky landing should go wrong. However, the leak unexpectedly and rapidly worsened. Immediately, the crew turned around and began their approach towards Seymour Johnson.

Without warning the huge plane began to shudder and shake – a massive structural failure was occurring and the bomber began to break apart. It’s entire right wing failed and the plane began falling towards earth. The order was given to abandon the plane, and eight crewmembers attempted to escape. Five survived.

But two other objects joined the crew in the air with parachutes. Two Mark 39 nuclear bombs, one with a successfully deployed parachute and one with a failed chute, fell from the sky.

The chuteless bomb hit the ground at 700+ mph and buried itself so deeply into a tobacco eld that some of its parts were never found. The other oated down on a parachute, planting its nose in the ground beside a tree. The parachute bomb came startlingly close to detonating. A secret government document said three of its four safety mechanisms failed, and only a simple electrical switch prevented a catastrophe. It was 260 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and could have instantly killed thousands of people.

The Air Force sent a team out relatively quietly to nd and defuse the nukes. Jack ReVelle told his daughter about getting the mission:

“One night, I get a phone call from my squadron commander. And instead of using all the code words that we had rehearsed, he says, ‘Jack, I got a real one for you.’ You don’t often have two hydrogen bombs falling out of aircraft onto U.S. property.”

The rst bomb was quickly found hanging from a tree. The parachute had kept its descent reasonable, and it had stuck vertically in the ground, buried only partially in the dirt. The team found that three of its four safeguards had either failed or triggered. Only one safety, the actual safe/ arm switch, had prevented a nuclear explosion.

Another famous quote from Lt. Jack Revelle, the bomb disposal expert responsible for disarming the device, reveals just how close we came

to disaster: “Until my death, I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, ‘Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch.’ And I said, ‘Great.’ He said, ‘Not great. It’s on arm.’” Indeed, the switch had been the only thing that prevented the rst bomb from detonating. It had failed on the second bomb. As they recovered the rest of it, they found no safeguards that had properly survived. The bomb should’ve exploded. Engineers wrote in a classi ed report in 1969 that a single electrical jolt could’ve triggered a weapon. The lead on the study, Parker F. Jones, recommended that Mark 39 bombs no longer be used in an airborne role since they almost gave us Goldsboro Bay.

But Jack and his team were able, through painstaking work, to recover most of the bomb, including the nuclear core. If even one of them had gone off, it could have killed approximately 28,000 people. 60,000 live there today and would, obviously, not be able to live there if the bombs had irradiated the whole area in 1961.

But there have been other such “Mishaps”.

Other Broken Arrows include a Mark-4 ‘Fatman’ jettisoned into the north Paci c in 1956. In 1965, an A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft carrying a 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb) rolled off the deck of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Paci c Ocean. The plane and weapon sank in 16,000 feet of water and were never found.

And the others were lost in the Spring of 1968. When the U.S.S. Scorpion, a nuclear attack submarine returning to home base in Norfolk, Virginia, mysteriously sank about 400 miles to the southwest of the Azores islands.

An unarmed nuke hit the ground in Mars Bluff, just south of Florence, South Carolina in 1958. The explosives that would have set off the nuke blew a crater in Walter Gregg’s garden some 24 feet deep and 50 feet wide. The concussion caused damage in buildings for a ve-mile radius and injured 6 members of the Gregg family whose home was heavily damaged as well.

Then there is the Tybee Island incident.

The United States lost a warhead off of Tybee Island, Georgia, in 1958. Tybee Island is a stone’s throw from Savannah – one of the neatest cities in our nation. According to the U.S. Air Force, it did not contain a plutonium core and therefore could not be considered a functional nuclear weapon, though that has been debated. Whether you believe the U.S. Air Force on this matter is a personal call.

For sure the military has had some very close calls with their Broken Arrows – let’s hope these incidents are in the past while we ride the backroads of Mysterious America…

O’Life Out! ,