Blast! The Blast Door is Open

US Air Force officers entrusted with the launch keys to long-range nuclear missiles have been caught twice this year leaving the blast door open.  SHUT THE G*D’M DOOR!, that’s what you would expect their senior officers to yell.  The blast door is intended to stop the uninvited from entering their underground command post WHERE THEY CONTROL THE RELEASE OF INTERCONTINETAL BALISTIC MISSILES.  The Associated Press reported that such violations have occurred multiple times, however two recent incidents have lead to two launch crew commanders and two deputy commanders given administrative punishments this year. The missileers (as they are called) hold the keys that could launch nuclear devastation. The missiles are nuclear warheads multiple times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Each underground launch center, known as a capsule for its pill-like shape, monitors and operates 10 Minuteman 3 missiles. The missiles stand in reinforced concrete silos and are linked to the control center by buried communications cables. The ICBMs are split evenly among “wings” based in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Each wing is divided into three squadrons, each responsible for 50 missiles.

SECRET DOCUMENT TELLS HOW BOMBS RAINED DOWN ON NORTH CAROLINA IN 1961 – “IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BAD NEWS… IN SPADES”

READ MORE:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961

A secret document recently declassified reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to accidentally detonating an atomic bomb over North Carolina in 1961, when two 4 megaton bombs fell from a B52 bomber on a routine flight over the Eastern seaboard.  The explosion would have been 260 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

The bombs fell to earth and fortunately neither exploded.  One of the bombs had activated itself in preparation for detonation in spite of multiple safety mechanisms designed to prevent an unintentional detonation.  Only one low-voltage switch prevented the catastrophe and the people of North Carolina, and South Carolina, and Tennessee and Virginia and D.C. and Maryland… were safe.

“It would have been bad news – in spades,” wrote Parker F Jones, a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons after a review of the event eight years later.  His secret report was titled “Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb”!

One of the bombs fell in a field, the other into a meadow off Big Daddy’s Road.  The poetic synchronicity of the Big Mama landing off Big Daddy’ road was not commented on in the secret report.

In a conversation I had with Bundeswehr General Franz Uhle-Wettler in the nineties he said he was endlessly asked if he would have pushed the button to unleash nuclear weapons while in the position of final command during the eighties.  He said he always told the journalists and others yes.  “Yes I will push the button if it comes to that.”  Then he added to me, “No, I would never have let off a nuclear bomb, but I needed the others to believe we would do just that.”

It is reassuring to know military leaders are rational beings, it is concerning to realize such awful destructive power is subject to human error, miscalculation and/or faulty workmanship.