> On the eighth day, Jack fished it all out of the muddy water at the bottom of the pit. One of his sergeants found another crucial piece.
> “Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,” he told Jack.
> “Great,” Jack said.
> “Not great,” the sergeant replied. “It’s on arm.”
> There’s far from a consensus on how close those bombs were to going off. Jack himself couldn’t say. But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well (The military refers to this as a “sympathetic detonation”). Each bomb was 250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an explosion that large would have permanently altered the geography of this state. Even thought it would have been at least 50 miles from the Pamlico Sound, Jack says the blast would have been powerful enough to create a new “Bay of North Carolina.” There would have been a 17-mile-wide “kill zone” around the blast site. Heavy fallout would have spread as far north as New York.
This is one of those moments that could have been a turning point in history. Consider the implications of these bombs exploding. Tens of thousands of Americans dead at the hands of their own military. Imagine how it would change the JFK presidency; he would have been in office for a total of three days at this point. Imagine the effect on the state of North Carolina; Raleigh is just 40 miles from blast site, and millions would be evacuated. Imagine how it would change the Cold War. Imagine how it would change the perception of nuclear technology not just among the American public, but among the British (who have had the bomb for eight years) and French (who have had the bomb for one). It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.
If you read about RAND and Air Force policy at the time in general, and LeMay’s beliefs specifically, it’s a very real likelihood. The dude wasn’t parodied in Dr. Strangelove for nothing.
This stuff is published now and terrifying.
LeMay was the architect of the firebombing of Japan and the North Korean population that killed as much as 20% of the population. Applying air power to kill until capitulation was the basis of strategy.
A common belief among the Air Force leadership was that nuclear weapons were a wasting asset that would be rendered moot once the Soviets were able to build out their arsenal. At the particular point in time, the US had an overwhelming superiority that was shrinking. There was a serious belief the preemptive war was critical while the window of superiority was open. That position was pushed strongly during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pushback to President Eisenhower’s moves to control planning escalated to the point where Eisenhower demanded compliance or resignation from SAC leaders.
Was that all serious or just bluster to scare to Soviets? It could be - fear of an uncontrolled madman might discourage escalation. Fortunately, we didn’t find out.
I believe by 1961 Le May had handed SAC over the General Powers as head of SAC, not exactly a man known for his subtlety:
"Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!"
Afterwards, Professor William Kaufmann from the RAND Corporation, losing his patience, noted: "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."
Thanks for detailed reply. My rebuke may have been hyperbolic itself. Agree with you and the others who noted it’s a conceivable outcome and an interesting counterfactual.
I was most acutely replying to the “no way he would…” framing. Top objection (besides the real, if pedestrian, point about certainty) is that, whatever a leader’s public messaging and/or bluster might include, the decision to kill millions as an organizational cover-up doesn’t seem like something one could easily project. Especially when retaliation risk would include the possibility of further detonations on home soil.
I’m not well versed in military history, but I understand LeMay’s story to be more complex than ‘bloodthirsty war criminal’ (and that’s including his own comments ~ “if we lost, I suppose I’d be a war criminal”). The Pacific theatre was nightmarish on all sides.
In the excellent (if rather terrifying) The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner Daniel Ellsberg describes going to see Dr Strangelove and basically concluding that a lot of the movie was pretty realistic - particularly the delegated use of nuclear weapons by a base commander without the approval of the President. This was actually possible for a long time even though publicly it was always said that only the President could authorise the use of nuclear weapons.
Yes. I think as early as Truman or Eisenhower the president would authorise the use with discretion delegated to local commanders, though I think there were some general rules of engagement attached to authorisations.
Why can it not just be hyperbole, a stylistic choice? This is all just internet discussion, with some speculation and exaggeration for color. Why do we need to equivocate in a discussion on events from three generations?
Some guy/gal wonders what would have happened, another guy/gal gives a concise clear answer. It's all good.
It's certainly an interesting counterfactual to consider how the US would react, and SAC in particular, to the exploding of a hydrogen bomb in the North Carolina.
Launching a full retaliatory response (and there was only one plan) certainly seems like something that might have happened - probably because they would genuinely believe it was an attack.
How much have you read about Curtis LeMay? His life ambition as a General did really seem to be to find any excuse to nuke another country… Quotes of his and anecdotes I’ve read from people who worked around him at the time, it really did seem to the point of being unhinged…
So I don’t see it as such a ridiculous idea that such an accident might not have been a convenient excuse to bomb the Soviets…
A sympathetic detonation is very unlikely for a nuclear weapon. They have to detonate in an extremely specific way, such that the explosion compresses the fissile material from all sides at once. A random off-center explosion hitting a nuclear bomb would likely cause the explosives in the bomb to detonate off their very specific timing and fail to cause a nuclear detonation.
This was actually a safety design feature:
> Walske also stipulated that all nuclear weapons in the stockpile must be “one-point safe;” that is,the weapon must have a probability of less than one in one million of producing a nuclear detonation if a detonation of the high explosives originates from a single point
In fact this entire article seems to not recognize this fact. Even if one of the bombs detonated, it was always going to be bad for the people near it but not catastrophic or anything. It would almost certainly not have been nuclear.
I disagree; under normal circumstances regarding the HE explosives you are 100% correct but I suspect a nuclear shockwave at near point blank range might be fast enough to push the near side of the primary pit to the far side in a time interval short enough to cause an additional criticality. Probably not to design yields, but plausible.
A nuclear chain reaction takes place roughly over a single microsecond. To travel the ~11 inches of a bomb, in ideal circumstances, a high explosive needs roughly 200 microseconds. It is not impossible that the exact right stuff could happen to trigger the bomb, but it is extremely unlikely - it took the smartest minds in america working together for 3 years to figure out the exact precise timing to prevent a nuclear fizzle and achieve a true atomic explosion. It is, contrary to pop culture, near-impossible to pull off by dumb luck. Mostly you'll just make a radioactive mess.
Right! But that's talking about compressing a plutonium pit in atmospheric pressure--being an extremely dense metal, plutonium will preferentially "squirt out" in any direction rather than compress, if there's a direction it can go in. Therefore, you need to make a spherical shockwave via explosives.
But that's in 1 atm! The initial wavefront of a fission device is going to be conservatively about 4 inches a microsecond (based on early above-ground test photos, modern high-yield devices would probably be faster still). This could very well turn the entire physics package of the secondary weapon into a thin pancake on the blast front, the plutonium can't get out of the way fast enough to avoid compression. This is a totally different scenario than a one-point-safety fizzle. The HE explosives in the second bomb might as well not exist relative to the overpressures faced from the first bomb's detonation.
Another point is the massive neutron flux, which will get some nuclear reaction out of the bomb material in and of itself. Neutrons will set off both fission and fusion reactions, simultaneously.
I wonder if you had two bombs in a confined space whether the X-ray flux from one would cause a radiation flux driven implosion in the other - similar to how the primary causes the secondary to implode in an H-bomb.
I was thinking the same, given that Teller, Sakharov et. al. came up with, but discarded as unworkable, several designs (the "Classical Super", the "Layer Cake"...) before they discovered that, unfortunately, there was a way to make it work. My guess is that the X-ray pulse from a buried bomb would be quickly absorbed (it is quite rapidly attenuated just by air), and that whatever X-rays reached the second bomb would all be from one direction, ruining the symmetry that is apparently needed for fusion ignition.
On the other hand, I have heard that a non-trivial part of the yield of a hydrogen bomb comes from the fast neutrons from the fusion causing a much more complete fissioning of the fissile material. Maybe, if the buried bomb was not damaged to the point where it was incapable of fusion ignition, the second bomb would contribute to the explosion in this way, without acting as a hydrogen bomb itself. With a high enough neutron flux from the first bomb, maybe the core of the second one would not have to undergo implosion, or even stay intact.
The article also talks about a 17-mile kill zone, and the creation of a new "North Carolina bay" despite the crash being 50 miles from Pamlico Sound. These seem to me to be incompatible claims, and surely the second, at least, must be hyperbole?
"non-trivial part of the yield of a hydrogen bomb comes from the fast neutrons"
I believe in almost all "H-bomb" designs most of the energy produced comes from the fissioning of various uranium components by those neutrons (mainly the "pusher" surrounding the secondary and sometimes the surrounding case enclosing the primary and secondary - e.g. in the W88).
It just makes me feel uncomfortable how many near-disasters we've had; with this one I'm also thinking about the flawed missile launch detection system that would have set off WW3 if the guy watching the screen had pushed the proverbial button. I'm sure there's been loads of incidents at nuclear power plants as well for that matter.
Wow that happened fairly close by. Just outside Smithfield. We tend to just drive through briefly (the county) on our way to I-40 before heading off to the coast to visit my Dad.
> It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.
I think the impact of 9/11 is exaggerated. It may have been traumatic for Americans, and to a lesser degree Europeans, but in the grand scheme of things its impact has been limited.
That's one possibility. The other one is that the world was moving towards peace and 9/11 completely unhinged USA, leading them to make almost completely unjustified wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in an effort to capture or kill a handful of people. The current situation in Europe is pretty much a straight continuation from all that.
In short, it pretty much fucked every good thing the fall of USSR achieved on this planet.
I don't think the physical impact of 9/11 was that important. 3000 or so lives is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The main immediate impact of 9/11 was demonstrating the USA was vulnerable. Before, they always managed to do their fighting in other countries.
As a result 1) the USA had a serious need to prove their power. They received a challenge which could not stay unanswered. 2) Europe and the 1st world in general tried to let the US kick around and prove themselves, without starting a world war, and without being dragged into it themselves. They all had similar moments in their own history, and understood how other nations would just not care as much as the receiving nation did. 3) The moslim world saw their biggest enemy receive a kick in the balls, and loved it. It was a great morale booster for them. The US could be hurt.
Long term impact was reducing the values of the enlightenment and western civilization. The US was seen torturing random people, starting a war against the wrong enemy, and limiting all kinds of freedom while claiming to be still free. They lost claims to moral superiority almost anywhere. The overton window shifted away from 'everyone has rights' and towards 'might makes right'.
- financial: the forever wars of Iraq / Afghanistan are somewhere around, per google, 8 trillion dollars. In terms of global warming mitigation then (yeah, it would never have been spent on that) or in terms of opportunity costs of budgeting now and the near future, that is a huge loss. That is a quarter of the current US debt (31.5 trillion dollars). It is a almost a third of our annual GDP.
- freedom: it instituted dangerous protocols for surveillance, jailing of US citizens without trial, assassination of US citizens without trial (Obama), the "enemy combatant" designation, mainstreamed use of torture and extraordinary rendition. I'm no war historian, but I think the only other war that resulted in such massive expansion of federal government power, and the creation of agencies to exert such power, was WWII with the beginnings of the CIA and NSA. Did Vietnam or Korea result in such expansions and institutions?
- trust: granted we always had an iffy relationship with this with banana republic atrocities, supporting dictators, the Shah of Iran, etc, but Iraq really destroyed a lot of American standing worldwide, and considering the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a surge of sympathy/support, that says something. America arguably lost a huge amount of it's soft power. Everyone knew it was an imperialist grab of oil by oilmen in charge of the White House. Consider that this was the early days of the EU and China was on the rise. Iraq likely lead to countries seeking leadership and aid from those rather than America as a serious option.
Most of the cost of those wars went into the pockets of US companies and contractors so they can be seen as massive subsidy packages for the US economy.
If your two other points are the only consequences you can think of then it has indeed all been very limited in the grand scheme of things.
Did they? The US sent 12 billion in cash (actual, paper cash) to Iraq and it went POOF. Weapons you fire and transport around the globe aren't free, pulling thousands of reservists from productive US jobs as cheap troops is not free. Lasting effects of PTSD and huge amounts of VA expenses for veterans is not free.
When you read about all the things that could have gone wrong in first decades of the nuclear arms race but didn't, it really feels like there were multiple narrow escapes that could have escalated rapidly. The Titan missile silo story, for example - basically kids just past their teen years were responsible for maintaining those systems (the dropped wrench down the missile silo, oops...). See Eric Schlosser's history:
By the way, this caught my eye with respect to Jack Revelle's leukemia:
> "Jack earned the Bronze Star during the Vietnam War, where he was exposed to Agent Orange."
While Agent Orange's active agent was supposed to be a mixture of two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the manufacturer ran a sloppy synthesis which produced a lot of dioxin as a side product. The herbicide mix was effective, but dioxin has a lot of nasty side effects related to interference with various cellular processes, and promotion of cancers such as leukemia and myeloma appears to be an issue. (The US govt and Agent Orange manufacturers tried to block VA care for veterans exposed to Agent Orange by promoting bogus studies done with highly purified 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T showing no such effects). See for example:
(2009) Cancer incidence in the population exposed to dioxin after the "Seveso accident": twenty years of follow-up.
Exposure to ionizing radiation could of course also be involved, either via ingestion of small amounts of those radionuclide species that are incorporated into human tissues and bone (cesium-137, etc.) or by short-term exposure to high levels of gamma photons, neutron fluxes, positrons, alpha particles, etc.
>it really feels like there were multiple narrow escapes that could have escalated rapidly.
This is a minor plot point in the Ringworld series. Humans are psychically lucky and as a species we have managed to avoid the utmost brink several times. The alien race keeps humans around hoping to exploit humanity's luck.
Not to undermine what the man did, but the title is a bit of an overstatement. What saved North Carolina from nuclear disaster was not the guy who pulled the cores out after, but luck, safety mechanisms, and failures / damage sustained during impact: http://nuclearweaponsaccidents.blogspot.com/2013/03/goldsbor...
Brenda is described as having a "thick British accent" which is tantalising vis a vis how they met as it suggests she is from the UK, but unfortunately otherwise meaningless as there is no such thing as a (single) "British accent".
This part, about one of the crew from the crashed bomber, is so sad:
> When he arrived at the front gate, his uniform was torn up, his military ID was gone, and he was banged up from his escape. His parachute was still on his back. He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was. So, the airmen arrested him for stealing government property.
Brilliant. Racism slowed response to a broken arrow situation. You'd think a guy showing up having clearly just survived a plane crash, with witnesses bringing him to the scene would be sufficient to at least place a phone call.
> He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was.
standard procedure, but yea I was waiting for the race baiting of the article, it isn't usual to be a whole 6 paragraphs down!
Yeah, random guy shows up and says 'I belong here' with zero proof that he belongs there. Yeah SoP would be arrest/detain them and let the guy in charge sort it out. Or as they say 'thats above my pay grade'. The alternative would be to let random people in and hope for the best. If I were a spy I would like the 'hope for the best' style of perimeter control.
If you are interested in this general subject, i recommend reading "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser. It chronicles the development of the US nuclear arsenal, and describes how the military dealt with the inherent tradeoff between nuclear weapon readiness vs reducing the likelihood of accidents.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is nukes are designed to not detonate if they are damaged or destroyed by a conventional explosion.
But if they're sitting next to another nuke which detonates, the core doesn't even have to go critical for it to release a bunch / most of its energy due to its neighbor's neutrons flux. Similar to how in thermonuclear (fusion) weapons a simple blanket of unenriched uranium can provide a huge boost to the weapon output.
I think for two nukes sitting any further apart than a few metres, if you set one off, the fissile material in the second nuke may have some small number of fissions due to incident neutrons, but it would be a very long way away from "most" of its energy.
Just from a physics point of view, let's be generous and say that a single fission releases four neutrons, and I'm pretty sure that's an overestimate. If the fissile material in the second nuke has a radius of 0.1m (r), and sitting 5m (R) away, then it would be exposed to at a maximum πr^2 / (4πR^2) = 0.0001 of those neutrons. If we imagine that every single one of those neutrons causes a fission in the second nuke (and that won't be true either) then the yield from the second nuke will be less than a thousandth of the yield from the first nuke. Secondary fissions from the neutrons released from those fissions may increase this a little, but the second nuke is subcritical, so it won't be by much.
I'd love to hear from someone who actually knows the answer for sure, though.
Criticality doesn't work like that. A lump of fissile material either is or isn't supercritical, regardless of the neutron flux. There are things that can change a lump from subcritical to supercritical, like lowering its temperature so it contracts, moving two lumps together, or using conventional explosives to compress the lump, but throwing a load of neutrons at it is not one of them.
No, you’re right & I wasn’t thinking it through. At worst it will cause the core to fizzle due to radiation induced decays, but it shouldn’t detonate.
Still not great of course! Now you’ve spread the second bomb’s worth of Pu or U over a wide area with the energy of the first one. Toxic /and/ radioactive. What’s not to like!
(I may have been digging up a partial memory of muclear missile fratricide by Pu predetonation during compression due to the extra neutron flux, which IIRC is a real thing, but would require the second warhead to go through a full conventional explosion.)
> “Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,” he told Jack.
> “Great,” Jack said.
> “Not great,” the sergeant replied. “It’s on arm.”
> There’s far from a consensus on how close those bombs were to going off. Jack himself couldn’t say. But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well (The military refers to this as a “sympathetic detonation”). Each bomb was 250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an explosion that large would have permanently altered the geography of this state. Even thought it would have been at least 50 miles from the Pamlico Sound, Jack says the blast would have been powerful enough to create a new “Bay of North Carolina.” There would have been a 17-mile-wide “kill zone” around the blast site. Heavy fallout would have spread as far north as New York.
This is one of those moments that could have been a turning point in history. Consider the implications of these bombs exploding. Tens of thousands of Americans dead at the hands of their own military. Imagine how it would change the JFK presidency; he would have been in office for a total of three days at this point. Imagine the effect on the state of North Carolina; Raleigh is just 40 miles from blast site, and millions would be evacuated. Imagine how it would change the Cold War. Imagine how it would change the perception of nuclear technology not just among the American public, but among the British (who have had the bomb for eight years) and French (who have had the bomb for one). It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.