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Notes
5. On November 13, 1963, three civilian contractors were working with beach ball-sized spheres of high explosives leftover after the radioactive fissile material known as “pits” had been removed from the warheads of dismantled Mark-7 nuclear bombs at Lackland Air Force Base’s Medina Annex, outside San Antonio, Texas. These spheres were being unloaded for long-term storage inside heavy-duty steel and concrete, garage-like hangers known colloquially as “igloos.” According to a November 2020 article by David Wood in Texas Monthly: “It seems likely that a detonator was accidentally bumped and then ignited, quickly setting fire to the sphere of highly explosive TNT and uranium metal.” In less than a minute, the fire that had started with the ignition of one sphere had ignited the other 209 spheres in the igloo, setting off a tremendous detonation—but because the radioactive pits had already been removed and stored elsewhere, there was no nuclear yield, meaning there was no nuclear explosion and no scattering of radioactive material. “The TNT itself was enough to cause a massive explosion but not the nuclear nightmare that so many feared.” https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/nuclear-weapons-bunker-blew-up-san-antonio/.
6. Robert L. Peurifoy worked at Sandia Labs for 39 years, serving as director of nuclear weapons development. Bill Stevens was an engineer who served as the first head of Sandia’s nuclear safety department. “Both men were shocked when they realized how vulnerable the nation’s nuclear weapons were to accidents” says this PBS American Experience episode. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/command-and-control-accident-report/.
8. On January 23, 1961, a B-52 bomber carrying two thermonuclear Mark-39 nuclear weapons experienced a fuel leak, and began to break apart mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. As the pilots lost control of the aircraft, one of the bombs was accidentally ejected. According to an account by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-goldsboro-b-52-crash/: “Luckily, its attached parachute successfully deployed and allowed it to float slowly toward the ground before getting tangled in a tree. The other bomb remained onboard until impact, where it became submerged underneath almost 20 feet of mud.” The US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told Pentagon officials in 1963 in a top-secret document, now de-classified, that “by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/atomic-bomb-north-carolina-video.
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Dan Drollette
Dan Drollette Jr. is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent who has filed stories from every continent except Antarctica. His stories have appeared in Scientific American, International Wildlife, MIT’s Technology Review, Natural History, Cosmos, Science, New Scientist, and the BBC Online, among others. He was a TEDx speaker to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and held a Fulbright Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship to Australia—where he lived for a total of four years. For three years, he edited CERN’s on-line weekly magazine about high-energy subparticle physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, where his office was 100 yards from the injection point of the Large Hadron Collider.