B-36 Bomber Nuclear Accident, Albuquerque, 1957

in august 1986 the albuquerque journal published a startling story according to documents that had just been declassified because of a freedom of information act request the air force in 1957 had dropped a giant thermonuclear bomb just outside of albuquerque the details of this accident why took 29 years to find out about it is a cautionary tale of the cold war and history that deserves to be remembered on may 22nd 1957 at around 11 15 a.m a convair b-36 peacemaker bomber piloted by air force captain dick meyer was preparing to land at kirtland air force base in albuquerque the plane had come from biggs air force base now called bigs army airfield in el paso texas where meyer's squadron the 334th bombardment squadron of the 95th bombardment wing was stationed because various airmen either needed flight time or transport the plane had two crews aboard including three pilots but the plane was relatively lightweight built as an intercontinental strategic bomber the b-36 could carry an enormous 320 thousand pounds of fuel but this b-36 was carrying less than a third of that going to the short distance of the flight from el paso to albuquerque meyer was on the landing approach some 1700 feet up and about four miles from kirtland when the plane suddenly jumped up almost a thousand feet at the same time the scanner a crew member who was stationed about halfway between the wings and the tail the plane yelled bombs away in a 1986 newspaper interview meyer said someone yelled [ __ ] he added it might have been me bombs away certainly would explain why the plane suddenly jumped a thousand feet the b-36 meyer was piloting was only carrying one bomb that day but the bomb 24 and a half feet long and five feet in diameter weighed more than forty two thousand pounds the bomb was so heavy that when it fell the bomb doors were closed but the bomb simply tore right through the bottom of the plane it was the loss of the weight of the massive bomb especially with the plane so lightly loaded that caused it to lurch into the air but the reason for shouting an expletive wasn't just the effort of trying to control a plane that suddenly gained a thousand feet of altitude four miles from the runway the bomb that had just fallen into new mexico was not an ordinary bomb the mark 17 was a hydrogen bomb with an expected nuclear yield of 15 megatons or the equivalent of 15 million metric tons of tnt the bomb that had fallen through the bottom of myers b-36 was the most destructive weapon the united states has ever built its potential yield was roughly 625 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped in hiroshima in 1945. developed at los alamos national laboratory the mark 17 was the result of a project to build an aircraft deliverable thermonuclear weapon part of the strategy of massive retaliation prevention of war via mutual issue destruction the bomb design have been tested with the runt device used in the castle romeo test at bikini atoll in 1954 the photo which has become an iconic image of the nuclear mushroom cloud 200 mark 17 bombs have been built with an additional 105 of the similar mark 24. as some of the most complex and highly classified weapons in the us arsenal maintenance on the bombs was done at los alamos kirtland air force base which had originated as a civilian airfield and had been established as albuquerque army air base in 1941 had been used for advanced pilot and bombardier training during the second world war but because of its proximity to the los alamos laboratory the base had become a staging area for the manhattan project after the war kirtland had been made in air force base rather than be decommissioned like many second world war bases largely disserviced the needs of los alamos and the nearby sandia national laboratories created in 1949 for the purpose of weapons development the bomb that had accidentally fallen on new mexico was being transported to los alamos for routine maintenance the reason the bomb was being carried on a b-36 bomber was simple the b-36 was the only aircraft in the air force arsenal at the time capable of carrying the huge mark 17 bomb introduced in 1948 the convair b-36 peacemaker was massive it was the largest mass-produced piston engine aircraft ever built and at 230 feet had the longest wingspan of any combat aircraft ever built in fact the b-36 wing span was nearly twice as wide as the distance originally flown by the right flyer in 1903 in what is usually considered the first controlled mechanically powered airplane flight designed to be able to deliver any nuclear weapon in the united states arsenal the b-36 had a range of 10 000 miles allowing it to be capable of intercontinental flight without refueling and had an enormous payload capacity of 87 pounds more than ten times what a world war two b-17 bomber could carry the b-36 was originally outfitted with six 28-cylinder pratt and whitney r-4360 wasp major radial engines the engines were mounted in an unusual pusher configuration with the propellers on the back by the time of the accident convair had added a pair of general electric j47-19 jet engines suspended near the end of each wing giving the bomber 10 engines more than any other mass-produced aircraft in history this configuration resulted in the slogan six turnin and four burnin not only was the b-36 the only bomber capable of carrying a mark 17 but kirtland was one of only a handful of air force bases with runway facilities that could receive a b-36 first lieutenant jack williams the flight engineer said he heard a dull thud as the bomb hit the ground while the mark 17 was designed to deploy with three parachutes to stabilize the bomb's descent the vomit came out at too low in altitude for the shoots to fully deploy meyer swung the plane around he knew that there was no risk of a 15 megaton explosion as an implosion nuclear weapon the mark 17 required plutonium pits that is fissile material necessary to start a chain reaction that produces a nuclear yield the pits were onboard the aircraft but to prevent an accident they were stored away from the bomb only to be inserted in the case of nuclear war still the bomb had a significant amount of conventional explosive required for the process of implosion and included radioactive material stan norris an expert on nuclear weapons with the national resources defense council noted in the la times in 1986 that the mark 17 was very primitive by today's standards in terms of safety devices as the plane turned meyer said in a 1986 interview we saw the plume of it more dust cloud than anything and a light plane was in the area and it'd like to have blown him out of the sky from the explosion at the same time both meyer and williams said that first lieutenant bob carp a junior navigator came charging out of the bombay saying i didn't touch anything i didn't touch anything a line that they were able to laugh at as soon as they realized they had not caused a thermonuclear explosion over albuquerque electronics operator jack resin described carp's face as it came out of the bombay as wider than any sheet you ever saw carp had been carrying out a normal procedure in the bombay the mark 17 hung on a wraparound sling which had a locking pin about an inch in diameter designed to prevent the bomb from dropping by accident but the pin was left out when taking off or landing in case the plane ran into trouble and had released the bomb due to a problem with the aircraft so after takeoff a crewman had to crawl into the bombay and manually insert the pin as the plane moved into the traffic pattern for landing a crewman would have to crawl back in and pull the pin out but as the b-36 approached kirtland and cart pulled out the pin something went wrong the bomb manual release mechanism was in the wrong position and when cart pulled out the pin the bomb released carp said in 1986 imagine standing on a catwalk over the bomb and removing the pin and the bomb went crashing down according to the documents released to the albuquerque journal a protective cover enclosed the wire near the release mechanism but the sling had been repositioned and the cover was moved causing a length of the manual release wire to be exposed exactly how that occurred was a mystery as the documents provided by the air force had blacked out the paragraph that might explain how the wire became exposed while some have speculated that carp accidentally grabbed the release as the plane hit a bit of turbulence he himself said that the handle had snagged on his safety cable and that the vibrations of the plane's frame had likely disconnected the wire he said i've been puzzled how something like this could happen with as many safeguards as we have had in the system but he also added the technology was basically 10 years behind the bomb was so large that it broke right through the closed and latched bombay doors the radio operator george houston immediately contacted kirtland and told the stunned operator we've dropped a hydrogen bomb the air force was understandably concerned as meyer tells it we were met with quite a group of vips when we landed the bomb landed just short of the air force base on uninhabited land owned by the university of new mexico the conventional explosives on the bomb had exploded on impact making a significant crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet in diameter and disintegrating the bomb sadly there was one casualty on the ground a cow grazing nearby had been caught in the explosion while there was some radioactive contamination found did not go beyond about a mile from the crater according to air force documents field command a division of the armed forces special weapons project conducted recovery and cleanup operations at the site meyer indicated that he heard that the air force paid a farmer for the loss of the cow and paid a fee to the university for tearing up the surrounding land in order to haul away the radioactive dirt the crew spent the next day giving affidavits and eventually the air force decided not to assign any blame to the officers involved the investigation actually went rather quickly as all the experts that would usually have to be called in were at kirkland or sandia perhaps the most interesting part of this early broken arrow meaning an event involving a nuclear weapon which results in the accidental launching firing detonation theft or loss of the weapon is how is kept so completely secret at the time as robert carp explained it was a different time in world history we had a cold war going on the first time the air force even acknowledged that the event occurred was in 1981 when they released a brief statement that only said that a nuclear weapon of some type had been dropped the details didn't come out until 1986 when the albuquerque journal obtained records through a freedom of information act request and then after the story was reported in a longer secret crew members began to come forward and tell the story interestingly the two pieces of cold war technology involved the mark 17 nuclear weapon and the b-36 strategic bomber were both nearly obsolete at the time the mark 17 was removed from service before the end of 1957. better soviet interceptors had made piston-driven bombers vulnerable and the b-36 which was both too slow and also not designed for an air refueling capability was already in the process of being replaced in 1957. the last conveyer b-36 peacemaker was taken out of service in february 1959 while some were used for reconnaissance the b-36 never dropped a bomb in combat today the national museum of nuclear science and history an affiliate of the smithsonian institution which was originally housed in kirkland air force base and is now housed in the city of albuquerque just a few miles from where this bomb dropped has the mission of serving as the nation's resource on nuclear history and science among its permanent displays is the casing for a mark 17 hydrogen bomb i hope 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Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 405,961

Keywords: History, the history guy, us history, us air force, B-36, cold war, new mexico

Id: p0gRHgwSGhE

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019