Have you ever made a mistake? Of course you have, we all have at one time or another. As they say, no one is perfect. Unfortunately this holds true not only for humans, but also for their organizations, no matter how large and proficient that we believe they are. Most of the public is not aware of some of the incredible mistakes that government agencies have made. Oh I am not talking about send out the wrong item to the wrong place or nonsense like that. I am not even talking about locking up the wrong person for a crime that they didn't commit, although this seems pretty bad to me. I am talking mistakes that could cost the lives of thousands of people in a split second. Oh you think that such a monumental mistake couldn't take place? If this is the way you feel, you couldn't be more wrong.

Nuclear Test
Photo Source: DOE

There was no reason to believe that anything was wrong and indeed no one had heard that anything had gone wrong. The cold war was raging and as a result we had bombers flying nukes all over the place. The public was happily unaware of all the things that were going wrong with this procedure. We know that the U.S. had many problems doing this and can only imagine what problems the USSR had with their own program. The date was March 11, 1958 and just the month before, unknown to almost everyone a B-47 that had taken off from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida had a mid air accident. It had hit a fighter jet. The bomber was so crippled that it couldn't land. On top of all this, it was carrying a large nuclear bomb. The crew of the plane did the only thing that they thought they could, they dropped the bomb off the coast of Savannah, Georgia where it remained until it was found in 2004. This had not been the first accident involving a nuclear bomb. There had been fires where nukes were burned, crashes and nuclear bombs dumped off planes that were in trouble. We were dropping these things all over the world.

B-47
Photo Source: US Air Force

On this particular day a B-47 had taken off from Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia. It was on an exercise, one that would prove to be a disaster and even worse than any before it. It seems that there was a system that was put in place that forced the crew to take off with a pin pulled out of the bomb. The pin was a safety measure to unarm the bomb. The idea was that the bomb was ready to be dropped on takeoff but the pin would be inserted by machinery inside the plane after it took off, when the pilot pressed a button. Now I ask you, who could have thought of such a stupid system? It was probably some politician who had zero experience in the military and not a spot of common sense. Anyway the bomber took off and when they reached a certain height the pilot pressed the button to insert the pin. Yeah you guessed it, it didn't insert. At this point I picture the crew being very upset. Even the prospect of landing with a live nuke in the bomb bay is not a pleasant one, after all, if anything went wrong on landing they were facing the prospect of a nuclear explosion. So what were they to do?

The pilot ordered a crewman to go back to the bomb and insert the pin by hand. This was not as simple as one might think. The damn bomb was so big and high that it filled the bomb bay and a person couldn't fit alongside it. The crewman had to lay in such a position that he was forced to reach up behind the bomb and without being able to see, insert a pin. He tried his best, he stretched more than he thought his body was capable of and finally he felt the lever for the pin and pulled it. This was unfortunate, because what he thought was the pin lever was actually the lever that opened the bomb holding device. What he had done was drop the armed bomb onto the closed bomb bay doors and to make matters worse he fell on top of it. This sort of reminds me of the movie Dr. Strangelove where Slim Pickens is trying to loosen a nuke to drop on Russia and falls onto it and rides it down. The weight of the bomb began to take its toll on the bomb bay doors. They creaked and groaned under the tremendous weight.

There was another way to disarm the nuke and that was with a radio signal. The pilot desperately called his base, but was force to call several times because no one believed him, at least that is the way the story goes. The signal was sent and the nuke was disarmed but the conventional explosives in the bomb were not. Finally the bomb bay doors gave way and the nuke was dropped, along with the hapless crew member, who was able to grab onto the bomb bay doors and climb back into the plane. Can you imagine what this guy felt like? The crew of the bomber sweated as the bomb tumbled to earth. They didn't even know where it would go. They found out soon enough when it exploded. They had blown up the home of the Gregg family. Even though the bomb didn't cause a nuclear explosion it did create a very large crater that was said to be over 60 feet wide and about 30 feet deep. Six people were injured and other houses and a church were damaged. We had dropped a nuke on the U.S.

First Nuclear Bombs - Fat Man and Little Boy
Photo Source: Los Alamos National Lab

Could we have done worse at other times? Our above ground testing in 1953 caused a radioactive rain fall in Troy, New York. We lost nukes by losing them from planes in other countries. We contaminated an aircraft carrier in 1961 by using faulty sea disposal techniques. We lost nuclear submarines at sea along with their reactors and weapons. In 1970 one of our underground tests caused a cloud of radioactive steam to sail over Wyoming. These are only a very few of the nuclear accidents we have had. If one were to read the list, he or she might rightfully wonder how we have survived this long. The amount of mistakes we make are incredible and these mistakes are also made by other nuclear powers and some of these nuclear powers are not as sophisticated as we are. As more and more countries get nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the chance of some tragic accident happening increases greatly.