March,1st 2014 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo H-bomb disaster

[Hog]

Originally Posted by Schrade

We had a little nuclear boo-boo about 14 miles from my house (although I was a mere hatchling at Ft. Bragg)...

DOD left the bomb at the site. So if I stop posting one day, you know someone has been diggin'...

D'OH!

It's amazing how many actual scanrios such as this one have played out. A lost nuclear weapon carries the call sign "Broken Arrow" just like the movie.
These "Broken Arrow"scenarios were bound to happen though as we had multiple B-52's actively loitering in the skies around North American and off of the coast of the Soviet Union. Operation "Chrome Dome" started in 1960 and ended in 1968. There were also Operations "Head Start","Hard Head","Giant Lanc", and "Round Robin".
The B-52 crash at Thule Airbase in Greenland prompted teh USA to end all operations of "Chrome Dome". This accident in 1968 caused the nuclear weapons conventional explosives(which are used to initiate the nuclear part of the detonation) to explode, but due to the saftey mechanisms the thermonuclear weapons did not dentonate. These explosions and the crash itself casued the hydrogen bombs to rip apart and throw radioactive contamination into the area. After the cleanup, one single hydrogen bomb could not be accounted for.
Operation Chrome Dome


It is scary to note that the British nuclear weapons have been stored with the ability to be detonated directly without any sort of detonation code or PAL(Permissable Action Link). A PAL is a device which is powered by a Plutonium-Pu238 powered RTG(Radioisotope Thermal Generator) which is pretty much a slug of Pu-238 that creates heat as the Plutonium decays and this heat is used to create an electrical charge. The picture below is of a slug of highly enriched Plutonium 238 which is glowing red hot simply because of it's Beta decay. AFtyer many many years this slug would stop producing heat It's half-life is 88 year though.
It should be noted that Medtrinic produced 250 Plutonium-238 powered heart pacemakers, after 25 years, 22 of teh pacemakers were still functioning in patients. Longevity that chemical batteries cant even begin to approach.



RTG's are used on deep space probes such as Voyagers 1 and 2, the SNAP-27 RTG's used on Apollo 14 and lost during re-entry during Apollo 13, some Russian coastlines have RTG's to help with shipping navigation.
It should be noted that Plutonium Isotope 238 or PU-238 is NOT a fissile isoptope, so it isnt used for nuclear weapons, Pu-239 was used in the Fatman nuke used over Nagasaki.

So these RTG's power the PAL of almost all the worlds nuclear weapons, with Btitain only installing PAL technology within the last 5-10 years.
The USA has been trying to get Pakistan to use PAL technology, but in doing so could expose and possibly weaken it's own PAL technology, so the USA has decided to give PAkistan extra vehicles and helicopters to protect its nuclear arsenal.
Lets be clear here, PAkistan has mobile nukes as pictured below. Not very safe.

These PAL's have a few different designs and generations. Some will not allow a detonation unless the proper code is typed into a keypad. SOme will render the nuke useless if morethan a certain number of attempts have been made. The nuke would then have to be shipped back to its manufacturer for repair.
Some modern nukes have different codes for different yield sizes.
Code 1,3,6,2,7,6, might get you a small 2 kiloton explosion to take out a subway or something. But code 8,3,7,9,1 might give you the full 500 kiloton yield to take out not only the subway, but the entire city and surrounding area.

It is interesting that many of the American land based Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles(ICBM's) had launch codes that were set at "0,0,0,0,0,0" in order to speed up the reaction time and to avoid confusion during a nuclear engagement. That's akin to using the letters "P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D" for your email password.

There were nuclear stockpiles up here in Canada that were simple UNGUIDED Air-to-Air missiles that used fast interceptor aircraft to carry the missile close to Soviet bomber formations, launch the missile into the center of teh bomber formation and teh nuclear warhead woudl explode, taking out a large portion of the bombers.
Here is a pic of the test of such a missile during Operation "Plumb-Bob" in the Yucca Flats. The rocket flew 4240 meters in 4.5 seconds at an altitude of 6,000 m (18,500 ft) before detonating the 1.7 kt warhead. Up here in Canada we carried and fired tehse weapons from the CF-101 Voodoo jet up until 1984 when we became a "non-nuclear weapon country".



A fasinating story of the Cold War was when the CIA decided that it was going to "recover" a sunken Soviet submarine that was loaded with three 1 megaton on 3 D-21 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile(SLBM) with a range of approx 1000 miles.
the CIA used a "mining barge" to position itself over the sub, bring it up underneath the ship, and transport it back to the USA, at one point Soviet ships were cruising around the "barge" taking pictures and watching through binoculars, not knowing what was happening under the water.

This CIA Operation was called "Project Azorian" and is one of the craziest stories of the Cold War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

One of the most dangerous stories of the Cold War. Just imagine, in 1983, you are the commander of a Soviet missile laucnhy detection center and the alarm goes off twice that the USA has actually launched ICMB's at the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...alarm_incident

IMO That is even scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the CMC was more widely publicized, there were no actual or percieved missile launches. Although during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviet submarine Capatains did have teh authourization to use their Nuclear Submarine Mines against any USA ship that was trying to sink/board her.
IMO IF a submarine started setting of nuclear mines on American ships, teh whole situation would have spiraled out of control.