1961 Goldsboro Nuclear Incident...What if?

So I was watching Last Night Tonight clips the other night and was reminded of that one time in 1961 where a plane accidentally dropped 2 armed nuclear weapons near Goldsboro, North Carolina, and they miraculously didn't detonate. Of course, being a frequent reader of this website, my mind jumped to the question; What would have happened if they had actually gone off? Specifically, what would have been the immediate international and political responses, as well as the social/cultural responses in the US and elsewhere?
 
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Calling them "armed" is a bit inaccurate. I don't recall the arming systems that is the triggers that would actually initiate the conventional explosives in the fission portions of the warheads actually being active.
 
Calling them "armed" is a bit inaccurate. I don't recall the arming systems that is the triggers that would actually initiate the conventional explosives in the fission portions of the warheads actually being active.

Pretty much. There are systems on the bombs designed to detect if they've been dropped from an airplane in a trajectory consistent with deliberate bomb release, and the bomb is designed not to detonate if it hasn't been dropped - so a saboteur couldn't set them off on the ground, for example. Those systems interpreted the breakup of the aircraft and subsequent fall as a deliberate release, which is where the "X out of Y arming circuits failed!" thing comes from. But the actual "are we armed/not armed?" circuits worked properly.

Which isn't to say it's impossible for the thing to go off, just that it's not as likely as people think. The bomb basically worked as designed.
 
Which isn't to say it's impossible for the thing to go off, just that it's not as likely as people think. The bomb basically worked as designed.
My understanding is that an HE explosion was possible but initiation of the nuclear components was not. Which downgrades the incident from a nuclear bomb to a dirty bomb, hardly something to sniff at.
 
My understanding is that an HE explosion was possible but initiation of the nuclear components was not. Which downgrades the incident from a nuclear bomb to a dirty bomb, hardly something to sniff at.

If I remember right - and I may not be - this was the incident where they actually had the fissile cores in the thing. So, if absolutely everything went wrong in precisely the right way, it is theoretically possible for the detonating circuit to fire and set the thing off at full yield. It's extremely unlikely, though - a short is more likely to set off the detonators asymmetrically, which, as you say, would basically be a dirty bomb.
 
Been cogitating about this, and I just wanted to say: while the 1961 Goldsboro incident is very unlikely to turn into a major nuclear accident - not impossible, but very unlikely - I think it would be more interesting to look at some other possibilities in the field of nuclear accidents. Have you noticed that we hear lots of stuff about mishaps with strategic nuclear devices, but very little about the tactical devices? Even though the opportunity for mishaps with the tacticals was greater, given that they were being toted around Europe on trucks and small aircraft - I don't know for sure, but I suspect there were a lot of near-misses with tacticals that we never heard about. Why not? I'm not sure, but I wonder if it might be because the strategic devices were all under the control of SAC, a single, unified command, while the tacticals were spread out over dozens of field commands. When, decades later, somebody goes digging through the archives looking for accidents, they're obviously going to start with SAC, and maybe they don't get to the archives from the various field commands at all. That's just speculation, admittedly, but it makes sense.

So where I'm going with this is, I think it's much more likely that we could have an accident with the tactical devices. These things simply could not have the same sorts of safeties as the strategic devices, because they were a lot smaller - they just didn't have the room in the device for as many safeguards against either deliberate or accidental detonation. Look at the Davy Crockett: where are you going to fit a PAL on that thing? It's tiny! Where's it going to fit? And it's being trucked through Europe on jeeps in training exercises.

What if there's a road accident with one of these convoys, or a transport aircraft crashes, and the damned thing goes off? I'm not sure what sort of safety measures they used when transporting them - if I was organizing things, I would want to prohibit moving them with the fissile cores inside, but as far as I know the tactical devices all used sealed pits, that is, the cores weren't removeable. But let's say one of these things is in a road accident, there's a fire, which causes a short, and the thing detonates. They're not going to schlep these things through downtown Amsterdam, so it's probably somewhere rural when it detonates. Now, the yield on these things is a lot less than Goldsboro, and we may not get a full nuclear yield, but even a partial yield is going to wreck some real estate. Radioactive egg on face! Even if they're lucky enough that it doesn't kill any civilians, this is a massive scandal, and it's going to make everyone look bad.

Or... What if it happens to the Russians? I would be shocked if they didn't have at least as many near-misses as we did. (Though, admittedly, they didn't have CHROME DOME, which was part of the problem on our side.) You can't cover up the accidental detonation of a nuclear warhead, not for long. Even if they somehow keep the news from spreading, the US is going to know within a few days at the most from our sniffer-aircraft. What happens next?
 
The Red Beard tactical weapon was notoriously unsafe, to the point where the RN refused to allow them aboard ship. There are rumours that a Scimitar crashed whilst carrying one, which went critical and created a low-order (10-20 ton yield) nuclear explosion. It's got all the hallmarks of a sea story, of course, and I have to think that it would have come to light by now.... but several early British devices were pretty appalling from a safety viewpoint, and an accident would be easy enough.
 
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