by Lorine Parks
“In the U.S. military’s euphemistic lexicon of nuclear warfare, there are four terms no one wants to hear.”
A “dull sword” is a minor incident involving a nuclear weapon.
A “bent spear” is a breach in the handling of a nuclear weapon.
An “empty quiver” is a nuclear weapon that has been stolen or lost.
And then there is a “broken arrow,” a nuclear weapon that has somehow gone awry, an accident that could result in the launching, firing, burning, detonation, theft or loss of a nuclear weapon.
So begins today’s program. With North Korea’s exploding of hydrogen bomb tests in today’s headlines, Program Chair Doug Baker could not have found a more timely subject.
According to the book “Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents,” published in 2008, the United States government has publicly acknowledged 36 broken arrows in history.
Only one of those involved the potential detonation of two megaton nuclear bombs on U.S. soil. Only one of those could have wiped out half the state of North Carolina and, in the process, triggered a nuclear war.
That broken arrow involved a guy named Dr. Jack ReVelle.
Jack, who now lives in Orange, CA, had to keep secret the details of what he was doing in the frigid 1961 winter, in a slushy field holding the “pit” of a nuclear weapon. “I couldn’t talk about it for more than 50 years,” Jack says. “When I found out I could, I was stunned. I sat down with my wife and I said, ‘Now I can tell you what I was doing.’ ” But Carolinians had for years heard rumors about the nuclear bomb buried near Nahunta Swamp off Big Daddy’s Road.
The early 1960s were the height of the Cold War. The U.S. and USSR attempted to check each other’s ideology and power by amassing enough ready-to-fire nuclear weapons to destroy their adversary many times over. Elementary school children were taught to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack. U.S. planes stocked with nuclear bombs fanned out above the coastlines to respond to threats. Silos held nuclear missiles that could be readied for launch in minutes. Details of the following are taken from Wikipedia and other online accounts.
At 10:56 a.m. on Jan. 23, 1961, a B-52 stationed at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, N.C., took off for a 25-hour, nonstop flight. Keep 19, the flight’s radio call sign for the mission, was to be a routine patrol with two in-air refuelings. Eight crewman and two MK-39 thermonuclear bombs were on board the B-52, a type of plane known as “the BUFF,” an acronym politely translated to Big Ugly Fat Fellow, because of its size.
During the B-52’s second refueling over Columbia, S.C., the crew on the refueling plane noticed a fuel leak coming from the bomber’s right wing. Crewmembers pulled circuit breakers to prevent a spark from causing a blaze. Jet fuel covered the bomb bay, soaked the wheel well and coated the hull’s bottom and electronics. The crew mentally rehearsed their ejection procedures.
Heading back toward base, Keep 19 descended to 10,000 feet over the North Carolina countryside, lowered its landing gear and began a high, long final approach. A loud noise echoed from under the airplane, which jerked violently left. The pilots leveled the plane. A louder noise boomed from below. The right wing dropped slightly. The plane turned right. The pilot and copilot yanked the yokes hard left and stomped on the left rudder pedals.
At 12:35 a.m. Jan. 24, 1961, Keep 19 crashed 12 miles north of the air base. Its nose landed in a tobacco field a few paces away from Big Daddy’s Road in Faro. Three men, gunner Frank Barnish, radar navigator Eugene Shelton and electronic warfare officer Eugene Richards, died in the crash. Five others, flight commander and pilot Walter Scott Tulloch, co-pilot Richard Rardin, relief pilot Adam Mattocks, electronic warfare officer Bill Wilson and navigator Paul Brown, parachuted to safety from 9,000 feet.
The plane had lost its wing, barrel-rolled to the right and cracked in the middle. Two thermonuclear bombs, each with enough power to leave a crater a third of a mile wide and exterminate all living things within 8.5 miles of its ground zero, had fallen out of the disintegrating, exploding aircraft.
The B52, on a routine mission flight, with two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs on board, each 250 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, had exploded in midflight and fragments came down over North Carolina, Both bombs had been jarred loose, and had to be found and de-activated.
The first bomb had a parachute that opened automatically. As it fell, the parachute got caught in a tree “When I checked it,” said Jack, “ I found the arm/safe switch was still in the safe position, so it had not begun the arming process.”
The second bomb had hit muddy ground and was immediately swallowed up. The 12-foot-long bomb was buried somewhere, but no one knew where it was. Seven things have to happen for a MK 39 3.8 megaton nuclear bomb to explode. Jack would soon discover that six of them had already happened: 1. The arming wires had been pulled; 2. The pulse generators had been activated; 3. The explosive actuators had been fired; 4. Timers had started; 5. Barometric switches had been engaged; and 6. Low-voltage batteries were actuated.
Before he could check the last line of defense – the ARM/SAFE switch – he had to find the bomb. And when he finally did, thirty feet deep in the mud, it was in the ARM position.
Why that bomb didn’t explode has been debated for years. Was the ARM/SAFE switch broken? Did the impact of the crash spread out the parts so far they couldn’t affect each other? Was the bomb a dud?
No one will ever know.
Jack, as the bomb disposal expert responsible for disarming the device, claimed "we came damn close" to a nuclear detonation that would have completely changed much of eastern North Carolina. “You might now have a very large Bay of North Carolina if that thing had gone off,” Jack says.
“With the water streaming down on this exposed melted pit, the alpha
particles and the beta particles that are inherently a part of the nuclear material got carried off with the water. Our job was to clean up the radioactive mess.” A Department of Defense report says Jack’s team kept the contamination contained within 100 feet of the weapon’s location.
Jack kept the club spellbound as he told the story, and when President Alex Lopez broke in at 1:30 to say the meeting was officially over, more than half stayed on to hear more. Complete details can be found in The Goldsboro Broken Arrow, by Joel Dobson, a former Air Force officer who uncovered the declassified military records. Details of this story as told above are from Wikipedia, and Dobson’s account, soon to be made into a major movie.
During his presentation, the pesky Event Center projector which often breaks down, did not faze Jack, a man who had faced death with equanimity. “I had the confidence to know when I walked up to that weapon, I knew exactly what it was, I knew exactly what could go wrong, and I knew exactly what I had to do,” Jack said. What is a technological glitch in the audio-visual, compared to that?
A bit of trivia: the civilian counterpart to the B 52 was the Boeing “Stratocruiser,” which Pan Am flew on its international routes in the 1950’s and 60’s. The term “Big Ugly Fat Fellow” became “The Pregnant Whale.” And the bomb bay was modified to be the glamorous first class compartment, where four passengers could stretch out in deluxe “Sleeperettes.”
NEXT WEEK’S PROGRAM:
Elisabeth Davis: Ronald McDonald House & Rotary Ties:
Camp Ronald and Diane Davis’s Daughter Elisabeth
Elisabeth Davis is currently a graduate student at USC. She started volunteering at Camp Good Times in 2012 but one could say that camp has been in her heart since the day she was born. Serving as an activity counselor and a cabin counselor and volunteering at multiple sessions in a summer, Elisabeth can honestly say Camp is her favorite place on earth. Program Chair Doug Baker promises that Elisabeth will share with us why during her presentation.
Our Rotary Club of Downey has been donating to Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times, which offers cost-free, sleep away camp experiences for children with cancer and their families.
Participants can shed the stress and routine of daily life and concentrate on having fun. Because all campers share a common experience of childhood cancer (whether they are the patient or the sibling), camp is a place where they can be themselves, have fun, try new things and learn how much they can do. It is a place they can return to year after year to renew special friendships and make new ones.