1959 crash nuclear secret for decades
Buried deep underground on Barksdale Air Force Bases East Reservation is a dark secret.
Its earth from a Bossier Parish cotton field and scraps of wreckage from a transport that crashed on takeoff 56 years ago Monday, killing none of the seven men on board but burning beyond repair their giant C-124 Globemaster II and its cargo.
I remember the day it went down, recalled Ralph Lecroy, a former Bossier City resident, now living in Alabama, who later joined the Air Force and four years later served as a loadmaster on C-124s. All of Bossier City was concerned.
Thats because the airplane carried what people were told at the time was an unarmed nuclear weapon.
Read more: http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/life/community/2015/07/02/crash-nuclear-secret-decades/29582107/
Cross-posted in the Louisiana Group.
marble falls
(57,083 posts)1966
H-bomb lost in Spain
On this day, a B-52 bomber collides with a KC-135 jet tanker over Spains Mediterranean coast, dropping three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs near the town of Palomares and one in the sea. It was not the first or last accident involving American nuclear bombs.
As a means of maintaining first-strike capability during the Cold War, U.S. bombers laden with nuclear weapons circled the earth ceaselessly for decades. In a military operation of this magnitude, it was inevitable that accidents would occur. The Pentagon admits to more than three-dozen accidents in which bombers either crashed or caught fire on the runway, resulting in nuclear contamination from a damaged or destroyed bomb and/or the loss of a nuclear weapon. One of the only Broken Arrows to receive widespread publicity occurred on January 17, 1966, when a B-52 bomber crashed into a KC-135 jet tanker over Spain.
The bomber was returning to its North Carolina base following a routine airborne alert mission along the southern route of the Strategic Air Command when it attempted to refuel with a jet tanker. The B-52 collided with the fueling boom of the tanker, ripping the bomber open and igniting the fuel. The KC-135 exploded, killing all four of its crew members, but four members of the seven-man B-52 crew managed to parachute to safety. None of the bombs were armed, but explosive material in two of the bombs that fell to earth exploded upon impact, forming craters and scattering radioactive plutonium over the fields of Palomares. A third bomb landed in a dry riverbed and was recovered relatively intact. The fourth bomb fell into the sea at an unknown location.