BBC reports that a B-52 from Minot Air Force Base was armed with actual nukes for an entire flight down to Barksdale last week. Six 150 kiloton W80-1 warheads were mounted on the bomber’s wings instead of going out for decommissioning as planned. If they had been doing bombing simulations that day, a lot of folks could have been killed. Probably in North Dakota.
Unlikely. It takes a special miracle to set one of those suckers off. Even the high explosive charges can survive a fall without detonating.
If they were to have dropped those bombs, unfused (the fusing devices are kept seperate from the warheads) and unarmed (coded arming system is a stone b**ch to arm and easy as pie to disarm), they would have likely hit like a brick.
If had been dropped the most that would have happened would have been a explosion like a dirty bomb. It takes a lot more to set off a nuke than an explosion. The explosives have to go off at exactly the precise time in a precise pattern to achive criticality. There have been other instnaces in the past of nukes hitting the ground either from falling out of/off of planes or plane crashes and none have gone off.
I’m aware of the engineering limitations of the bomb, and the chances of actual detonation were slight. The chances that someone could have even completed a simulated arming session without noticing the live bombs was probably minimal. But that chance was magnified by the nukes being mounted in the first place.
[...] In and of itself. But this follows launch crews falling asleep while holding our missile codes, guards distracting themselves with iPods and cell phones, and of course, flying six nukes to Louisiana without anybody noticing. [...]
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