Please note this does not mean the USSR wasn’t that way. Just want to clarify I’m not a tankie, lol.
If Chernobyl had almost exploded and melted down, I wouldn’t blame the USSR for trying to hide it.
Isn’t the US Air Force still missing like 5 bikes that they lost over the decades?
I could go over mk ultra and other fun little government projects but I guess people already got the point
I was wondering where those neighborhood kids got those air force bikes…
At least it was bikes and not nukes.
But speaking of nukes I don’t get why they didn’t continue the lie. If I was an asshole I sure as fuck would not let that go public.
It was 6 but one recently turned up
Wholesome opossum lady isn’t a tankie?? Thank God.
Turns out the USA has a long list of nuclear near miss and minor disasters, we just don’t like to talk about them. Well There’s Your Problem podcast just did a lengthy episode chronicling the more notable publicly-disclosed ones, including the ones in North Carolina. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqJR6kgwCio
Accidentally dropping a nuke is wild.
It wasn’t even the only time. They also accidentally dropped 4 more nukes in Spain, 3 of them over land. And the bombs actually detonated (but failed to trigger a nuclear explosion), spreading radioactive material around.
And we’ve done it several times. On domestic soil.
they’re called Broken Arrow incedents
And of course there is a cool sounding name for a terrible fuck up
There’s a whole list of codenames for different scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_incident_terminology
If I recall, Chernobyl wasn’t actually a nuclear meltdown or explosion. It was a pressure vessel explosion.
Was not a nuclear explosion, sure, reactors can’t really explode in the same way as bombs, but it absolutely was a meltdown. Meltdown really just means that the fuel melted, which did happen shortly after the power peak flashed the coolant to steam and blew open the core.
Yep, just to add, it’s entirely possible to have a melt down without any explosion at all. As you said, It just means the fuel melted through the reactor vessel. It can even happen without the fuel going prompt-critical.
Half my immediate family has cancer from undisclosed testing causing nuclear fallout over swaths of the southwest US…
US is run by assholes.
🌏 👨🚀 🔫 👨🚀
That explains so much about North Carolina.
~ngl, sometimes I kinda wish they had exploded a little bit.~
Feels like every time I end up in North Carolina or meet someone from there my conviction that humans are not inherently good or evil is challenged. I fucking hate North Carolina, with cause. It’s as if the turd rival team full of bullies in a sports movie was a state.
At least Mississippi and Alabama have the excuse of being economically depressed. And the people I’ve meet from those places are actually pleasant.
As a near-lifelong resident of the GrEaT state of North Carolina, you are spot on in your assessment.
Asking as a non-Southerner, what the hell is up with White people from the South? I keep hearing all about how great their hospitality is, but they’ve been (at least the most “Howdy, y’all” good old boys and belles) just culturally the most conniving and backstabbing petty Mean Girls. They’ll act sweet to your face, but you don’t even have to leave earshot before they start talking shit and starting small-town rumors. What, is it some kinda local pastime to start shit without saying it to somebody’s face?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with North Carolina.
As long as you exclude North Carolina.
I know, I mean who hasn’t wanted to nuke North Carolina a little bit?
I joke, it’s actually pretty cool in the mountains.
For us not to qualify as a backwards ass country we’d also have to pretend that three mile island wasn’t one lucky accident away from doing just what Chernobyl did.
he has very polish name and surname
You know how you hear stories sometimes about shadowy government agencies converging on an area for no apparent reason, and then leaving just as fast as they came? People usually assume it’s aliens, but I wonder how many of those incidents have been stupid shit like this.
Military term for this is “broken arrow”
It happens more than you would think mostly by the US but also Russia. Usually they find the things pretty fast but a few are just missing and at least one I remember was underwater somewhere it couldn’t safely be recovered so the area is patrolled.
I’ve heard that term before, but I had no idea that this was what it referred to. Fascinating.
There’s a movie by the same name about an evil Baldwin brother recovering one to get… Something; i haven’t seen it in years.
Travolta and Slater as B2 pilots, it’s cheesy but still a great action flick
The army/airforce actively spread rumors of aliens to hide their activities.
Probably all of those, because it’s really unlikely that aliens have come to earth and even less likely that an advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel, would ever get busted.
Agreed.
I think one of these armed hydrogen bombs they dropped on NC was never recovered. Someone said that online I didn’t read it in a publication so idk.
But there was an incident in Portugal, they sent in these service members to clean up this wreckage with no safety gear and they all died of cancer and the government denied it all. Also plutonium I believe.
Probably a lot
Yeah… the US track record is completely blank, nothing to see here. It’s a long episode but also pants shittingly terrifying…
Source? EdIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
Both of the weapons began their firing sequences upon separation from the aircraft, despite safeguards meant to prevent that from occurring.
Continuing…
The other bomb did not get as far into its firing sequence, but became deeply embedded in a muddy field, and one of its major weapons components (the thermonuclear “secondary” stage) was regarded as irrecoverably lost after an extensive, failed effort to recover it.
Me: “IT’S STILL THERE?!?!”
Continuing…
In 1962, the landowner was paid $1,000 to grant the United States of America a perpetual 200-foot (61 m) radius circular easement over the remains of the buried second bomb.[56][57] The site of the easement, at 35°29′37″N 77°51′30″W, is visible as a disturbed area, and lies approximately 250 feet (76 m) north of an obvious circle of trees (and disused cemetery) in the middle of a plowed field visible on Google Earth.
Time for spicy pilgrimage!
$1,000 to grant the United States of America a perpetual 200-foot (61 m) radius circular easement
worst deal than selling Manhattan for some beeds.
Thermonuclear secondary stages, A.K.A. the “Fusion” portion don’t detonate unless the first stage has been propperly ignited. While Lithium Deuteride (the second stage fusion fuel) is not safe to handle (corrosive and explodes on contact with water) it’s not going to cause a blast comparable to even a fision bomb.
This also happened in South Carolina a few years earlier. Unsure when it was revealed to the public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Mars_Bluff_B-47_nuclear_weapon_loss_incident
God damn the US has so many nukes it can lose them like coins in a sofa.
Holy shit, that close to Raleigh?! Most of the state would have been wiped off the map twice. Maybe parts of VA and/or SC!
Edit: Apparently it would have only taken out a few cities. Hollywood is wrong again!
Raleigh would have been fine. VA and SC would have heard the explosion but nothing worse. I checked it with a nuclear blast simulator. Even the Tsar Bomba would have killed less than 5% of the population of Raleigh.
“260 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb” sounds impressive, but most of that energy is wasted heating the nearby air rather than increasing the blast radius. This is why modern nuclear weapons use cluster munitions with smaller yields.
Only “LeSs tHaN 5% oF tHe pOpULaTiOn”
The Tsar Bomba was the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, so yeah, only less than 5%
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It would really only be comparable if they nuked north Carolina then tried to cover it up.
It’s not shocking that the military keeps classified that sort of thing, they’d have been hard pressed to keep an actual nuclear detonation classified/hidden 🤷♂️
A near miss and a disaster are worlds apart in terms of consequence, but very close in terms of what went wrong.
Tbh the bomb exploding would be worse because you’d have the kinetic blast and death from that PLUS fallout (though on the east coast that fallout would likely be headed to Europe)
They didn’t drop the bombs by accident, there was a plane crash, the plane broke apart and the bombs began arming themselves as part of the separation process, but didn’t detonate due to the failsafes.
To be clear the failsafes barely did.
Of the steps in this diagram the only one that prevented a nuclear detonation of the first bomb was the arming switch. In the swiss cheese model of accidents, out of 17 layers of protection, 16 failed. The safety mechanism that succeeded in this case had a history of failing because nuts in the plane could fall down and short the switch, arming the bomb unintentionally in flight.
The pilots who bailed out were both arrested by base MPs for ‘stealing parachutes’ while trying to get to the base and warn about the unsafe condition of the crash site. It probably didn’t help that the first pilot to make it to base was black in NC in the 60s.
Making a mistake with something intended to kill people vs making a mistake with something that provides a public good show different levels of intent. One of them was a city destroyer on purpose and the other was a city destroyer on accident.
There was a plane crash. It wasn’t some “whoops we dropped ze bombs” situation.
There were catastrophic failures but still failsafes prevented the disaster.
These events aren’t comparable at all.
Three mile island is much more comparable.
Um, there were actually several instances of “woops we dropped a bomb”.
Until the invention of the ICBM, there were planes carrying nukes in the air 24/7.
It’s only thanks to luck that none of them exploded, as the safety systems in place today were not added until the 60s when Kennedy learned how American nukes were being handled and freaked the fuck out about it all. Justifiably so.
The Air Force had been in charge before that and fought relentlessly against adding any safety systems at all.
Ok. But not this instance … which is my point.
laughs in three mile island.
Three Mile Island is a perfect comparison.
Partial meltdown. Not hidden. Handled.
Reported to emergency officials effectively immediately.
It wasn’t handled perfectly, but the level of incompetence wasn’t nearly on the same level. Venting the Xenon and dumping the tritium water wasn’t exactly advised without approval but people acted on their own to do them. By far the biggest mistake was the comment from the power company spokesperson that he doesn’t need to tell the public everything they do.
Yeah, but the government came behind and made it happen.
Three Mile Island should be held up as a “why we need regulation and government oversight” example IMO.
The business wanted to save face, they were obligated to be more forthcoming by the state.
*not hidden
- that we know of.
Yeah they also might have found Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster in the reactor but they could be hiding that too.
my point is that I’m not all about knowing “the other side” covers shit up and then assuming “my side” is telling the truth.
they all lie. about literally everything.
It’s actually asserting without evidence to back up the claim
do you need evidence to show that the US lies?
Nuclear power plants are more dangerous than intentional nuclear bomb strikes because the most destruction from a nuclear bomb is an “air burst” that happens to avoid poisoning the ground for centuries. Chernobyl has a 30km exlusion radius, and was 10x more radiation than Fukushima for a 20km radius. Hiroshima could be settled again after the fires burnt out, and no long term health effects from those who weren’t initially poisoned by radiation.
It is ground burst nuclear weapons or reactors that permanently sow the land with salt. Missing bombs, or accidentally dropped bombs, are that risk for someone who might use it after finding it.
