7 ms·

An obituary for the man who saved North Carolina from Nuclear Disaster

290 points by joeatwork 4y ago

mnw21cam 4y ago
> But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well Really? Because everything we have been told about nukes so far is that this does not happen.
- pja 4y ago
  The mechanism - neutron flux from the first bomb pushing the second into criticality - seems plausible. Where does it say that this is impossible?
  - mnw21cam 4y ago
    Criticality doesn't work like that. A lump of fissile material either is or isn't supercritical, regardless of the neutron flux. There are things that can change a lump from subcritical to supercritical, like lowering its temperature so it contracts, moving two lumps together, or using conventional explosives to compress the lump, but throwing a load of neutrons at it is not one of them.
    - pja 4y ago
      No, you’re right & I wasn’t thinking it through. At worst it will cause the core to fizzle due to radiation induced decays, but it shouldn’t detonate. Still not great of course! Now you’ve spread the second bomb’s worth of Pu or U over a wide area with the energy of the first one. Toxic /and/ radioactive. What’s not to like! (I may have been digging up a partial memory of muclear missile fratricide by Pu predetonation during compression due to the extra neutron flux, which IIRC is a real thing, but would require the second warhead to go through a full conventional explosion.)
- dontwearitout 4y ago
  I'm not an expert, but my understanding is nukes are designed to not detonate if they are damaged or destroyed by a conventional explosion. But if they're sitting next to another nuke which detonates, the core doesn't even have to go critical for it to release a bunch / most of its energy due to its neighbor's neutrons flux. Similar to how in thermonuclear (fusion) weapons a simple blanket of unenriched uranium can provide a huge boost to the weapon output.
  - mnw21cam 4y ago
    I think for two nukes sitting any further apart than a few metres, if you set one off, the fissile material in the second nuke may have some small number of fissions due to incident neutrons, but it would be a very long way away from "most" of its energy. Just from a physics point of view, let's be generous and say that a single fission releases four neutrons, and I'm pretty sure that's an overestimate. If the fissile material in the second nuke has a radius of 0.1m (r), and sitting 5m (R) away, then it would be exposed to at a maximum πr^2 / (4πR^2) = 0.0001 of those neutrons. If we imagine that every single one of those neutrons causes a fission in the second nuke (and that won't be true either) then the yield from the second nuke will be less than a thousandth of the yield from the first nuke. Secondary fissions from the neutrons released from those fissions may increase this a little, but the second nuke is subcritical, so it won't be by much. I'd love to hear from someone who actually knows the answer for sure, though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
beavis000 4y ago
If you are interested in this general subject, i recommend reading "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser. It chronicles the development of the US nuclear arsenal, and describes how the military dealt with the inherent tradeoff between nuclear weapon readiness vs reducing the likelihood of accidents.
cf100clunk 4y ago
Further HN reading on this fascinatingly scary event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910 ''I remember a talk about North Carolina and a strange, strange pond'' -- ''Hypnotized'', Fleetwood Mac, 1973
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kibwen 4y ago
> On the eighth day, Jack fished it all out of the muddy water at the bottom of the pit. One of his sergeants found another crucial piece. > “Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,” he told Jack. > “Great,” Jack said. > “Not great,” the sergeant replied. “It’s on arm.” > There’s far from a consensus on how close those bombs were to going off. Jack himself couldn’t say. But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well (The military refers to this as a “sympathetic detonation”). Each bomb was 250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an explosion that large would have permanently altered the geography of this state. Even thought it would have been at least 50 miles from the Pamlico Sound, Jack says the blast would have been powerful enough to create a new “Bay of North Carolina.” There would have been a 17-mile-wide “kill zone” around the blast site. Heavy fallout would have spread as far north as New York. This is one of those moments that could have been a turning point in history. Consider the implications of these bombs exploding. Tens of thousands of Americans dead at the hands of their own military. Imagine how it would change the JFK presidency; he would have been in office for a total of three days at this point. Imagine the effect on the state of North Carolina; Raleigh is just 40 miles from blast site, and millions would be evacuated. Imagine how it would change the Cold War. Imagine how it would change the perception of nuclear technology not just among the American public, but among the British (who have had the bomb for eight years) and French (who have had the bomb for one). It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.
- scotty79 4y ago
  I wonder what story would be told to the public to cover this up. Probably US Army would just blame soviets somehow.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  > It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours. I think the impact of 9/11 is exaggerated. It may have been traumatic for Americans, and to a lesser degree Europeans, but in the grand scheme of things its impact has been limited.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
This part, about one of the crew from the crashed bomber, is so sad: > When he arrived at the front gate, his uniform was torn up, his military ID was gone, and he was banged up from his escape. His parachute was still on his back. He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was. So, the airmen arrested him for stealing government property. Brilliant. Racism slowed response to a broken arrow situation. You'd think a guy showing up having clearly just survived a plane crash, with witnesses bringing him to the scene would be sufficient to at least place a phone call. Nope. Arrest the black guy.
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  > He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was. standard procedure, but yea I was waiting for the race baiting of the article, it isn't usual to be a whole 6 paragraphs down!
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    Yeah, random guy shows up and says 'I belong here' with zero proof that he belongs there. Yeah SoP would be arrest/detain them and let the guy in charge sort it out. Or as they say 'thats above my pay grade'. The alternative would be to let random people in and hope for the best. If I were a spy I would like the 'hope for the best' style of perimeter control.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    If the article was literally correct, it doesn't sound like standard procedure. I'd expect detention for verification, but not an arrest for theft! But the difference is so close to semantics that it might just be a little bit of hyperbole in the article.
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  My former professor told me about going to the NSA during the cuban missile crisis for his interview. Apparently "a cuban candidate" became "a cuban spy" by the time he had sat down to wait by the door for his escort.
photochemsyn 4y ago
When you read about all the things that could have gone wrong in first decades of the nuclear arms race but didn't, it really feels like there were multiple narrow escapes that could have escalated rapidly. The Titan missile silo story, for example - basically kids just past their teen years were responsible for maintaining those systems (the dropped wrench down the missile silo, oops...). See Eric Schlosser's history: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-control https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-cont... By the way, this caught my eye with respect to Jack Revelle's leukemia: > "Jack earned the Bronze Star during the Vietnam War, where he was exposed to Agent Orange." While Agent Orange's active agent was supposed to be a mixture of two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the manufacturer ran a sloppy synthesis which produced a lot of dioxin as a side product. The herbicide mix was effective, but dioxin has a lot of nasty side effects related to interference with various cellular processes, and promotion of cancers such as leukemia and myeloma appears to be an issue. (The US govt and Agent Orange manufacturers tried to block VA care for veterans exposed to Agent Orange by promoting bogus studies done with highly purified 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T showing no such effects). See for example: (2009) Cancer incidence in the population exposed to dioxin after the "Seveso accident": twenty years of follow-up. Exposure to ionizing radiation could of course also be involved, either via ingestion of small amounts of those radionuclide species that are incorporated into human tissues and bone (cesium-137, etc.) or by short-term exposure to high levels of gamma photons, neutron fluxes, positrons, alpha particles, etc.
- fbdab103 4y ago
  >it really feels like there were multiple narrow escapes that could have escalated rapidly. This is a minor plot point in the Ringworld series. Humans are psychically lucky and as a species we have managed to avoid the utmost brink several times. The alien race keeps humans around hoping to exploit humanity's luck.
ugh123 4y ago
>He later met his wife Brenda on a computer dating service. In the late 1960s I thought this needed more explanation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/old-weird-tech-computer-dating-of-the-1960s/71217/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/old-w...
- tragomaskhalos 4y ago
  Brenda is described as having a "thick British accent" which is tantalising vis a vis how they met as it suggests she is from the UK, but unfortunately otherwise meaningless as there is no such thing as a (single) "British accent".
  - pprotas 4y ago
    This might offend some Brits, but most people know exactly what is meant by a “British accent”
    - arethuza 4y ago
      I don't think anyone would be offended, same way that we refer to an "American accent" even though people from the US do have different accents.
bclemens 4y ago
Not to undermine what the man did, but the title is a bit of an overstatement. What saved North Carolina from nuclear disaster was not the guy who pulled the cores out after, but luck, safety mechanisms, and failures / damage sustained during impact: http://nuclearweaponsaccidents.blogspot.com/2013/03/goldsboro-19-steps-away-from-detonation.html http://nuclearweaponsaccidents.blogspot.com/2013/03/goldsbor...

290 points by joeatwork 4y ago

> But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well Really? Because everything we have been told about nukes so far is that this does not happen.

pja 4y ago
The mechanism - neutron flux from the first bomb pushing the second into criticality - seems plausible. Where does it say that this is impossible?
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  Criticality doesn't work like that. A lump of fissile material either is or isn't supercritical, regardless of the neutron flux. There are things that can change a lump from subcritical to supercritical, like lowering its temperature so it contracts, moving two lumps together, or using conventional explosives to compress the lump, but throwing a load of neutrons at it is not one of them.
  - pja 4y ago
    No, you’re right & I wasn’t thinking it through. At worst it will cause the core to fizzle due to radiation induced decays, but it shouldn’t detonate. Still not great of course! Now you’ve spread the second bomb’s worth of Pu or U over a wide area with the energy of the first one. Toxic /and/ radioactive. What’s not to like! (I may have been digging up a partial memory of muclear missile fratricide by Pu predetonation during compression due to the extra neutron flux, which IIRC is a real thing, but would require the second warhead to go through a full conventional explosion.)
dontwearitout 4y ago
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is nukes are designed to not detonate if they are damaged or destroyed by a conventional explosion. But if they're sitting next to another nuke which detonates, the core doesn't even have to go critical for it to release a bunch / most of its energy due to its neighbor's neutrons flux. Similar to how in thermonuclear (fusion) weapons a simple blanket of unenriched uranium can provide a huge boost to the weapon output.
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  I think for two nukes sitting any further apart than a few metres, if you set one off, the fissile material in the second nuke may have some small number of fissions due to incident neutrons, but it would be a very long way away from "most" of its energy. Just from a physics point of view, let's be generous and say that a single fission releases four neutrons, and I'm pretty sure that's an overestimate. If the fissile material in the second nuke has a radius of 0.1m (r), and sitting 5m (R) away, then it would be exposed to at a maximum πr^2 / (4πR^2) = 0.0001 of those neutrons. If we imagine that every single one of those neutrons causes a fission in the second nuke (and that won't be true either) then the yield from the second nuke will be less than a thousandth of the yield from the first nuke. Secondary fissions from the neutrons released from those fissions may increase this a little, but the second nuke is subcritical, so it won't be by much. I'd love to hear from someone who actually knows the answer for sure, though.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

beavis000 4y ago

If you are interested in this general subject, i recommend reading "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser. It chronicles the development of the US nuclear arsenal, and describes how the military dealt with the inherent tradeoff between nuclear weapon readiness vs reducing the likelihood of accidents.

cf100clunk 4y ago

Further HN reading on this fascinatingly scary event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927910 ''I remember a talk about North Carolina and a strange, strange pond'' -- ''Hypnotized'', Fleetwood Mac, 1973

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kibwen 4y ago

> On the eighth day, Jack fished it all out of the muddy water at the bottom of the pit. One of his sergeants found another crucial piece. > “Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,” he told Jack. > “Great,” Jack said. > “Not great,” the sergeant replied. “It’s on arm.” > There’s far from a consensus on how close those bombs were to going off. Jack himself couldn’t say. But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well (The military refers to this as a “sympathetic detonation”). Each bomb was 250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an explosion that large would have permanently altered the geography of this state. Even thought it would have been at least 50 miles from the Pamlico Sound, Jack says the blast would have been powerful enough to create a new “Bay of North Carolina.” There would have been a 17-mile-wide “kill zone” around the blast site. Heavy fallout would have spread as far north as New York. This is one of those moments that could have been a turning point in history. Consider the implications of these bombs exploding. Tens of thousands of Americans dead at the hands of their own military. Imagine how it would change the JFK presidency; he would have been in office for a total of three days at this point. Imagine the effect on the state of North Carolina; Raleigh is just 40 miles from blast site, and millions would be evacuated. Imagine how it would change the Cold War. Imagine how it would change the perception of nuclear technology not just among the American public, but among the British (who have had the bomb for eight years) and French (who have had the bomb for one). It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.

scotty79 4y ago
I wonder what story would be told to the public to cover this up. Probably US Army would just blame soviets somehow.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
> It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours. I think the impact of 9/11 is exaggerated. It may have been traumatic for Americans, and to a lesser degree Europeans, but in the grand scheme of things its impact has been limited.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

This part, about one of the crew from the crashed bomber, is so sad: > When he arrived at the front gate, his uniform was torn up, his military ID was gone, and he was banged up from his escape. His parachute was still on his back. He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was. So, the airmen arrested him for stealing government property. Brilliant. Racism slowed response to a broken arrow situation. You'd think a guy showing up having clearly just survived a plane crash, with witnesses bringing him to the scene would be sufficient to at least place a phone call. Nope. Arrest the black guy.

heywhatupboys 4y ago
> He told the airmen at the front gate that a B-52 had crashed, but the word hadn’t spread to them yet. Mattocks, a Black man, couldn’t prove who he was. standard procedure, but yea I was waiting for the race baiting of the article, it isn't usual to be a whole 6 paragraphs down!
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  Yeah, random guy shows up and says 'I belong here' with zero proof that he belongs there. Yeah SoP would be arrest/detain them and let the guy in charge sort it out. Or as they say 'thats above my pay grade'. The alternative would be to let random people in and hope for the best. If I were a spy I would like the 'hope for the best' style of perimeter control.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  If the article was literally correct, it doesn't sound like standard procedure. I'd expect detention for verification, but not an arrest for theft! But the difference is so close to semantics that it might just be a little bit of hyperbole in the article.
WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
My former professor told me about going to the NSA during the cuban missile crisis for his interview. Apparently "a cuban candidate" became "a cuban spy" by the time he had sat down to wait by the door for his escort.

photochemsyn 4y ago

When you read about all the things that could have gone wrong in first decades of the nuclear arms race but didn't, it really feels like there were multiple narrow escapes that could have escalated rapidly. The Titan missile silo story, for example - basically kids just past their teen years were responsible for maintaining those systems (the dropped wrench down the missile silo, oops...). See Eric Schlosser's history: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-control https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-cont... By the way, this caught my eye with respect to Jack Revelle's leukemia: > "Jack earned the Bronze Star during the Vietnam War, where he was exposed to Agent Orange." While Agent Orange's active agent was supposed to be a mixture of two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, the manufacturer ran a sloppy synthesis which produced a lot of dioxin as a side product. The herbicide mix was effective, but dioxin has a lot of nasty side effects related to interference with various cellular processes, and promotion of cancers such as leukemia and myeloma appears to be an issue. (The US govt and Agent Orange manufacturers tried to block VA care for veterans exposed to Agent Orange by promoting bogus studies done with highly purified 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T showing no such effects). See for example: (2009) Cancer incidence in the population exposed to dioxin after the "Seveso accident": twenty years of follow-up. Exposure to ionizing radiation could of course also be involved, either via ingestion of small amounts of those radionuclide species that are incorporated into human tissues and bone (cesium-137, etc.) or by short-term exposure to high levels of gamma photons, neutron fluxes, positrons, alpha particles, etc.

fbdab103 4y ago
>it really feels like there were multiple narrow escapes that could have escalated rapidly. This is a minor plot point in the Ringworld series. Humans are psychically lucky and as a species we have managed to avoid the utmost brink several times. The alien race keeps humans around hoping to exploit humanity's luck.

ugh123 4y ago

>He later met his wife Brenda on a computer dating service. In the late 1960s I thought this needed more explanation: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/old-weird-tech-computer-dating-of-the-1960s/71217/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/old-w...

tragomaskhalos 4y ago
Brenda is described as having a "thick British accent" which is tantalising vis a vis how they met as it suggests she is from the UK, but unfortunately otherwise meaningless as there is no such thing as a (single) "British accent".
- pprotas 4y ago
  This might offend some Brits, but most people know exactly what is meant by a “British accent”
  - arethuza 4y ago
    I don't think anyone would be offended, same way that we refer to an "American accent" even though people from the US do have different accents.

bclemens 4y ago

Not to undermine what the man did, but the title is a bit of an overstatement. What saved North Carolina from nuclear disaster was not the guy who pulled the cores out after, but luck, safety mechanisms, and failures / damage sustained during impact: http://nuclearweaponsaccidents.blogspot.com/2013/03/goldsboro-19-steps-away-from-detonation.html http://nuclearweaponsaccidents.blogspot.com/2013/03/goldsbor...