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> 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 fo
by 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 agoI 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.
- hyperman1 4y agoI don't think the physical impact of 9/11 was that important. 3000 or so lives is nothing in the grand scheme of things. The main immediate impact of 9/11 was demonstrating the USA was vulnerable. Before, they always managed to do their fighting in other countries. As a result 1) the USA had a serious need to prove their power. They received a challenge which could not stay unanswered. 2) Europe and the 1st world in general tried to let the US kick around and prove themselves, without starting a world war, and without being dragged into it themselves. They all had similar moments in their own history, and understood how other nations would just not care as much as the receiving nation did. 3) The moslim world saw their biggest enemy receive a kick in the balls, and loved it. It was a great morale booster for them. The US could be hurt. Long term impact was reducing the values of the enlightenment and western civilization. The US was seen torturing random people, starting a war against the wrong enemy, and limiting all kinds of freedom while claiming to be still free. They lost claims to moral superiority almost anywhere. The overton window shifted away from 'everyone has rights' and towards 'might makes right'.
- darthrupert 4y agoThat's one possibility. The other one is that the world was moving towards peace and 9/11 completely unhinged USA, leading them to make almost completely unjustified wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria in an effort to capture or kill a handful of people. The current situation in Europe is pretty much a straight continuation from all that. In short, it pretty much fucked every good thing the fall of USSR achieved on this planet.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago9/11 was only the latest, albeit most spectacular, attack against the US. The conflict with Djihadist movements did not start on 9/11. All of those conflicts started decades earlier, with oil in the Middle East and the creation of Israel. 9/11 did not profoundly change things.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThe lasting impact of 9/11: - financial: the forever wars of Iraq / Afghanistan are somewhere around, per google, 8 trillion dollars. In terms of global warming mitigation then (yeah, it would never have been spent on that) or in terms of opportunity costs of budgeting now and the near future, that is a huge loss. That is a quarter of the current US debt (31.5 trillion dollars). It is a almost a third of our annual GDP. - freedom: it instituted dangerous protocols for surveillance, jailing of US citizens without trial, assassination of US citizens without trial (Obama), the "enemy combatant" designation, mainstreamed use of torture and extraordinary rendition. I'm no war historian, but I think the only other war that resulted in such massive expansion of federal government power, and the creation of agencies to exert such power, was WWII with the beginnings of the CIA and NSA. Did Vietnam or Korea result in such expansions and institutions? - trust: granted we always had an iffy relationship with this with banana republic atrocities, supporting dictators, the Shah of Iran, etc, but Iraq really destroyed a lot of American standing worldwide, and considering the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a surge of sympathy/support, that says something. America arguably lost a huge amount of it's soft power. Everyone knew it was an imperialist grab of oil by oilmen in charge of the White House. Consider that this was the early days of the EU and China was on the rise. Iraq likely lead to countries seeking leadership and aid from those rather than America as a serious option.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoIt just makes me feel uncomfortable how many near-disasters we've had; with this one I'm also thinking about the flawed missile launch detection system that would have set off WW3 if the guy watching the screen had pushed the proverbial button. I'm sure there's been loads of incidents at nuclear power plants as well for that matter.
- zikduruqe 4y agoRight up the road from there, the Catch Me Eye Explosion took place earlier. https://jocoreport.com/75th-anniversary-of-catch-me-eye-explosion/ https://jocoreport.com/75th-anniversary-of-catch-me-eye-expl... It really wouldn't have looked good to have a second one and a few magnitudes bigger.
- Spooky23 4y agoThere’s no way Curtis LeMay would have allowed SAC’s incompetence to be known in the event of a fuck-up of this magnitude. They would have launched bombers to hit the Soviets immediately and pinned down Kennedy to give a thumbs up with only a few minutes to think.
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- elefanten 4y agoThere’s no way you can project into the psychology of such a moment with the confidence you exhibit in this comment. Joke? Thoughtless hyperbole? Political ax to grind? Come on.
- arethuza 4y agoI think you are being a bit harsh. It's certainly an interesting counterfactual to consider how the US would react, and SAC in particular, to the exploding of a hydrogen bomb in the North Carolina. Launching a full retaliatory response (and there was only one plan) certainly seems like something that might have happened - probably because they would genuinely believe it was an attack.
- stephen_g 4y agoHow much have you read about Curtis LeMay? His life ambition as a General did really seem to be to find any excuse to nuke another country… Quotes of his and anecdotes I’ve read from people who worked around him at the time, it really did seem to the point of being unhinged… So I don’t see it as such a ridiculous idea that such an accident might not have been a convenient excuse to bomb the Soviets…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- trgn 4y agoWhy can it not just be hyperbole, a stylistic choice? This is all just internet discussion, with some speculation and exaggeration for color. Why do we need to equivocate in a discussion on events from three generations? Some guy/gal wonders what would have happened, another guy/gal gives a concise clear answer. It's all good.
- j9461701 4y agoA sympathetic detonation is very unlikely for a nuclear weapon. They have to detonate in an extremely specific way, such that the explosion compresses the fissile material from all sides at once. A random off-center explosion hitting a nuclear bomb would likely cause the explosives in the bomb to detonate off their very specific timing and fail to cause a nuclear detonation. This was actually a safety design feature: > Walske also stipulated that all nuclear weapons in the stockpile must be “one-point safe;” that is,the weapon must have a probability of less than one in one million of producing a nuclear detonation if a detonation of the high explosives originates from a single point In fact this entire article seems to not recognize this fact. Even if one of the bombs detonated, it was always going to be bad for the people near it but not catastrophic or anything. It would almost certainly not have been nuclear.
- evo 4y agoI disagree; under normal circumstances regarding the HE explosives you are 100% correct but I suspect a nuclear shockwave at near point blank range might be fast enough to push the near side of the primary pit to the far side in a time interval short enough to cause an additional criticality. Probably not to design yields, but plausible.
- j9461701 4y agoA nuclear chain reaction takes place roughly over a single microsecond. To travel the ~11 inches of a bomb, in ideal circumstances, a high explosive needs roughly 200 microseconds. It is not impossible that the exact right stuff could happen to trigger the bomb, but it is extremely unlikely - it took the smartest minds in america working together for 3 years to figure out the exact precise timing to prevent a nuclear fizzle and achieve a true atomic explosion. It is, contrary to pop culture, near-impossible to pull off by dumb luck. Mostly you'll just make a radioactive mess.
- evo 4y agoRight! But that's talking about compressing a plutonium pit in atmospheric pressure--being an extremely dense metal, plutonium will preferentially "squirt out" in any direction rather than compress, if there's a direction it can go in. Therefore, you need to make a spherical shockwave via explosives. But that's in 1 atm! The initial wavefront of a fission device is going to be conservatively about 4 inches a microsecond (based on early above-ground test photos, modern high-yield devices would probably be faster still). This could very well turn the entire physics package of the secondary weapon into a thin pancake on the blast front, the plutonium can't get out of the way fast enough to avoid compression. This is a totally different scenario than a one-point-safety fizzle. The HE explosives in the second bomb might as well not exist relative to the overpressures faced from the first bomb's detonation.
- totetsu 4y agoScreen writer Pendleton Ward did a great series set in this kind of alternative history setting.