A nuclear weapon torn apart by fire and impact does not go off.<\/p>\n
That sounds like luck. It is design, and it was designed in deliberately.<\/p>\n
The package only works if a precise sequence happens in a precise order, and almost any departure from it produces no yield at all<\/strong>.<\/p>\n What it does produce instead is a mess, and a very persistent one.<\/p>\n The conventional explosive packed around the core still fires, and metal that was solid a moment earlier leaves as dust<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Then the wind takes it.<\/p>\n A weapon of this kind is built so it cannot assemble itself by accident.<\/p>\n The core sits inside a shell of shaped explosive that has to fire everywhere at once, within millionths of a second, to squeeze the metal evenly from all sides.<\/p>\n Set it off from one side, or set off only part of it, and the core is pushed sideways<\/strong> and broken instead.<\/p>\n Nothing follows. The design requirement is that one accidental detonation point cannot produce a meaningful yield, and on that morning it held four times out of four.<\/p>\n What it cannot prevent is the rest. Plutonium ignites in air on its own, and burning jet fuel supplies as much air and heat as that needs.<\/p>\n The metal turns to a fine oxide powder, the powder rides the smoke, and it comes down wherever the smoke went.<\/p>\n So the job that followed was not an engineering problem. It was a surface problem<\/strong>, and the surface was ice.<\/p>\n The site was a bay in northwest Greenland, a few miles from an air base wedged on rock between the ice sheet and the sea.<\/p>\n In January there is no daylight there. The sun does not clear the horizon for months, so every hour of the work happened under portable lamps<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The bay was frozen across, which was the only thing that made a search possible at all.<\/p>\n Under that lid the water runs deep, and anything that went through was effectively gone.<\/p>\n The contamination lay in a strip roughly one mile by three, easy to see because burning fuel had melted down into the ice and refrozen black.<\/p>\n Black on white was the one advantage<\/strong> anybody had.<\/p>\n The aircraft came down on January 21 of 1968 with four weapons aboard, each rated a little above a megaton.<\/p>\n Six of the seven men aboard got out of it before it came apart.<\/p>\n The recovery ran from that week into September and averaged 40 below zero, dropping at times to 76 below.<\/p>\n Crews worked a marked grid in line, lifting contaminated ice, snow and wreckage into containers, and more than 550,000 gallons of it went back to the United States in 30 tanks<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The general in charge put the share of contaminated material removed at 93 percent.<\/p>\n Analysis of the recovered weapon parts accounted for 85 percent of the uranium and 94 percent by weight of three secondaries. Of the fourth, nothing was identified<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The temperature gets used carelessly. An extreme reading is not a working condition, and the gap between an average of 40 below and an occasional 76 below is the gap between hard and impossible.<\/p>\n The missing part is the second thing. A small submarine searched the seabed that August, found nothing, and the effort was dropped rather than finished<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Whether that component went through the ice, burned, or was carried off has never been stated publicly, and those are three different answers.<\/p>\n The health claims are the third. Hundreds of workers later sued, a Danish survey found a raised cancer count among those sampled, and official inquiries disputed the link, in the way that arguments around a Cold War machine<\/a> or a heavy lift<\/a> tend to outlast the event<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The diplomatic side is separate again, and the documents behind it stayed sealed for decades, as the declassified file<\/a> now shows.<\/p>\n Two things came out of that winter in the end, and only one of them was quick.<\/p>\n Armed bombers stopped flying standing patrols within weeks of the accident. That practice simply ended and never came back.<\/p>\n The second took eleven years. Designers went after the explosive itself and produced a formulation that burns instead of detonating when it is struck, crushed or dropped.<\/p>\n It is less powerful and you need more of it, and that was accepted as the price of not repeating this, as the assembled account<\/a> of the accident sets out.<\/p>\n The second stage<\/strong> nobody found is the part the record cannot close.<\/p>\n Everything else about that winter is on paper<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A nuclear weapon torn apart by fire and impact does not go off. That sounds like luck. It is design, and it was designed in deliberately. The package only works if a precise sequence happens in a precise order, and almost any departure from it produces no yield at all. What it does produce instead is … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2673"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2750,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions\/2750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why the surface was the problem and never the blast<\/h2>\n
The bay, the dark and the lid on the water<\/h2>\n
What the record says about that winter<\/h2>\n
What the tidy version leaves out<\/h2>\n
What the accident actually changed<\/h2>\n