Please note this does not mean the USSR wasn’t that way. Just want to clarify I’m not a tankie, lol.
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.
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.
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.
Are you referring to bombs the Air Force accidentally dropped or the Navy losing nuke subs? Cause we’ve done both and no one has explained what happened to the USS Scorpion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines
Air force, I think they lost one in the atlantic or gulf in the water but they found one or two swamp ones. My headcannon for the Nemo shark submarine was a mined nuclear sub
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
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
Half my immediate family has cancer from undisclosed testing causing nuclear fallout over swaths of the southwest US…
US is run by assholes.
🌏 👨🚀 🔫 👨🚀
I went to a beach on the Jersey Shore and saw this sign
And you guys keep voting them in.
Well, sorta. Most of us fail to participate at all in voting, mainly cause we know the system is fucked and nigh impossible to “fix from within”, but also have no clear idea what could be done. Other than the obvious, but not many are eager to face death, obviously…
There are examples where US populations have banded together and voted in people who genuinely care about their interests (Bernie Sanders; AOC; et al). If US peoples of varying electorates actually organised and spoke with one another to endorse and vote in more of these people, change might actually occur.
The issue is threefold: the US population would rather not vote than seek out a third candidate who actually cares about them; the US does not have mandatory voting; and the concept of community has broken down and been sold to individualism so broadly that many in the US would rather vote in a candidate who harms them as long as they harm others than someone who would help them but also help others.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
Time for spicy pilgrimage!
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.
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?
There’s a whole list on Wikipedia of Super Fund sites that might at first give you the impression that we as a nation monitor, manage, and clean up the spills of toxic and radioactive waste that happen by industry in this country.
If you start reading about these cases you’ll realize how fundamentally inadequate our legal system is to punish and prevent toxic materials from escaping into everything from our drinking water to our grain.
It’s not just the scale of mistakes and mismanagement, but also the unvarnished evil that lurks in the heart of our nations executive class that intentionally buries radioactive materials and builds a school over it to cover it all up.
Not everything gets a movie made about it especially when the victims of the toxic horror are not white.
Then there are the casual everyday mismanagements that we allow to occur because the owners of those institutions have lots of influence on the government to lower standards and evade punishment.
https://youtube.com/@uscsb The USCSB is another great resource for seeing how poorly our regulatory establishment is equipped to enforce standards on industry.
The largest population of Marshallese people in the continental United States is in Springdale, Arkansas, just a short drive from where I live.
Why is there a large Marshallese population in Arkansas?
Well, you see, between 1946 - 1958, the US government detonated sixty-seven (yes, 67) nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands, rendering dozens of the islands uninhabitable.
I suppose you could call it a “big whoops” except for the part a where they were fully aware of the dangers of radioactive fallout and just did it anyway.
tf didn’t they drop nukes in arkansas instead? i’d rather live in the Marshall Islands
They got paid 600 million USD as compensation
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
The fun thing about american history is that americans don’t know it.
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.
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?
I wish I had an answer that would satisfy you. I am only realizing the depths of what you describe myself, and only because I am dating a woman from New Jersey. She is telling me all the time how culturally weird I am for how I act and talk to people (in general; I personally try my best to be authentic in my interactions).
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.
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
If Chernobyl had almost exploded and melted down, I wouldn’t blame the USSR for trying to hide it.
Yes. And when it did explode, they should have prioritized saving lives rather than preserving national reputation.
Disasters happen. How they are handled is what matters, and on that front, there was a difference between the two sides of the Cold War.
There was a difference but not in the direction you’re thinking. After the US tested a nuclear bomb in the marshal islands that led to an unexpected large fallout not only did they cover it up, they launched a secretive study to see how the fallout would affect the local inhabitants of affected islands. It’s genuinely hard to top that level of fucked up.
Before they knew what the effects would be? Ok.
Whereas your angelic Soviets threw human cattle onto the Chernobyl pyre knowing good and well by then how radiation affected flesh.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Most liberals I’ve seen on lemmy choose to pretend that US crimes against humanity are in the past. Rarely do I encounter someone so defensive that they openly support secret medial experimentation on native peoples. Project 4.1 happened well after the US dropped bombs on Japan. It continued for decades after. Your flimsy defense of such disgusting behavior falls apart under the slightest amount of scrutiny.
Feel free to live in a fantasy world where the US were “the good guys” but in doing so you’re tacitly endorsing the seriously despicable shit the US did to people around the world including it’s own citizens. If you do that don’t be so surprised when people start to call you a fascist.
Castle Bravo was bigger than expected. More tankie bullshit
Yes, and the US mobilized real quick to turn that fallout into an unethical medical experiment on tens of thousands of people. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Are you going to defend the Tuskegee experiments too? Have some shame for fucks sake. Reflexively defending crimes against humanity because the US can do no wrong in your mind is incredibly gross.
Also one of the cores was ever found and is still lost somewhere.
It will probably be found in a stadium’s parking lot in Seattle (this is a reference to The Sum of All Fears).
That was a good and bad movie at the same time.
The book is much better.
Yeah… the US track record is completely blank, nothing to see here. It’s a long episode but also pants shittingly terrifying…
same thing happened in Spain, they dropped a couple nukes and one actually detonated but I’m such a way it didn’t trigger a nuclear explosion, just fill the area with highly radioactive material.
