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US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret doc

PostPosted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 9:18 pm
by seemslikeadream
US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina – secret document
Exclusive: Journalist uses Freedom of Information Act to disclose 1961 accident in which one switch averted catastrophe

Ed Pilkington in New York

The Guardian, Friday 20 September 2013 12.03 EDT

The bomb that nearly exploded over North Carolina was 260 times more powerful than the device which devasted Hiroshima in 1945. Photo: Three Lions/Getty Images
A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons – the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city – putting millions of lives at risk.

Though there has been persistent speculation about how narrow the Goldsboro escape was, the US government has repeatedly publicly denied that its nuclear arsenal has ever put Americans' lives in jeopardy through safety flaws. But in the newly-published document, a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons concludes that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe".

Writing eight years after the accident, Parker F Jones found that the bombs that dropped over North Carolina, just three days after John F Kennedy made his inaugural address as president, were inadequate in their safety controls and that the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst. "It would have been bad news – in spades," he wrote.

Jones dryly entitled his secret report "Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb" – a quip on Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film about nuclear holocaust, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.


Slim Pickens in a scene from Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive
The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy's Road.

Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity. "The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," Jones concludes.

The document was uncovered by Schlosser as part of his research into his new book on the nuclear arms race, Command and Control. Using freedom of information, he discovered that at least 700 "significant" accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded between 1950 and 1968 alone.

"The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," he said. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 11:47 am
by MacCruiskeen
Thanks, SLAD. I'm surprised there hasn't been more comment on this astonishing story. It raises a whole bunch of questions.

1) It's taken them 52 years to declassify the file on this. Since it happened, many people have been born, had children and even grandchildren, and died. How much else are "the authorities" sitting on right now, and for how much longer will they continue to sit on it?

2) Can we be sure we're getting the full story on this, even now? I doubt it. The explanation provided strikes me as baffling.

The BBC, on today's front page, wrote:
The plane was on a routine flight when it began to break up over North Carolina on 23 January 1961.

As it was breaking apart, a control inside the cockpit released the two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs over Goldsboro.

One fell to the ground unarmed. But the second "assumed it was being deliberately released over an enemy target - and went through all its arming mechanisms save one, and very nearly detonated over North Carolina," Mr Schlosser told the BBC's Katty Kay.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24183879


Two H-bombs primed for detonation and extremely poorly secured against accident "on a routine flight...over North Carolina"?? WTF? "Routine"? Why on earth would the USAF "routinely" fly active, armed H-bombs over US territory, and pretty damn close to Washington DC at that?

Remember that USAF's destruction of Hiroshima was only 15 years in the past at this time, and that these bombs were 260 times stronger.

Image

3) This deeply embarrassing incident happened at the height of the Cold War. It was also only two months after JFK was elected and only three days after he was sworn into office. How would he have responded if that bomb had actually detonated over the eastern USA? How would the Pentagon have responded? Would they have blamed it on the Russians - and "retaliated"?

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 12:00 pm
by seemslikeadream
I believe this is the most astonishing thing i have read in a long time if not ever.... just three days after John F Kennedy made his inaugural address as president

thinking of the consequences ....did JFK know about this?


American Exceptionalism :wink:

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 7:40 pm
by Nordic
Astonishingly, this story serms to have made it into the mainstream. I saw it on google news todsy of all places.

I had the same thoughts as per the timing.

When I think of these types of things I keep going back to the wild ride of of Air Force 1 over NYC early in his presidency. I have to wonder if that wasn'y a Bill Hicks Moment of some kind.

I've been wondering about that incident just lately, after forgetting all about it for quite some time.

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 8:18 pm
by JackRiddler
MacCruiskeen » Sat Sep 21, 2013 10:47 am wrote:Two H-bombs primed for detonation and extremely poorly secured against accident "on a routine flight...over North Carolina"?? WTF? "Routine"? Why on earth would the USAF "routinely" fly active, armed H-bombs over US territory, and pretty damn close to Washington DC at that?


Very good points MacC but this would have possibly been not unusual - maybe it still is. They kept hundreds of h-bomb planes in the air and ready to go over the Arctic throughout those years. Reality. Fuckers.

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 11:35 pm
by 82_28
Just a hunch, but my call is that it is a wake-up call for the fact that THEY CAN remind us at any given time what they are capable of fucking up in the sense that they are in total control of our safety via said control because they administer the lack of safety in given units only they know.

Okay. Who wants to hear 82_28 mention the word "doublebind" again? Well, I did.

There are quite a few flaws in this "leak" or whatever the fuck it is. It's meat in order to right the ship of bullshit and death by introducing a doublebind to conceal the previous doublebind by using the history of our prowess and making it look fucking stupid while all the while we still "won the war" yet some factors put some American citizens in "harm's way" way back when we were stupid. But thankfully now "we're not".

Here. Here's an email I wrote to some of my website cohorts:

It occurred to me as I was reading this older piece by Dave McGowan that America's role in WWII was to bomb people into the technocratic age not backwards into a "stone age". What the fuck is a "stone age" anyhow? It is a purely technocratic term invented to demonstrate that all things improve only if THEY DO IT.

http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/fwordpr ... hapter%203

We bombed the fuck out of Japan for the wealth of the future technocrats. There are many ads in the early days of when the archives began at least of "technocrats" rolling through town -- probably many towns that proved useful to the techno-occult in those days. They would give talks and presentations and shit with like refreshments and other such bullshit leading up to WWII. We bombed them into the future, not stone age.

Perhaps Islam (NSA Tagged bitchez!), but perhaps Islam has taken much more time to conclude the technocrats assault because they saw the OpenQNL writing on the wall before the technocrats were able to get to them. Thus they are the only LARGE holdout. So the term "we bombed Iraq into the stone age" is a double bind with connotations of a happy application of cruelty that cancels itself out. Ah, whatever, just thinking out loud as I read that link I put up.

I was replied to by Gordon this:

I think you are exactly right about the purpose of WWII as being to globalize the technocracy, bring everyone up to speed on the infrastructure of roads and factories, etc...

I've been working the past week and a half with a local landscaping company whose maintenance contracts consist primarily of new-ish houses in "neighborhoods" that all look the same, a couple of housing associations in enclosed "communities" and four McDonalds... The experience has taught me a lot about "technocracy" on a really "grass-roots" level let's say (and anyway - what is so good about the roots of grass?)

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 1:05 am
by JackRiddler
It occurred to me as I was reading this older piece by Dave McGowan that America's role in WWII was to bomb people into the technocratic age not backwards into a "stone age".


Sort of what Hannah Arendt said. Can't find a passage online but along the lines of if you blow up cities it's a boost to development assuming the surviving society remains organized & technologically advanced enough to respond by rebuilding. Come to think of it, sort of what many have said, because it's obvious. But it took Halliburton to make into an explicit business model.

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 11:25 am
by seemslikeadream
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
by James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell

TOP SECRET EYES ONLY
Notes on National Security Council Meeting July 20, 1961
General Hickey, Chairman of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, presented the annual report of his group. General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.
After the presentation by General Hickey and by the various members of the Subcommittee, the President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R which would be incurred by a preemptive attack. General Lemnitzer stated that such studies had been made and that he would bring them over and discuss them personally with the President. In recalling General Hickey's opening statement that these studies have been made since 1957, the President asked for an appraisal of the trend in the effectiveness of the attack. General Lemnitzer replied that he would also discuss this with the President.
Since the basic assumption of this year's presentation was an attack in late 1963, the President asked about probable effects in the winter of 1962. Mr. Dulles observed that the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved. General Lemnitzer added a word of caution about accepting the precise findings of the Committee since these findings were based upon certain assumptions which themselves might not be valid.
The President posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelters following an attack. A member of the Subcommittee replied that no specific period of time could be cited due to the variables involved, but generally speaking, a period of two weeks should be expected.
The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.
Declassified: June, 1993
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, NUMBER 19, FALL 1994, PP. 88-96. COPYRIGHT (c) 1994 BY NEW PROSPECT, INC. PERMISSION IS GRANTED TO COPY AND CIRCULATE FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES ONLY, PROVIDED THAT THIS NOTICE ACCOMPANIES ALL COPIES MADE.
Introduction

During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies ﷓﷓ from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" ﷓﷓ worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent effect of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.
But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R, based on our growing lead in land-based missiles, And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.
The document reproduced above is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others, presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a Presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.
The Real Missile Gap

In 1960, claims of a "missile gap" favoring the Soviets had given the Democrats a critical election theme, and many millions of Americans entered the Sixties feeling intensely vulnerable to the new Soviet ICBM threat. But as Richard Reeves has recently written, intelligence based on satellites launched in August of 1960 soon challenged the campaign assessment and public view. (Reeves, 228) The United States had beaten the USSR to an operational ICBM and enjoyed clear, and growing, numerical advantage. We were far ahead, and our military planners knew it.
Kennedy was quickly convinced of this truth, which was further confirmed as new satellites brought back new information. Later in 1961, a National Intelligence Estimate came through showing only 4 Soviet ICBMs in place, all of them on low alert at a test site called Plesetsk. By fall, Defense Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric was to acknowledge in a public speech that US forces (with 185 ICBMs and over 3,400 deliverable warheads at that time) were vastly superior to those of the Russians.
It was in this context, of an increasing nuclear edge based on a runaway lead in land-based missiles, that Kennedy faced his first nuclear-tinged crisis, which erupted over Berlin in July of 1961.
The Berlin Crisis

The July 20th meeting took place under conditions of unusual tension. Only three months before, Kennedy had suffered the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and his loss of confidence in both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. One month before, he had been shaken by his Vienna confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev. Now, the Soviets were threatening to turn control of access to West Berlin over to the East Germans, and to conclude a separate peace treaty with that satellite state.
At the crucial National Security Council discussion of the brewing Berlin crisis on July 13, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had opposed negotiations with the Soviets until the last moment (Newman, 115). As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., then a special assistant, later summarized for the President, adviser Dean Acheson had prepared a paper arguing that
"we are in a fateful test of wills, that our major task is to demonstrate our unalterable determination, and that Krushchev will be deterred only by a US readiness to go to nuclear war rather than to abandon the status quo. On this theory, negotiation is harmful until the crisis is well developed; then it is useful only for propaganda purposes..." (Foreign Relations, XIV, 173)
Kennedy favored negotiations over conflict. While not directly challenging Acheson, he encouraged Schlesinger to produce an unsigned memo critical of Acheson's stance.
Schlesinger advised caution. In a passage especially pertinent to the larger issue, he wrote:
"The [Acheson] paper hinges on our willingness to face nuclear war. But this option is undefined. Before you are asked to make the decision to go to nuclear war, you are entitled to know what concretely what nuclear war is likely to mean. The Pentagon should be required to make an analysis of the possible levels and implications of nuclear warfare and the possible gradations of our own nuclear response." (Foreign Relations XIV 173)
It is possible (though we do not know) that the decision to bring the Net Evaluation to Kennedy occurred in response to the raising of these concerns. At any rate, the meeting occurred.
The Burris Memorandum

The memorandum reproduced here was written for Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who did not attend the meeting, by Colonel Howard Burris, his military aide. Declassified only in June of 1993, it has not previously received any public attention so far as we have been able to determine.
The first paragraph introduces General Hickey and his group, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee. Although the Subcommittee report is described as "annual," this would be the first one given to President Kennedy and his advisors, and it is not clear whether President Eisenhower received such reports in person. General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stepped in to explain the "assumption" of the 1961 report: "a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions." The question arises: A surprise attack by whom on whom?
The following paragraphs answer the question. The second paragraph reports that after hearing the presentations, President Kennedy asked the presenters "if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the U.S.S.R. which would be incurred by a preemptive attack." Kennedy also asked for an effectiveness trend since "these studies have been made since 1957." Lemnitzer responded that he would later answer both of the President's questions in private.
Paragraph three records Kennedy asking a hypothetical question: what would happen if we launched a strike in the winter of 1962? Allen Dulles of the CIA responded that "the attack would be much less effective since there would be considerably fewer missiles involved." Lemnitzer then cautioned against putting too much faith in the findings since the assumptions might be faulty. The discussion thus provides a time﷓frame. December of 1962 was too early for an attack because the U.S. would have too few missiles; by December of 1963 there would likely be sufficient numbers.
Paragraph four reports one more Kennedy question: how much time would "citizens" need to remain in shelters following an attack? The President receives a qualified estimate of 2 weeks from a member of the subcommittee. The group was clearly talking about U.S. citizens protecting themselves from the globe-encircling fallout following a U.S. nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R.
Paragraph five adds to the intensity of the document with Kennedy's directive "that no member in attendance disclose even the subject of the meeting."
Other Accounts of the Meeting

So far as we know, the official record of this meeting remains secret. The excellent Foreign Relations of the United States, volume XIV, "Berlin Crisis 1961-1962," published in late 1993, though replete with memoranda detailing the nuclear aspects of the Berlin confrontation, makes no mention of it. The only official reference we know of is the agenda for the National Security Council issued on July 18, 1961, declassified in 1977, which reads, simply "The Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NSC 5816; N.S. Action No. 2223) ... Presentation of the report by the Chairman of the Subcommittee." (The most detailed discussion of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee we have found is in Desmond Ball's Politics and Force Levels (pp. 192﷓3), which identifies the larger task of the Subcommittee as the preparation of revised targeting plans.)
On the other hand, the fact of a meeting, and Kennedy's personal reaction to it, has been reported. The President was displeased. But no account yet published has told what he was displeased about.
For example, Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account:
"...Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, "as though it were for a kindergarten class.. Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one." (p. 483)
McGeorge Bundy evidently refers to the same meeting in this passage:
"In the summer of 1961 [Kennedy] went through a formal briefing on the net assessment of a general nuclear war between the two superpowers, and he expressed his own reaction to Dean Rusk as they walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting on other subjects: "And we call ourselves the human race." (p. 354)
(Dean Rusk's memoirs repeat Kennedy's remark, though they place the meeting "shortly after our assuming office." Richard Reeves, for his part, does not mention the July meeting, and attributes Kennedy's remark to a later briefing in September, 1961.)
Numerous other apparent accounts of the meeting exist, though they do not refer to it by name or date. All agree on Kennedy's reaction. But none reveal what was actually discussed. Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy, published only four years later, presents an understandably benign version:
"That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all﷓out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'pre﷓emptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept." (p. 513)
Unfortunately, the critical third point was not yet true. As UnderSecretary of State Roger Hilsman wrote in 1967:
"As the intelligence community looked at their estimates in 1958, 1959, and 1960, and even through the first half of 1961, they saw a missile gap developing that would come to a peak about 1963." (p. 162)
What Hilsman does not say explicitly is that the estimated missile gap was in America's favor. The Soviets had virtually no operational ICBMs in 1961, a fact known to American intelligence at least by the end of 1960. And it appears the Russians did not solve their fundamental technical problem, namely building a hydrogen bomb small enough to be carried by a missile of manageable size, until years later. (Sorenson, 524; Bobbitt, 61).
Dean Rusk describes the meeting as an "awesome experience" in his memoirs, As I Saw It, published in 1990.
"President Kennedy clearly understood what nuclear war meant and was appalled by it. In our many talks together, he never worried about the threat of assassination, but he occasionally brooded over whether it would be his fate to push the nuclear button... If any of us had doubts, that 1961 briefing convinced us that a nuclear war must never be fought. Consequently, throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years we worked to establish a stable deterrent..." (p. 246﷓7)
What Rusk does not say is that the problem of a "stable deterrent" in 1961 did not lie in an insufficiency of American missiles. It lay, rather, in the need for the Soviets to develop sufficient effective ICBM forces, to deter us. That is an ugly but unavoidable fact. Rusk goes on, a page later, with comments that appear almost anguished, and for which his own account of the meeting gives no apparent rationale:
"...the United States has never renounced possible first use of nuclear weapons. I personally think that the United States is committed to a second strike only, after we have received nuclear weapons on our own soil. Under no circumstances would I have participated in an order to launch a first strike, with the possible exception of a massive conventional attack on Western Europe." (p. 248)
The July 25 Speech on Berlin

Nuclear conflict was very much in the air that week. Another document of the time indicates the directions Kennedy's nuclear thinking was actually taking ﷓﷓ quite the Cold Warrior, but at the same time far removed from pre﷓emptive strikes and the inflexible all﷓out attack envisioned by the Joint Chiefs. This is a paper entitled "Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis," by the economist Thomas C. Schelling, which was sent to Hyannis Port over the weekend of July 21, 1961 and which, as Bundy noted, made a "deep impression" on the President. In it Schelling presented arguments for a capability, which did not then exist, to wage limited nuclear war:
"the role of nuclears in Europe should not be to win a grand nuclear campaign, but to pose a higher level of risk to the enemy. The important thing in limited nuclear war is to impress the Soviet leadership with the risk of general war ﷓ a war that may occur whether we or they intend it or not....We should plan for a war of nerve, of demonstration, and of bargaining, not of tactical target destruction." (Foreign Relations, XIV, 170).
Schelling also advocated centralization of the control of weapons in the hands of the President so as to
"permit deliberate, discriminating, selective use for dangerous nuclear bargaining. This means preventing any use, by anyone, not specifically authorized as part of the nuclear bargaining plan...This is a controlled strategic exchange." (op. cit., 172)
Schelling's paper thus called attention to a key concern: the diffuse character of nuclear command and control in 1961 did not assure that the President in fact enjoyed the full authority over the bomb which most Americans assumed to be the case. Establishing such control became a priority for Kennedy in the months that followed. (Desmond Ball, 193).
The cumulative impact of this diverse advice can be seen in Kennedy's televised address to the nation on July 25, 1961. "We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force" Yet Kennedy also stressed the dangers: "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history" (Newman, 115). He asked for increased military appropriations and called out 150,000 reserve personnel. But he did not engage the Soviets. The wall was allowed to remain intact when constructed in August of 1961, a symbolic column of soldiers was sent through to West Berlin, and a fallout shelter program was undertaken in the United States.
With the Burris memorandum, the reasoning behind the fallout shelter program now begins to fall into place. As a civil defense measure against a Soviet nuclear attack, the flimsy cinderblock shelters Americans were told to build were absurd. But they could indeed protect those in them, for a couple of weeks, from radiation drifting thousands of miles after a U.S. pre﷓emptive strike on the Soviet Union. It is known that Kennedy later regretted this program.
Down the Road: 1962 and 1963

The U.S. was far ahead in the arms race. Yet the military continued to press for a rapid build-up of strategic missiles. Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2400 Minutemen; Thomas Powers of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation, know as SIOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan.
SIOP was a recipe for blowing up the world, whether in a first or a second strike. As McGeorge Bundy wrote to the President on July 7, 1961:
"...All agree that the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. We believe that you may want to raise this question with Bob McNamara in order to have a prompt review and new orders if necessary. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult." (quoted in Kaplan, 297)
During that summer of 1961, the Defense Secretary ordered an overhaul of SIOP carried out by RAND analysts (including Daniel Ellsberg) and quickly approved by the JCS. (Bobbitt, 48) Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara eventually imposed a limit of 1,000 Minuteman missiles, angering the Chiefs. Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force, then far from being securely concentrated in the President's hands.
The Burris memorandum may help to explain both the military's drive for a vast U.S. nuclear build﷓up, despite the fact that America was already far ahead, and the resistance from JFK and McNamara. The Net Evaluation Subcommittee had offered the Pentagon, the CIA, and President Kennedy a glimpse of the opportunity that lay ahead in the winter of 1963: U.S. nuclear superiority so complete that a first strike might be successful. But it also alerted Kennedy to a danger. American nuclear superiority might then be so complete, that rogue elements from the military and intelligence forces, seeking to precipitate an American first strike, might not feel deterred by fear of Soviet retaliation. What was the dispute over the numbers of land﷓based ICBMs really about? To be sure, at some level it involved the sufficiency of deterrence. But there may also have been an even graver concern: the offensive capabilities of the nuclear force, at a time when the President could not be sure of his control over the nuclear button.
By October of 1962, the U.S. nuclear lead remained strong, though perhaps not yet air-tight, given the number of Soviet bombers and the risks to Europe. Twenty years later, Anthony Cordesman described the picture:
"During the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the US had approximately 1500 B﷓47s and 500 B﷓52s, and had already deployed over 200 of its first generation of ICBMs. In marked contrast, the Soviet strategic missile threat consisted of a few token ICBM deployments whose unreliability was so great that it was uncertain exactly whom they threatened. Soviet long range bomber forces consisted only of 100 Tu﷓Bears and 35 May Bison, whose range and flight characteristics forced them to fly at medium and high altitudes, and which made them extremely vulnerable to US fighters and surface-to-air missiles." (p. 7, cited in Bobbitt)
Kennedy resisted strong pressures to test this advantage in October of 1962, as he might have had to do, had he agreed to launch bombing raids on the Cuban missile installations. Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs, published in 1970, tell of graphic fears expressed by Robert Kennedy to the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin at the peak of the crisis:
"Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will... If the situation continues for much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American military could get out of control." (p. 497)
Not even the American editors of Khrushchev's memoirs took these remarks seriously at the time they were first published. A rare editorial note reads: "Obviously this is Khrushchev's own version of what was reported to him. There is no evidence that the President was acting out of fear of a military take﷓ over." (Khrushchev, 498).
Looking down the road, the Net Evaluation calendar of 1961 implied that the period from Cuba to Dallas and just after was, perhaps, critical to the survival of the world. Had tensions escalated or been aroused in some violent way in late 1963, the President might have faced an excruciating choice ﷓﷓ to strike first, or to give up "victory" during the last brief moment in all history when it could conceivably have been won.
We cannot say whether Kennedy believed the Net Evaluation calendar, or indeed, perhaps equally serious, whether he believed that others in the government might believe it. We do know that the last year of his life saw repeated initiatives to settle conflicts and reduce tensions: the normalizaton of Berlin, the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey, the no﷓invasion pledge on Cuba and the effort, only partially effective, to end to the covert campaign (OP/MONGOOSE) against Castro, the test﷓ban treaty, and ﷓﷓ though the point is disputed ﷓﷓ the order in October 1963 to begin a phased withdrawal from Vietnam. By November of 1963, the potential for "heightened tensions" leading to uncontrollable pressures to strike first had indeed been reduced. And, some time later, the Soviet Rocket Forces did evidently shut the window, building ICBMs more rapidly than the U.S. could target them; the Soviets also improved their submarine force. From that point, the world probably became a good deal more secure. But exactly when this happened is not clear.
And Lyndon Baines Johnson, the recipient of Burris's note, was still uneasy on the point when he assumed office on November 22d, 1963, amid swirling rumors connecting Lee Harvey Oswald, falsely as we now know, to the KGB. David Wise, then Bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune reports hearing Johnson tell in late 1963 of recruiting Earl Warren to head the Warren Commission in the following terms:
"...when Warren came to the White House, [LBJ] told the Chief Justice he knew he had been a first lieutenant in World War I, and he knew Earl Warren would walk across the Atlantic ocean to save the lives of three Americans, and possibly a hundred million lives were at stake here..." (p. 292)
Whose lives, exactly?
One meeting, even in the White House, does not establish that first﷓strike was in fact the nuclear policy of the United States. Kennedy's recorded response, moreover, indicates his personal determination, shared by his civilian advisers, that it never become so. But we do know, from Howard Burris's notes, that a first strike plan had authors close to the decision center. Kennedy's subsequent actions and Johnson's eerie remark are consistent with the possibility that the calendar and risks of a first-strike window remained in the minds of both men as late as November, 1963 and possibly in Johnson's mind for a good deal longer.
In any event, the fact that first﷓strike planning got as far as it did raises grave questions about the history of the Cold War. Much more needs to be known,: about nuclear decisionmaking under Eisenhower and Nixon, about the events of late 1963, about later technical developments such as MIRV and Star Wars. Surely it is now time to declassify all records on this and related history.
SOURCES

Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
John Baylis and John Garnett, eds. The Makers of Nuclear Strategy, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Philip Bobbitt, Democracy and Deterrence, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.
Philip Bobbitt, Lawrence Freedman and Gregory Treverton, U.S. Nuclear Strategy, New York: New York University Press, 1989.
McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York: Random House, 1988.
Grant Burns, The Nuclear Present, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1992.
Anthony Cordesman, Deterrence in the '80s, London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1982.
Foreign Relations of the United States 1961﷓1963, Vol XIV, Berlin Crisis 1961﷓1962. Washington: United States Department of State, 1993.
Lawrence Freedman, U.S. Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
David Goldfisher, The Best Defense: Policy Alternatives for Nuclear Security From the 1950's to the 1990's, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, New York: Doubleday, 1967.
Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963﷓1969, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1971.
Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, Boston: Little Brown, 1970.
John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam, New York: Warner Books, 1992.
Richard Reeves, President Kennedy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Dean Rusk, As I Saw It, New York: WW Norton, 1990.
Arthur Schlesinger, jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times, New York: Ballantine, 1978.
David Schwartzman, Games of Chicken: Four Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy, New York: Praeger, 1988.
Theodore C. Sorenson, Kennedy, New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
David Wise, The Politics of Lying, New York: Random House, 1973.
Heather A. Purcell and James K. Galbraith are at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin.

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 6:11 pm
by justdrew
and remember, the "nuclear football" that the President supposedly had to enter a secret code into to enable nuclear launches? The code for a couple decades was all zeros. Like using "password" for your password.

The "true" "heart" of the nuclear cold-war was not US vs Soviets. It was US Mad-men vs US Sane-men. It's a miracle and unsung historic confrontation played out over decades that the Sane were able to prevent the initiation of the preemptive attack SO MANY wanted so deeply.

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Wed Sep 25, 2013 11:30 am
by seemslikeadream
SEPTEMBER 25, 2013

When We Almost Nuked Savannah
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Last week a report by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser (excerpted from his terrifying new book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety) revealed that two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 23, 1961. Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons. One of the weapons was fully engaged and, despite denials from the US government, came very close to detonating. A few years ago, I investigated a similar deeply buried incident from 1958 when the Air Force jettisoned a hydrogen bomb over Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia. Here’s that story.–JSC

Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 55 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber’s pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: “A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed.”

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Wassaw Slough was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb’s 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn’t detonate.

The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. “The search for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement.”

There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat, as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10, 1958 classified memo to Congress: “There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. … The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities.”

But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security, safety or ecological problem, than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a joint statement to the press, the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be “scattered” by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the letter downplayed possibility of that ever happening: “The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited.”

In fact, that scenario had already occurred and would occur again.

That’s where the matter stood for more than 42 years until a deep sea salvage company, run by former Air Force personnel and a CIA agent, disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to locate it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents, the disclosure prompted fear and outrage among coastal residents and calls for a congressional investigation into the incident itself and why the Pentagon had stopped looking for the missing bomb. “We’re horrified because some of that information has been covered up for years,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican.

The cover-up continues. The Air Force, however, has told local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing to worry about.

“We’ve looked into this particular issue from all angles and we’re very comfortable,” said Major Gen. Franklin J. “Judd” Blaisdell, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations at Air Force headquarters in Washington. “Our biggest concern is that of localized heavy metal contamination.”

The Air Force even has suggested that the bomb itself was not armed with a plutonium trigger. But this contention is disputed by a number of factors. Howard Dixon, a former Air Force sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that in his 31 years of experience he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane that wasn’t fully armed. Moreover, a newly declassified 1966 congressional testimony of W.J. Howard, then assistant secretary of defense, describes the Tybee Island bomb as a “complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule.” Howard said that the Tybee Island bomb was one of two weapons lost up to that time that contained a plutonium trigger.

Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned bomb was an “Mk-15, Mod O” hydrogen bomb, weighing four tons and packing more than 100 times the explosive punch of the one that incinerated Hiroshima. This was the first thermonuclear weapon deployed by the Air Force and featured the relatively primitive design created by that evil genius Edward Teller. The only fail-safe for this weapon was the physical separation of the plutonium capsule (or pit) from the weapon.

In addition to the primary nuclear capsule, the bomb also harbored a secondary nuclear explosive, or sparkplug, designed to make it go thermo. This is a hollow plug about an inch in diameter made of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (the Pentagon has never said which) that is filled with fusion fuel, most likely lithium-6 deuteride. Lithium is highly reactive in water. The plutonium in the bomb was manufactured at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State and would be the oldest in the United States. That’s bad news: Plutonium gets more dangerous as it ages. In addition, the bomb would contain other radioactive materials, such as uranium and beryllium.

The bomb is also charged with 400 pounds of TNT, designed to cause the plutonium trigger to implode and thus start the nuclear explosion. As the years go by, those high explosives are becoming flaky, brittle and sensitive. The bomb is most likely now buried in 5 to 15 feet of sand and slowly leaking radioactivity into the rich crabbing grounds of the Wassaw Slough. If the Pentagon can’t find the Tybee Island bomb, others might. That’s the conclusion of Bert Soleau, a former CIA officer who now works with ASSURE, the salvage company. Soleau, a chemical engineer, said that it wouldn’t be hard for terrorists to locate the weapon and recover the lithium, beryllium and enriched uranium, “the essential building blocks of nuclear weapons.” What to do? Coastal residents want the weapon located and removed. “Plutonium is a nightmare and their own people know it,” said Pam O’Brien, an anti-nuke organizer from Douglassville, Georgia. “It can get in everything–your eyes, your bones, your gonads. You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there.”

The situation is reminiscent of the Palomares incident. On January 16, 1966, a B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed while attempting to refuel in mid-air above the Spanish coast. Three of the H-bombs landed near the coastal farming village of Palomares. One of the bombs landed in a dry creek bed and was recovered, battered but relatively intact. But the TNT in two of the bombs exploded, gouging 10-foot holes in the ground and showering uranium and plutonium over a vast area. Over the next three months, more than 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation was scooped up, placed in barrels and, ironically enough, shipped back to the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Lab, where it remains. The tomato fields near the craters were burned and buried. But there’s no question that due to strong winds and other factors much of the contaminated soil was simply left in the area. “The total extent of the spread will never be known,” concluded a 1975 report by the Defense Nuclear Agency.

The cleanup was a joint operation between Air Force personnel and members of the Spanish civil guard. The U.S. workers wore protective clothing and were monitored for radiation exposure, but similar precautions weren’t taken for their Spanish counterparts. “The Air Force was unprepared to provide adequate detection and monitoring for personnel when an aircraft accident occurred involving plutonium weapons in a remote area of a foreign country,” the Air Force commander in charge of the cleanup later testified to Congress.

The fourth bomb landed eight miles offshore and was missing for several months. It was eventually located by a mini-submarine in 2,850 feet of water, where it rests to this day.

Two years later, on January 21, 1968, a similar accident occurred when a B-52 caught fire in flight above Greenland and crashed in ice-covered North Star Bay near the Thule Air Base. The impact detonated the explosives in all four of the plane’s H-bombs, which scattered uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 2,000-foot radius. The intense fire melted a hole in the ice, which then refroze, encapsulating much of the debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs. The recovery operation, conducted in near total darkness at temperatures that plunged to minus-70 degrees, was known as Project Crested Ice. But the work crews called it “Dr. Freezelove.”

More than 10,000 tons of snow and ice were cut away, put into barrels and transported to Savannah River and Oak Ridge for disposal. Other radioactive debris was simply left on site, to melt into the bay after the spring thaws. More than 3,000 workers helped in the Thule recovery effort, many of them Danish soldiers. As at Palomares, most of the American workers were offered some protective gear, but not the Danes, who did much of the most dangerous work, including filling the barrels with the debris, often by hand. The decontamination procedures were primitive to say the least. An Air Force report noted that they were cleansed “by simply brushing the snow from garments and vehicles.”

Even though more than 38 Navy ships were called to assist in the recovery operation, and it was an open secret that the bombs had been lost, the Pentagon continued to lie about the situation. In one contentious exchange with the press, a Pentagon spokesman uttered this classic bit of military doublespeak: “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for.”

When Danish workers at Thule began to get sick from a slate of illnesses, ranging from rare cancers to blood disorders, the Pentagon refused to help. Even after a 1987 epidemiological study by a Danish medical institute showed that Thule workers were 50 percent more likely to develop cancers than other members of the Danish military, the Pentagon still refused to cooperate. Later that year, 200 of the workers sued the United States under the Foreign Military Claims Act. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the discovery process revealed thousands of pages of secret documents about the incident, including the fact that Air Force workers at the site, unlike the Danes, have not been subject to long-term health monitoring. Even so, the Pentagon continues to keep most of the material on the Thule incident secret, including any information on the extent of the radioactive (and other toxic) contamination.

These recovery efforts don’t inspire much confidence. But the Tybee Island bomb presents an even touchier situation. The presence of the unstable lithium deuteride and the deteriorating high explosives make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition–so dangerous, in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.

In short, there aren’t any easy answers. The problem is exacerbated by the Pentagon’s failure to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the situation and reluctance to fully disclose what it knows. “I believe the plutonium capsule is in the bomb, but that a nuclear detonation is improbable because the neutron generators used back then were polonium-beryllium, which has a very short half-life,” said Don Moniak, a nuclear weapons expert with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Aiken, South Carolina. “Without neutrons, weapons grade plutonium won’t blow. However, there could be a fission or criticality event if the plutonium was somehow put in an incorrect configuration. There could be a major inferno if the high explosives went off and the lithium deuteride reacted as expected. Or there could just be an explosion that scattered uranium and plutonium all over hell.”

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Wed Sep 25, 2013 9:45 pm
by SonicG
MacCruiskeen » Sat Sep 21, 2013 10:47 pm wrote:
Remember that USAF's destruction of Hiroshima was only 15 years in the past at this time, and that these bombs were 260 times stronger.

Image


Not trying to detract from the absolute horror of the Hiroshima bombing - I know it quite intimately, but the razing of buildings was mostly due to the fire caused by the bombing that spread rapidly among the mostly wood structures. Nonetheless, 260 times the strength is nearly unthinkable. What are current payloads at?

ETA: I believe this is the building shown in the photo.
http://visithiroshima.net/things_to_do/ ... _park.html

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 4:31 pm
by elfismiles
Seems as good a thread as any to put this ... "information" into.

Somehow I missed this little conspiracy-community storyline ... I guess I heard parts of it.

It all seems rather Sorach Faal-ish. Follow the bouncing conspiracy ball if you can (or if you care)... it definitely reminds me of a couple of previous similar false-flag-fear campaigns from the past ten years.

Graham: Nukes In Hands Of Terrorists Could Result In Bomb Coming To Charleston Harbor
September 3, 2013 12:55 PM

GOOSE CREEK, S.C. (CBS Charlotte/AP) — South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham says he’s convinced that Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons on his own people.

Graham told reporters in Goose Creek on Tuesday that taking action against Syria in response to the situation is not a question of yes or no, but rather a question of bad or worse choices.

He says if there is no U.S. response, Iran will not believe America’s resolve to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Graham also says those nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists could result in a bomb coming to Charleston Harbor.

He says he’s working to convince South Carolinians weary of war that the situations in Syria and Iran are linked. Graham says Syria could destabilize the entire Middle East.

Secretary of State John Kerry said last week that more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of children, were killed during the Aug. 21 chemical attack carried out by Bashar Assad’s regime.

(TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

http://charlotte.cbslocal.com/2013/09/0 ... on-harbor/


Breaking: Obama Orders Secret Nuke Transfer!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bb8r0-poM

Exclusive: High Level Source Confirms Secret US Nuclear Warhead Transfer
http://www.infowars.com/exclusive-high- ... ast-coast/

A high level source inside the military has now confirmed to us that Dyess Air Force base is actively moving nuclear warheads to the East Coast of the United States in a secret transfer that has no paper trail.
According to the high level military source, who has a strong record of continually being proven correct in deep military activity, the Dyess Air Force Commander authorized unknown parties to transfer the nuclear warheads to an unknown location that has been reported to be South Carolina, where the warheads will then be picked up and potentially utilized.


[youtube]46x6wycUc8U‎[/youtube]
www.youtube.com/watch?v=46x6wycUc8U
Sep 6, 2013 - Uploaded by bigeyenews
Sen Lindsey Graham has warned of a nuclear strike in S Carolina following the report by Alex Jones and ...

[youtube]ZrQTz_yLC5k‎[/youtube]
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrQTz_yLC5k
Sep 7, 2013 - Uploaded by bigeyenews
WW3 BECKONING: SOUTH CAROLINA TO BE THE NEW PEARL ... iran ww3 wwIII china pakistan russia ...

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Tue Dec 10, 2013 4:40 pm
by elfismiles
All of which I only know about because I happened to hear Alex today interviewing this fellow: Dr. Jim Garrow

Pink Pagoda Girls - Saving Baby Girls in China
www.pinkpagodagirls.com

Pink Pagoda Girls is an organization dedicated to fighting female infanticide in China.
www.pinkpagoda.org
For those wishing to Sponsor a Child through Pink Pagoda Girls ... one man, Dr. Jim Garrow, have saved the lives of some 45,000 Chinese girls who otherwise ...

On today's show, Alex talks with Dr. Jim Garrow the former Nobel Peace Prize nominee and founder of The Pink Pagoda, an institute that rescues baby girls from infanticide in China. Garrow previously exposed Obama's purge of high-ranking officers from the military.

Top Nuke Commanders Fired Following Missing Nuclear Warheads Report
by Anthony Gucciardi
October 11th, 2013
Updated 10/11/2013 at 2:04 pm .
http://www.storyleak.com/top-nuke-comma ... ke-report/

Snopes: Rapid Fire
Claim: President Obama fired several military officers for disobeying his order to destroy Charleston as part of a "false flag" attack.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/charleston.asp

Obama Ousts Top Officers After Nuke Explodes In Ocean Instead Of Charleston
October 12, 2013 / By: Sorcha Faal
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1714.htm

Ex-CIA Agent: Obama Planned Massive False Flag Attack On America
Breaking News | November 24, 2013
http://govtslaves.info/ex-cia-agent-oba ... k-america/


elfismiles » 10 Dec 2013 20:31 wrote:Seems as good a thread as any to put this ... "information" into.

Somehow I missed this little conspiracy-community storyline ... I guess I heard parts of it.

It all seems rather Sorach Faal-ish. Follow the bouncing conspiracy ball if you can (or if you care)... it definitely reminds me of a couple of previous similar false-flag-fear campaigns from the past ten years.

Graham: Nukes In Hands Of Terrorists Could Result In Bomb Coming To Charleston Harbor
September 3, 2013 12:55 PM

http://charlotte.cbslocal.com/2013/09/0 ... on-harbor/



Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Wed Dec 11, 2013 6:49 pm
by Iamwhomiam
I could live without South Carolina. Just sayin'.

Re: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over N Carolina secret d

PostPosted: Mon Mar 23, 2015 12:40 am
by elfismiles
Obama Missing Nuke Now Part of Election Debate
Rick Santorum questioned on Obama nuke transfer to South Carolina
by Mikael Thalen | Infowars.com | March 22, 2015
http://www.infowars.com/obama-missing-n ... on-debate/


EDIT:

Other Nuking of the Carolina Memes...

A drill? An attack? Rumor mill names Charleston as setting
Post by seemslikeadream » 15 Aug 2005
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=3568

Nuke exercise coming up in Charleston, SC
Post by manxkat » 24 Jan 2006
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=3871