While giving lots of interviews for the release of the first volume of 50 Things, by far the most popular topic was the accidental nuclear bombing of North Carolina in 1961. It struck such a nerve that a follow-up is more than warranted. The Tar Heel State incident, it turns out, wasn't the first or last time that the US almost accidentally turned a friendly city into the new Hiroshima.
The first such mishap occurred over Canada. On February 13, 1950, a B-36 from Alaska iced up while flying over Vancouver. Before bailing out, the crew veered over the Pacific and dropped their nuclear bomb right off the coast. The conventional explosives detonated, but luckily they didn't trigger a nuclear reaction.
The Royal Air Force Station Lakenheath, around 80 miles from London, was the site of a close call on July 26, 1956. A number of US planes were housed at the base for strategic reasons. One of them, a B-47, crashed and burned while attempting to land. It skidded into a storage building housing three atomic bombs, its blazing fuel setting everything on fire. Each bomb was loaded with four tons of TNT, but the fire was put out before the Mark VI's became dirty bombs.
A telex from the General in charge, declassified decades later, said: “Preliminary exam by bomb disposal officer says a miracle that one Mark Six with exposed detonators didn't go off.” When the incident finally came to light, a retired Air Force Major General told a reporter: “It is possible that a part of Eastern England would have become a desert.”
A B-47 caught fire and crashed during takeoff in Texas on November 4, 1958. Again, the explosives on the nuke went kaboom, but there was no mushroom cloud explosion.
Spain was the site of the worst such disaster. While refueling over the coastal village of Palomares on January 17, 1966, two planes collided and blew up. The B-52 was carrying four nuclear weapons. One landed safely near the village; another was lost at sea. Three months later, it was fished out of 2,850 feet of water. “The search took about eighty days and employed 3,000 Navy personnel and 33 Navy vessels,” according to the Center for Defense Information, “not including ships, planes, and people used to move equipment to the site.” The other two A-bombs landed in fields, their explosives went off, and 558 acres were contaminated with plutonium. As part of its contrition, the US military packed 1,400 tons of radioactive dirt into steel drums, then shipped the glowing mess back to the States for disposal. To this day, the Department of Energy still monitors the health of the people and the land.
Two years later (January 21, 1968), a B-52 headed toward Thule US Air Force Base in Greenland crashed seven miles away. Three of the four nukes on board exploded, spritzing plutonium over a large area. In a replay of the Palomares aftermath, 237,000 cubic feet of snow, ice, and debris were packed into drums and freighted to the US for disposal. The evidence conflicts over whether the fourth bomb, which went into the ocean, was recovered or is still underwater.
And this isn't even close to the whole list. There have been many other close calls — crashes of nuke-bearing planes in Kentucky, New Mexico, and Morocco; the jettisoning of two A-bombs off the Delaware coast (never recovered) and one near Tybee Island, Georgia (also never recovered). Then there are the nuclear oopsie-daisies committed by Britain and the Soviet Union. It seems likely that every nuclear power — including France and Israel — must've had similar nail-biting moments, though they've been kept hush-hush. 