The wind was blowing the right way...

Spent three years of my childhood at this AFB. While my dad was stationed here, he helped but together the B-52, nuk bomb loaded, strike packages. This was part of the 24/7 AF portion of the 1960s MAD policy.

And 50 years later they are still flying the B-52s out of here.
 
Lndwarrior said:
Spent three years of my childhood at this AFB. While my dad was stationed here, he helped but together the B-52, nuk bomb loaded, strike packages. This was part of the 24/7 AF portion of the 1960s MAD policy.

And 50 years later they are still flying the B-52s out of here.
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Actually Minot and Barksdale AFBs are the only bases flying the BUFF now.
Grand Forks has Predators andGlobal Hawks RPA operations now. B52s left in 1986.
 
As a kid I remember the buffs on station at Bergstrom AFB. Highway 71 was close enough to the sitting buffs that a person could hit one with a rock. Different times, for sure...
 
When I was growing up, KMCO shared the single runway with the McCoy SAC base. They shut down passenger traffic to launch the B-52s when they scrambled. And I spent a fair amount of time watching these as our house was under the pattern:
:Screen Shot 2018-06-01 at 1.30.45 PM.png
 
Interesting incident. I did have a question for those in the know. Why would the explosive warhead not cause detonation of the nuclear portion?
 
Why would the explosive warhead not cause detonation of the nuclear portion?
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The purpose of the high explosive ("h-e") charge(s) is to compress the fissile material to a critical density. These h-e charges are placed with accuracy and timed precisely so that the h-e explosion has the desired effect. It is very unlikely (but not impossible, I suppose) that a fire cooking off the h-e would result in the proper sequence of the non-nuke explosions. -Skip
 
jsstevens said:
When I was growing up, KMCO shared the single runway with the McCoy SAC base. They shut down passenger traffic to launch the B-52s when they scrambled. And I spent a fair amount of time watching these as our house was under the pattern:
:View attachment 63630
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EC-121, they flew them up and the coast during the Vietnam War. Air Force, Navy had them too though probably a different variant.
 
The big worry, as the fellow in the video attests, is that the high explosives could cook off and spread the radioactive materials inside the warhead over a wide distance. If I'm not mistaken the warheads in the video contained plutonium, which in addition to being radioactive is highly toxic. It would have intoxicated an uncomfortably large swath of North Dakota and Minnesota for about 40,000 years.

There is another video by the same fellow discussing the explosion of a Titan I missile in Northern Arkansas. Same concerns, though this time it was Little Rock in the middle of the Democratic National Convention.
 
I drive past one of these every day on my way to work. Its on display at the Pima Air and Space Museum.

screen-shot-2018-06-01-at-1-30-45-pm-png.63630
 
steingar said:
There is another video by the same fellow discussing the explosion of a Titan I missile in Northern Arkansas. Same concerns, though this time it was Little Rock in the middle of the Democratic National Convention.
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There’s also a documentary with dramatizations of that one that’s a good watch. Lots of video from the TV coverage and what not back then and an interview with one of the (by then dead) AF incident responders who was super-critical of the USAF handling of that incident until his death.

But hey, they’re trying to open up hiking on old Rocky Flats land here now. Hahaha. Yeah, I’m not going hiking on land where they watered the grass with contaminated water and lost over 70 lbs of plutonium. All sorts of nice places to hike in CO that don’t have that history. And zero motivation for any government bureaucrat to say “we were wrong” later if opening it to hikers is a bad idea. None.

Only nuclear weapons facility ever sued with a Grand Jury seated and then told to go away when the government made a deal with itself to keep its secrets. Threatened every member of the Grand Jury not to speak about any of it or be imprisoned for being traitors.

And other facilities made bigger messes and hid even more than the Flats. No other lawsuits ever brought by government against government in any of those States, of course. Too embarrassing for them.
 
Yeah Nate, I read a book on the Arkansas one. Another one in Spain, I think it was a B47.

Then another where a nuke fell off just off the SC or NC coast, might have been a B47 also. I'm sure there's a few more.
 
mscard88 said:
Yeah Nate, I read a book on the Arkansas one. Another one in Spain, I think it was a B47.

Then another where a nuke fell off just off the SC or NC coast, might have been a B47 also. I'm sure there's a few more.
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Yeah I was talking about the contamination and bad practices at the weapons plants, but the Broken Arrow incidents are quite entertaining as well.
 
denverpilot said:
Yeah I was talking about the contamination and bad practices at the weapons plants, but the Broken Arrow incidents are quite entertaining as well.
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Rocky Flats or how I learned to quit fearing and use the government against itself...
 
Lndwarrior said:
Spent three years of my childhood at this AFB. While my dad was stationed here, he helped but together the B-52, nuk bomb loaded, strike packages. This was part of the 24/7 AF portion of the 1960s MAD policy.

And 50 years later they are still flying the B-52s out of here.
Click to expand...
There have not been B-52s based at KRDR since 1987.
 
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