My view of the Thule B-52 Crash 01-21-1968 - Got this from a close friend.....

originally posted by: noeltrotsky
You should advise your friend to see a top lawyer. He has got one hell of a case I suspect and it would likely be settled out of court quietly. Being that close to see the explosion and dirty bomb blast he was surely 'nuked'. For all the suffering he's gone through he deserves it.

Thanks for sharing!

Please look up Erin Brocovich.She has a Template which might be helpfull.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: Aliensun
I assume it was an H-bomb flash and not the fuel or the bomb(s) explosive trigger(s).

The explosives detonated (or deflagrated, it was, IIRC, some of one, some of the other) and scattered the innards of the weapons over the site. Older weapons especially carried quite a bit of chemical explosives.

Isn't the PU pit for the H bomb trigger a solid slug of heavy metal? How would that disperse? Wouldn't the pit just get knocked away from the core by the explosives?

Would it be partially consumed in a sub critical event? I'm thinking about reactor three at Fukushima and any comparison to that "dirty fission squirt".

a reply to: matadoor

The aircraft developed major problems, so the plan was for them to ditch the aircraft intact, so that the weapons would remain intact, and could be recovered. However, the problems that led to them planning to ditch worsened, and they were forced to eject before they could ditch.

originally posted by: intrptr
Isn't the PU pit for the H bomb trigger a solid slug of heavy metal? How would that disperse? Wouldn't the pit just get knocked away from the core by the explosives?

Would it be partially consumed in a sub critical event? I'm thinking about reactor three at Fukushima and any comparison to that "dirty fission squirt".

It sort of depends what you're meaning. You've got a primary that's composed of several chunks of material, and that's where most of the explosives are. There's also a plutonium component to the secondary. If THAT's what you mean by 'h bomb trigger', then probably so - it's some distance away and protected by a couple of other pieces of heavy material.

The primary, in a really good failure where the explosives explode instead of burning, will be compressed but in a safed modern weapon will not achieve criticality 'because'. If they deflagrate instead, you won't come close. However, they can deflagrate with enough enthusiasm to splatter the physics package. If you blow uranium or plutonium to smithereens (a technical term) they will burn like you set off a WP grenade. It will turn into a very fine suspension of oxide dust and scatter to the winds. This is also true of the lithium deuteride, which isn't radioactive but it's bad for you to breathe. Chunky bits of primary and secondary will burn in air if they're small and you get them hot enough. Bigger chunks will just fly and sink into the ice. Newer explosives deflagrate more calmly. The newest explosives that are being worked with now are back to enthusiastic. Everything goes in cycles, I suppose.

It's a sad truism that you can wreak cheap non-technical havoc by just getting in a place with poor air circulation, I'll leave it to your imagination but the example given was "NYC during a bad thermal inversion", climbing someplace high and simply lighting your ill-gotten plutonium on fire with a railroad flare. Grant you, you've had it as well, but there's no shortage of stupid people.

a reply to: Bedlam

There's also a plutonium component to the secondary. If THAT's what you mean by 'h bomb trigger', then probably so - it's some distance away and protected by a couple of other pieces of heavy material.

Yah, that. And the atomic bomb component PU is surrounded by the (Hi) explosive which could detonate on impact (the white flash witnessed in the OP) and that could fizz away the pit?

Thanks for that other descriptive (like white phosphorus)… eeks.

I would go into the physics of hi explosive detonation from impact parameters but didn't want to get too… informative.

a reply to: Hendrick99
Thank you for the correction

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: Aliensun
I assume it was an H-bomb flash and not the fuel or the bomb(s) explosive trigger(s).

The explosives detonated (or deflagrated, it was, IIRC, some of one, some of the other) and scattered the innards of the weapons over the site. Older weapons especially carried quite a bit of chemical explosives.

What's the chance that a core which was not detonated by design with sequenced initiators and inserted tritium could still yield some kind of criticality accident with some fission? Remember, 1968.

If there were that many cancers, seems more than just the plutonium....erhaps it wasn't just chemistry making the flash?

originally posted by: mbkennel

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: Aliensun
I assume it was an H-bomb flash and not the fuel or the bomb(s) explosive trigger(s).

The explosives detonated (or deflagrated, it was, IIRC, some of one, some of the other) and scattered the innards of the weapons over the site. Older weapons especially carried quite a bit of chemical explosives.

What's the chance that a core which was not detonated by design with sequenced initiators and inserted tritium could still yield some kind of criticality accident with some fission? Remember, 1968.

If there were that many cancers, seems more than just the plutonium....erhaps it wasn't just chemistry making the flash?

The nature of deflagrating/detonating in an unorganized manner tends to just splat things around randomly. Plutonium and uranium both cause all sorts of nasty biological effects in tiny doses. Cancer is a common one. If it's a bigger dose, of course, you'll die too soon to get cancer. A few hundred micrograms of aerosolized plutonium will generally do the trick in pretty brisk fashion, less and you'll die of pulmonary fibrosis in weeks. A lot less and it's cancer as one of the options.

I stumbled on this thread accidentally, but wanted to chime in since I was there the night the B-52 crashed. I was sitting in my barracks at Thule listening to a Rolling Stones album on earphones when my chair jumped. I took my earphones off and stuck my head out the door and found that everyone in the barracks had done the same thing. Then someone called from the latrine, which was on the end of the building facing the bay and we ran down there in time to see an orange fireball out on the ice. We figured it was one of the fuel tanks that had exploded.

Anyway, I went to work at midnight (I was a teletype maintenance repairman) and by then we had learned it was a B-52 that had crashed. I remember going to the AFRTS radio station to do preventive maintenance on their teletype and a friend who had a show that ran from midnight to 6 a.m. mentioned on air about "all the excitement" at Thule because of the B-52 crash. Just after he said that the teletype started dinging and it was an urgent message from Dover AFB, our HQ, saying not to mention the plane crash on air. Oops. Too late.

At 8 a.m., just as I was going off shift, my NCOIC said they were looking for volunteers to go out on the ice and build pre-fab huts with kerosene heaters for the SAC guys that would be coming in soon to investigate. So a friend of mine and I volunteered. We went back to our barracks and got our mukluks and iron pants (heavy pants that matched our parkas, which we did not wear under normal circumstances) and met as instructed at the flight line. A rescue helicopter took three of us out and we were the first ones on the ice at that location. I've since learned that this was some ways away from the actual crash site. He left us there on the ice, in complete darkness and at -40 degrees. A scary feeling. Then he brought others and soon trucks arrived with the building materials.

We worked out there for two shifts, building the 8x10 huts. At the end of each shift we'd enter a trailer and they'd run a Geiger counter over us. Each day they took my mukluks and gave me new ones. You can find photos online of the actual huts we built. That's the extent of my involvement, which was entirely voluntary. I'm guessing I was not near any radioactivity because I'm 68 now and in fine health. When I left Thule in September of 1968, the beach was lined with those train-car-size tankers that they filled with contaminated snow. I took a picture of them from the plane as I headed back to "The World."