It remains only to amaze that we have not yet taken off. Here are the most outstanding cases that show how lucky a person is.
Bombs
The overwhelming number of nuclear emergencies lies on the conscience of American aviation. And this is no wonder, because in the funniest years of the Cold War, it was customary in the United States to conduct training flights and watch in the air with real bombs. Moreover, bombers just like "trucks" transported bombs from place to place.
So in 1950 alone, five incidents occurred! For example, the giant B-36, which had failed engines, got rid of the bomb over the sea before the crew left the plane. Two more episodes occurred with the B-29 and B-50 (modernized B-29). The most serious puncture came with an emergency landing in California, where the fire not only detonated the usual explosives in the Mk.4 bomb, but also killed 19 people, including as much as a brigadier general.
The incident of November 10, 1950 over Canada clearly demonstrates the mores of that time. A B-50 bomber, returning with a nuclear bomb on board after a training and top secret deployment in Canada, started having engine problems. The crew did not find anything better than to cock a bomb to self-detonate a conventional explosive (no plutonium core was found) at an altitude of 760 meters and throw it over a stream. Forty-five kilos of uranium fertilized the Canadian soil, and the townsfolk were told that a light training bomb had exploded. The truth was not acknowledged until the 80s.
Americans would have to think: something is going wrong; but in the future, many more similar episodes will occur in the United States.
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In the mid-1950s, the Soviet Air Force finally began to receive a large number of serial nuclear bombs, including tactical ones. Of the latter, the famous "Tatiana" - RDS-4 should be especially noted. The bombs were delivered to conventional units of Il-28 bombers. The Soviet aviators had doubts - what if an airplane with a loaded bomb crashed while landing at its own airfield? Will it explode?
Secret physicists answered responsibly and confidently: it will not explode. But since the physicists will be far from the airfield and you cannot ask them from them, they insisted on checking. In the summer of 1955, the Il-28 was thrown off, imitating the fall of the plane, a fully loaded, but "not cocked" bomb. They waited - there was no explosion. A team of physicists, cautiously approaching, examined the structure - despite the damage to the bomb, the detonators survived. However, scientists for some reason refused to discharge and take their product from the test site … As a result, the bomb was destroyed. According to one of the sources, she was shot with unguided rockets from a fighter-bomber.
RDS-4.
For greater confidence, the tests were repeated two more times. In both cases, "Tanya" has shown its reliability. However, we took security much more seriously and did not fly with nuclear bombs just like that.
Reverse plane crash
Another - special - case occurred with American aircraft in England in 1956. During this period, the proud Britons willingly played the role of an unsinkable aircraft carrier for US strategic aviation off European shores. Of course, they also had nuclear weapons.
One of the main American air bases in Great Britain then and now is Lakenheath. So, in that year, the long-range bomber B-47 managed to take and fall right on the shelter, where three nuclear bombs of the Mk.6 type were stored at once. A terrible fire broke out, everything was in burning kerosene. The explosives in the bombs did not detonate only by a miracle. Of course, a real nuclear explosion would not have happened, since the bombs were stored without a plutonium charge, but they would have “improved” the ecology on the spot.
Iron fish with atomic hearts
The largest military disasters related to nuclear weapons took place, of course, in the submarine fleet. As a result of accidents, two American and five of our nuclear submarines sank, in addition, the USSR also lost a diesel submarine with nuclear missiles on board. But the pioneers in this sad case were the Americans, who lost a boat in 1963 and 1968; in the second case - with nuclear charges on torpedoes.
The biggest, in terms of the number of nuclear weapons on board, was the accident of our K-219 missile carrier, which sank in October 1986 after one of the missiles exploded right in the launch silo. The boat sank to the bottom after three days of desperate struggle for life already at night, during towing. Fortunately, most of the crew was rescued (eight out of 119 people died), but about thirty ballistic missile warheads and two more torpedoes with special ammunition left for eternal storage on the Atlantic seabed.
Anton Zheleznyak - Expert on technical and engineering issues:
Project 667A missile carriers in their original version carried 16 R-27 ballistic missiles of the D-5 complex with a monoblock nuclear charge of TNT equivalent to 1 megaton. The boats upgraded according to the 667AU project (including the K-219, which underwent an "upgrade" in the late 1970s) carried the improved R-27U of the D-5U complex. These missiles were somewhat more accurate, and could carry charges of two types: either the same megaton monoblock, or a multiple scattering warhead with three 200 kiloton blocks. The exact combination of charges on board the K-219 during this campaign was not published in open sources, but it is known that the submarine carried 15 missiles (one of the silos - number 5 - was decommissioned), and, presumably, 8 of them were equipped with monoblock charges.
In addition to accidents that ended in the loss of boats, there were many problems with ship reactors, especially at first. Unfortunately, sailors often received significant doses of radiation, and fires happened even more often.
However, the accidents were not always caused by problems with the power plant. So in 1977, the R-29 missile was damaged on the K-171 missile carrier while loading into the mine. Fuel and oxidizer began to leak, mixing into an explosive cocktail. In a desperate attempt to avoid fire and explosion, the boat went into the bay of the base and sank, flooding the mine. This did not help, and after a day of fighting the fire, the rocket still exploded. It all ended not so badly: the brave men returned to the base on a slightly wounded boat without loss, and a few days later they found the warhead.
A gift from heaven
In terms of the consequences, this accident turned out to be, albeit a trifle, but unusual and, moreover, was accompanied by a lot of hype. In the 70s and 80s, a real miracle of technology was created in the USSR - the Legend space reconnaissance and target designation system. Consisting of many satellites, it tracked the movement of the fleets of NATO countries. At the same time, satellites could provide direct target designation for heavy anti-ship missiles. This greatly increased the effectiveness of Soviet submariners: the submarine is good for everyone, but it cannot give out the exact coordinates of an aircraft carrier at a distance of hundreds of kilometers.
The system consisted of US-P passive satellites (tracking radio signals) and active US-A satellites. The latter are radars practically flying in space, looking for ships. They needed a lot of energy, so they stuffed real nuclear reactors into them. The time was already "herbivorous", environmentally friendly, so that at the end of their service life, the reactors were put into a high disposal orbit. There they hang out to this day. Except for a couple …
Collection of debris from the satellite "Cosmos-954".
In September 1977, the USSR launched the Kosmos-954 satellite, which after a month of operation went out of order for unclear reasons. In January of the following year, he left orbit and welled up on the same long-suffering Canada. Fortunately, he fell in an uninhabited area. We failed to hush up the story: the Americans were watching the satellite, and even before its fall, there was an uproar in the world press. Although most of the "Cosmos" burned down, a lot of radioactive debris was collected on the ground. After the litigation, I had to pay for the damage and refine the following satellites. And in 1982, Kosmos-1402 already fell, but there the fuse blew up the reactor, and the uranium dispersed in the high layers of the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. Despite international pressure, US-A launches continued until 1988.
Start key
Let's finish with a rather famous, but extremely epic story from the USA, which is a pity to miss. On September 19, 1980, a couple of technicians were performing routine maintenance in the mine of the Titan II heavy ICBM. It was late in the evening, and the work seemed to be fed up, and one technician accidentally dropped a three and a half kilogram socket wrench attachment into the shaft. She hit the first step and broke through the skin. And in this, in principle, there is nothing unusual: for reasons of economy of mass, the walls of liquid-propellant missiles (both ICBMs and space) are very thin.
Fuel leak started. The fuel tank that had emptied overnight, it seems, was no longer able to hold the rest of the rocket, and as a result of deformation, the oxidizer flowed … The explosion turned out to be notable: the shaft cover weighing 740 tons flew out like a cork from a bottle of champagne, and the warhead went into a short but bright flight. And the charge on "Titan II", by the way, was the most powerful in the American arsenal - 9 megatons! The warhead was made, fortunately, conscientiously, and survived. In the explosion, only one of the missilemen died, who was just trying to turn on the hood, and another two dozen were injured.
We, of course, do not know about all nuclear emergencies. While there is at least some open information in Russia and the United States, other members of the nuclear club are modestly silent. However, looking around, we can confidently say: so far we are very lucky!
Alexander Ermakov
