Bombs Away
The American handling of atomic weapons in peacetime has been riddled with mishaps. The most spectacular accidents have come in the mere transport of the bombs from one place to another. In early 1958, for example, a B-47 crashed into a fighter plane and jettisoned a nuclear weapon into the sea off Savannah Beach, Georgia. The bomb was never found.
Later that year another B-47 accidentally dropped an atomic bomb while flying over Florence, South Carolina.
When it hit the ground, an explosion with the power of several hundred pounds of TNT blasted out a crater thirty-five feet deep and spread a ring of plutonium around the area. Local residents preparing for a family picnic heard it coming and barely had time to duck for cover. "It blew out the side and top of the garage just as my boy ran inside with me," said Walter "Bill" Gregg, whose family was injured in the blast. "The timbers were falling around us. There was a green, foggy haze, then a cloud of black smoke. It lasted about thirty seconds. When it cleared up, I looked at the house. The top was blown in and a side almost blown off." The government later dragged Gregg’s compensation claims through the courts. He finally won fifty-four thousand dollars, but was left deeply embittered by the experience.2
In 1961 two more American atomic bombs were dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina, by a crashing B-52.
One deployed a parachute, which eased its fall to earth; the other broke apart on impact. Another B-52 with four hydrogen bombs aboard crashed into an ice floe near Thule, Greenland. The entire plane and its cargo apparently disintegrated, leaving a radioactive hole nearly half a mile long in its wake. With abundant apologies to the Danish government, which rules Greenland, the military was forced to ship 1.7 million gallons of contaminated ice and snow back to the United States for disposal. In January of 1966 yet another B-52 crashed into its refueling tanker and spewed three hydrogen bombs onto the fishing village of Palomares, Spain. A fourth bomb dropped into the Mediterranean. TNT exploded in two of the bombs and spread plutonium over a square mile, forcing the U.S. to destroy local crops and remove tons of radioactive topsoil back to South Carolina for burial.
In all, the U.S. military admits to twenty-seven accidents involving nuclear weapons—which it terms "Broken Arrows." Independent critics charge the figure is more like 125.3
If the handling of nuclear bombs has been less than perfect, so has their production. In 1963, for example, a fire at the AEC’s Medina works in San Antonio touched off 120,000 tons of explosives and sent a uranium cloud into the environs of one of Texas’s largest cities. At least two major explosions also ripped through the AEC’s Burlington, Iowa, bomb-assembly plant. And the AEC’s hydrogen-bomb fabrication plant at Pantex, Texas (near Amarillo), was severely damaged by a freak hailstorm, despite its supposed invulnerability to enemy attack.4
Significant quantities of radiation have also leaked into the environment. In 1974 the operators of the huge Savannah River weapons facility at Aiken, South Carolina, accidentally released some 435,000 curies of radioactive tritium in a single day—the largest single tritium emission ever reported in the U.S. Studies of the local water system show serious contamination, and there are preliminary indications of an escalated cancer rate among people living near the plant.5
Overall, the American nuclear weapons production program has been plagued with mismanagement, cost overruns, sloppy handling of radioactive materials, and low worker morale.
All of which may have found its ultimate expression at the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory (INEL), a vast outpost where research-and-development projects are conducted for the military, spent nuclear submarine fuel is recycled, and military radioactive wastes are stored.
INEL has a bleak history. In 1960 three technicians were killed there when a fuel rod blew out of a small test reactor, piercing the body of one and pinning him to the reactor containment, high above the core. The other two men were hopelessly contaminated, and pieces of their bodies had to be buried in lead caskets. An NRC official later indicated that the "accident" may have been caused deliberately by one of the technicians in a bizarre suicide-murder plot stemming from a love triangle at the plant.6 In subsequent years INEL has been plagued with sloppy handling of nuclear wastes. Concentrated uranium was accidentally dumped on a nearby road. Far more serious, INEL management from 1952 to 1970 deliberately dumped some sixteen billion gallons of liquid wastes into wells that feed directly into the water table below. Radioactive contamination has been found 7.5 miles away, angering local farmers and raising questions about the long-term fate of the huge Snake River Aquifer, a major underground water source for much of the American Northwest.7
An even more severe accident, however, occurred during the 1978 World Series. With the Yankees leading the Dodgers 7-2, the plant supervisor was engrossed in the game on a portable TV set he had sneaked, against regulations, into the facility. Had he not been so involved in watching New York win yet another World Championship, he might have noticed that an abnormal buildup of radioactivity was occurring in a small uranium-processing column nearby. No one was checking the plant’s monitoring devices. One recording chart had run out of paper two weeks earlier. Meanwhile the solution in the processing column was dangerously unbalanced. As the game was getting under way, uranium concentrations in the column were sixty times what they should have been. Suddenly, at 8:45 P.M., high-radiation alarms began ringing around the plant. The panicked supervisor abandoned the Yankees. Operators in the control room fled to a sheltered area.8 Fortunately the column was brought under control. But official figures showed that at least eight thousand curies of radioactive iodine, krypton, and xenon had been released into the atmosphere, more than enough to threaten the health of anyone downwind.9
The supervisor was later fired. An investigation of worker alienation and low morale at INEL concluded that the situation was bad, with no easy solutions available. As a health physicist who worked on the study told The Idaho Statesman: "It’s a generic question that I have no answer for."10
2. Clyde W. Burleson, The Day the Bomb Fell on America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), p. 13. The Savannah Beach incident appears on p. 16.
3. David E. Kaplan, "Where the Bombs Are," New West, April 1981, p. 80.
4. Rapoport, Great American Bomb Machine, pp. 22-23.
5. Robert Alvarez, Report on the Savannah River Plant Study (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Policy Institute, 1980) (hereafter cited as Savannah River Study).
6. Stephen Hanauer, NRC, interview, June 1981.
7. High Country News, February 8, 1980, p. 10, see also, Progressive, October 1980, and J. T. Barraclough, et al., Hydrology of the Solid Waste Burial Ground, as Related to the Potential Migration of Radionuclides, Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, Open File Report #76-471 (Idaho Falls: U.S. Geological Survey, Water Resources Division, August 1981) (hereafter cited as Hydrology).
8. Idaho Statesman, April 25, April 26, and May 22, 1979. The bulk of the "World Series" story appears in the May 22 edition.
9. DOE, Radioactive Waste Management Information: 1978 Summary and Record-to-Date (Washington, D.C. July 1979), p. 12 (DOE, Nuclear Fuel Cycle Division, Idaho Operations Office, prepared by E.G. & G. Idaho).
10. Idaho Statesman, May 22, 1979.