[SystemSafety] USAF Nuclear Accidents prior to 1967

[Les Chambers]

Peter
For your file on nuclear accidents (and incidents).
Cheers
Les

Time: Saturday, October 27, 1962
Place: The Sargasso Sea, 300 miles south of Bermuda
Context: The Cuban missile crisis. The U.S. Navy is blockading Cuba to
prevent further import of missiles that would put the Soviet Union in range
of most American cities. Four U.S. Navy carrier groups are hunting the four
Russian submarines known to be deployed in the area. Against the advice of
secretary of defence McNamara, President Kennedy has authorised the U.S.
Navy to use practice depth charges and hand grenades to signal Soviet
submarines to come to the surface and identify themselves. Practice depth
charges are designed to produce a loud bang beneath the water, but
supposedly pose no material damage to the Soviet vessels.
Due to this distinct lack of American hospitality, life abroad Russian
submarine B-59 is becoming increasingly unpleasant. Capt Valentin Savitsky
is near the end of his tether. The U.S. Navy has been chasing him for two
days, his batteries are dangerously low. He has been unable to communicate
with Moscow for more than 24 hours. For all he knows, World War III might
have broken out while he has been submerged. His voyage has been plagued
with mechanical problems. The ventilation system has broken down. The diesel
coolers are blocked with salt and several electrical compressors are broken.
Temperatures aboard ship range from 110 to 140° and carbon dioxide levels
are becoming critical. His men are falling "like dominoes." The B-59 carries
a nuclear torpedo with a 10 kiloton warhead. By the book Valentin requires a
directive from Moscow to launch this weapon against an enemy, however there
are no special locks on the weapon that block its unauthorised use. If the
officer in charge of the torpedo and the captain of the submarine are in
agreement, it is physically possible to launch it.
Vadim Orlov, chief of the signals intelligence team continues the story:

The Americans hit us with something stronger than a grenade, apparently some
kind of practice depth charge. We thought "that's it, that's the end." After
this attack, a totally exhausted Savitsky became furious. In addition to
everything else, he had been unable to establish communications with the
General Staff. He summoned the officer who was in charge of the nuclear
torpedo, and ordered him to make it combat ready. "Maybe the war has already
started up there while we are doing somersaults down here," shouted Valentin
Grigorievich emotionally, justifying his order. "We're going to blast them
now! We will perish ourselves, but we will sink them all! We will not
disgrace our Navy!"

Luckily for the U.S. Navy, Valentin's fellow officers persuaded him to calm
down. The B-59 surfaced in the midst of four American destroyers,
helicopters hovered overhead illuminating the sea with powerful
searchlights, dozens of sonobuoys dropped by American aircraft to pinpoint
the submarine's position bobbed up and down on the waves. Savitsky and his
officers went up to the bridge and gulped down the cool night air, 30°
cooler that was down below. They were dirty, dispirited and further
humiliated by the sailors on the decks of the American warships looking down
upon them in their neatly pressed uniforms. But nonetheless they were proud,
they had undertaken a 5000 mile Odyssey to seas that no Soviet submariner
had sailed before. They raised the crimson red flag of the Soviet state,
with the hammer and sickle emblazoned in the corner. One of the American
destroyers sent a message by flashing light asking if they needed
assistance. "This ship belongs to the Union of Soviet Socialist republics,"
Savitsky replied. "Halt your provocative actions."

Source: Dobbs, Michael, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and
Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
[mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of
Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2013 3:37 AM
To: systemsafety at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: [SystemSafety] USAF Nuclear Accidents prior to 1967

The Guardian today has an article on an accident to a US B-52 bomber in
North Carolina in 1961. The 
aircraft, suffering a mid-air break-up, released two nuclear weapons, which
were armed. One of the 
bombs was, according to a book by Ralph Lappe, "equipped with six
interlocking safety mechanisms, 
all of which had to be triggered in sequence to explode the bomb. ...Air
Force experts....found that 
five of the six interlocks had been set off by the fall! Only a single
switch prevented the 24 
megaton bomb from detonating..."

This quote is contained in a short memo by Parker F Jones, an analyst at
Sandia Labs, written in 
October 1969. He deprecates Lappe's general account but says that on this
point he is correct; 
emphasises the vulnerability embodied by the switch, its type and function
(it does not appear to 
have been adequately assessed for reliability in an accident scenario) and
concludes that this type 
of bomb "did not provide adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the
B-52." and footnotes 
that the "same conclusion should be drawn about present-day SAC bombs."

This is all contained in an article in The Guardian at 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina
-1961  Jones's memo is 
presented at 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/20/goldsboro-revisited
-declassified-document

This is due to Eric Schlosser, who is about to publish a book called Command
and Control. Schlosser 
has visited facilities, and so on, and gave an interview to The Guardian at 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/21/eric-schlosser-books-interview
Apparently, he made an FOIA request for all the incidents in the 10 years to
1967, and received 245 
pages of them.

Scott Sagan made similar inquiries in his 1993 book The Limits of Safety,
for which he is justly 
famous. I didn't find the incident in Scott's book, so asked him if he knew
about it. Scott's thesis 
in that book was testing Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents theory against
the 
high-reliability-organisation theory of La Porte and colleagues.

The NA hypothesis is that tightly-coupled interactively-complex systems are
unavoidably vulnerable 
to accidents which occur while everything is operating "as designed". The
HRO theory says that there 
are certain characteristics of complex organisations which have proven to
have had high reliability. 
One example of such an organisation is USN peacetime carrier operations
(launching and retrieval of 
aircraft); another is Pacific Gas and Electric's nuclear power plant
operations (which was a bit of 
a surprise to us who lived through part of the Diablo Canyon controversy).

USAF has obviously not had an accident in which a nuclear weapon has been
accidently detonated. The 
question therefore was whether USAF SAC exhibited the characteristics of a
La Porte HRO. Sagan 
argued that such accidents had been avoided through happenstance, and that
the history rather 
supported the NA theory. It seems from the advance commentary that
Schlosser's book will make a 
similar case.

PBL

-- 
Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld,
33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de




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