American Notes Accidents

About 29 years ago, as an Air Force B-36 bomber flew over New Mexico, a hydrogen bomb weighing 42,000 lbs. somehow got loose, tore away the plane's bomb-bay doors and plunged to earth, landing in the desert about ten miles from Albuquerque. The Mark 17, an estimated ten-megaton monster hundreds of times more powerful than the weapon that leveled Hiroshima, was one of the largest bombs in the U.S. arsenal. It did not set off a nuclear explosion, but it did leave a crater 24 ft. across.

In reporting on the little-known incident last week, after having sifted through documents newly made available by the Freedom of Information Act, the Albuquerque Journal said conventional explosives used in the bomb's trigger did detonate but failed to set off a thermonuclear blast. A Defense Department official sought to put the best possible light on what could have been a calamity by saying the failure of the bomb to explode "confirms the efficacy of the safety devices."