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Tonight in 1980 at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, the number five engine on the right wing of a B-52 on ground alert caught fire during a drill. The aircraft was loaded with 8 Short-Range Attack Missiles (armed with 170-200-kt W69 warheads) and 4 B28 bombs (70 kt to 1.45 Mt). /1 
That night, a southeast wind gusted up to 35 mph. The B-52 pointed in that direction. That alone kept the flames away from the fuselage. Had the nose been facing west, the fire would have incinerated all six crew members as they evacuated and burned the nukes in the bomb bay. /2
The fire burned for three hours. It was only extinguished when a civilian base fire inspector boarded the B-52 and shut off the fuel. Had the nukes caught fire and their conventional high explosives detonated, a radioactive plume would have drifted over Grand Forks and beyond. /3
In 1988, then-Livermore Laboratory director Roger Batzel told the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee that if that the fire had reached the bomb bay, the HE "would have detonated" and plutonium would have been scattered across 60 sq. miles of North Dakota and Minnesota. /4
"You are talking about something that in one respect could be probably worse than Chernobyl," Batzel testified during a closed hearing, "because you have plutonium in the soil and on the soil, which you have to clean up. I wouldn't want either one.'" /5 chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-19…
Worse still—and unmentioned by Batzel—a design flaw in the B28 bomb meant that if exposed to prolonged heat, two wires too close to the casing could short circuit, arm the bomb, trigger an accidental detonation of the HE surrounding the core, and set off a nuclear explosion. /6
That would have destroyed Grand Forks (home to ~60,000 people) and showered Duluth or Minneapolis-St. Paul with lethal fallout, depending on which way the winds were blowing. The USAF subsequently found the engine fire was caused by a small missing nut on the fuel strainer. /7
In 1990, then-SecDef Dick Cheney ordered SRAMs removed from all alert bombers after all three nuclear weapons lab directors warned their W69 warheads posed an unacceptable risk in case of fire, something they had first alerted DOD about in 1974 (W69 photo: @NuclearAnthro). /8
@NuclearAnthro However, SRAMs were not actually removed from the nuclear stockpile until 1993. In 1999, the last W69 was dismantled at the Pantex Plant in Texas. But not until early 2016 were all of its thermonuclear secondary components finally disassembled at the Y-12 Plant in Tennessee. /9
@NuclearAnthro After years of delays by the DOD, which put warfighting ahead of safety, the B28 bomb finally began receiving a safety retrofit in 1984, although it stalled a year later when funds ran out (resuming only in 1988). In 1991, it was finally retired after 33 years of service. /10 End
