Tonight in 1980 at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, the number five engine on the right wing of a B-52H 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).
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 weapons in the bomb bay.
Because the crew did not follow the correct procedure to shut off the fuel lines before evacuating, the fire burned for three hours. Eventually, a crew member broke through the fire line, climbed into the B-52, and properly engaged the shutoff valves, extinguishing the blaze.
A USAF veteran who was a police officer at Grand Forks AFB at the time of the fire and suffers from PTSD as a result told the VA in 1994 and 2011 he was ordered to shoot KC-135 pilots who refused to move their tankers away from the burning B-52. va.gov/vetapp16/Files…
This unnamed veteran first sought treatment and benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs for service-connected post-traumatic stress disorder caused by this accident in 1994. His claim was denied multiple times until an appeals board finally granted it in August 2016.
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.
"You are talking about something that in one respect could be probably worse than Chernobyl," Batzel testified during the 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.'" 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.
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 wind was blowing. The USAF subsequently determined the engine fire was caused by a small missing nut on the fuel strainer.
In 1990, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ordered SRAMs removed from all alert bombers after all three nuclear weapons laboratory directors warned its W69 warhead posed an unacceptable risk in case of fire, an extreme danger they had first warned the DOD about in 1974.
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.
After years of stalling by the DOD—which put nuclear warfighting ahead of safety—B28 bombs began receiving a safety retrofit in 1984, although the work halted a year later when funds ran out (resuming only in 1988). In 1991, the B28 was finally retired after 33 years of service.

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More from @AtomicAnalyst

14 Sep
Alarmed by Trump's irrational behavior and the insurrection, Gen. Mark Milley took the extraordinary step of ordering officials at the National Military Command Center not to accept any orders—incl. to launch nuclear weapons—unless he was directly involved.cnn.com/2021/09/14/pol…
While somewhat reassuring given the circumstances, Milley's Jan. 8 actions were arguably extralegal because the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff only advises the president and others and does not have the legal authority to impede or override a president's military orders.
Flashback to Trump's State of the Union address on January 30, 2018:
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14 Sep
OTD in 1954—for its ninth nuclear test—the USSR staged a live-fire nuclear wargame near Totskoye, ~600 mi. SE of Moscow. At 9:33am (local), a 40-kt atomic bomb exploded 1,150 feet in the air between two groups of soldiers, some just 2 miles from the blast.
The roughly 45,000 soldiers were then ordered into mock battle under highly radioactive conditions for the remainder of the day. Most had no protective equipment and were not warned about the dangers. Some who were issued gas masks removed them in the oppressive 115F (46C) heat.
Exposures that day were reportedly ten times the maximum allowable level for US soldiers for an entire year. The 1,000,000 people who lived within 100 miles of the blast were given no warning at all. For more about this "monstrous" exercise, see washingtonpost.com/archive/politi….
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13 Sep
White House Military Office Coast Guard aide Lt. Cdr. Jayna McCarron was on “Football” duty in Wilmington this morning at the start President Biden’s trip to Idaho and California. The ~45-lb. briefcase follows Biden 24/7, enabling him to authorize a nuclear strike at any time. ImageImage
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11 Sep
Twenty years ago today, US Strategic Command was one week into its annual Global Guardian nuclear command and control exercise. Bombers had been armed with nuclear weapons, ICBMs and several SSBNs were on alert, and three E-4B command posts were airborne. omaha.com/local/on-strat…
Which is why, when Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana (carrying President George W. Bush from Sarasota, Florida, to Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, and, finally, back to Washington, DC), this is the first thing that happened: politico.com/magazine/story…
In 2016, William Arkin and Robert Windrem reported that three dozen live nuclear weapons were aboard strategic bombers at three US Air Force bases that day. The other bases were almost certainly Minot AFB in North Dakota and Whiteman AFB in Missouri. nbcnews.com/storyline/9-11…
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10 Sep
Nuclear fracking, anyone? Today in 1969, in the second of three Project Plowshare experiments (Rulison), a 40-kt nuclear device was detonated in a 8,425-ft. shaft near Grand Valley, Colorado, to stimulate the flow of natural gas. The gas was—surprise!—too radioactive to sell.
The other two tests of nuclear explosives to increase natural gas production were Gasbuggy (29 kt, December 10, 1967), near Farmington, NM, and Rio Blanco (three 33-kt devices, May 17, 1973, near Rifle, CO), which was also the 27th and final Project Plowshare experiment.
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29 Aug
Today in 2007 at Minot AFB, North Dakota, munitions crews accidentally loaded a B-52H bomber with six Advanced Cruise Missiles, each armed with a live W80-1 nuclear warhead with a variable yield of 5-150 kilotons. The plane sat on the tarmac overnight without any special guards.
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This was supposed to be a routine fight supporting the USAF's March 2007 decision to retire the ACM by ferrying the missiles stored at Minot to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, for disposal (by August 2007, more than 200 unarmed ACMs had been safely transported to Barksdale). It wasn't.
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