Nuclear weapons are the most destructive devices on earth. The collision caused an explosion that ignited the tanker, killing all four crew members on board.

What can be done?Each year, nitrogen runoff from Midwestern farms produces a large "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, damaging fisheries and the people who make their living from them. The aircraft was a part of a Strategic Air Command (SAC) mission designed to keep a significant number of bombers in air at all times, so that in the event of a Soviet first strike they would not be damaged or destroyed. Eric Schlosser, Author, Command and Control: The Goldsboro accident occurred at a time when the number of nuclear weapons accidents was increasing. In 1939, he wrote a letter to Albert Einstein in search of Einstein’s signature. That's exactly what happened when a really, really stupid accident resulted in America tossing an atom bomb on rural South Carolina. Will state governments do what's needed to ensure a free and fair 2020 election?The Union of Concerned Scientists is actively monitoring the coronavirus pandemic and its implications for scientific integrity.We're connecting scientific experts, legal scholars, and practitioners working at the intersection of science and climate litigation. Image courtesy of RJHaas/Wikimedia Commons.Crew members on the USS Petrel after the recovery of the missing H-bomb, 1966.Two of the recovered Palomares bombs at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. The Navy’s recovery of the fourth bomb was dramatized in the 2000 film Over the course of four months, more than 1,400 tons of soil, across 650 acres of land, was sent to an approved storage facility in Aiken, South Carolina. The B-52 started to break apart, and its unarmed thermonuclear payload, four 1.5 megaton bombs, was released. All rights reserved. The B-52 was part of the United States Air Force’s Operation “Chrome Dome,” in which Strategic Air Command constantly flew bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons in order to provide the US with a first strike capability over the USSR in event of a “hot” confrontation.While flying at an altitude of 31,000 feet, the B-52 bomber approached the KC-135 tanker for a routine aerial refueling at around 10:30 am. A road marker labeled “Nuclear Mishap” in Eureka, NC, a town three miles north of the crash site, commemorates the incident today.On the morning of January 17, 1966, a B-52 bomber carrying four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs collided with a KC-135 refueling aircraft near Palomares, Spain. Since 1950, the Defense Department At 11:50 a.m. local time on May 22, 1957, a B-36 aircraft jettisoned an unarmed Mark 17 ten-megaton hydrogen bomb over Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fortunately, there are solutions that can benefit both farmers and fishers.The US continues to keep intercontinental ballistic missiles on high alert—creating the risk of a mistaken nuclear war in response to a false warning.COVID-19 has amplified the US electoral system's many problems. March … The Field Command division of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, responsible for recovery and cleanup operations, reported the incident’s only casualty was a nearby grazing cow, and found that radioactive material did not spread beyond one mile of the crater.The incident was revealed to the public for the first time in the 1980s, after the Air Force released declassified documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear secondary system, followed by a human-operated relief valve in the primary system that stuck open, which allowed large amounts of nuclear reactor coolant to escape. A newly declassified document reveals how close the United States came to accidentally detonating a nuclear bomb on North Carolina in 1961. The thermonuclear device, weighing 42,000 pounds, was being transported from Biggs Airfield in Texas to Kirtland Air Force Base just miles south of Albuquerque.The nuclear chain reaction necessary to set off the bomb did not occur because the bomb’s fissionable plutonium component was stored separately aboard the aircraft. Public hazard, actual or implied. It occurred on April 26, 1986, when a sudden surge in power during a reactor systems test resulted in an explosion and fire that destroyed Unit 4. Plant operators’ initial failure to correctly identify the problem compounded it. Clean energy investments can help.Ride-hailing services are increasing carbon pollution. Massive amounts of radiation escaped and spread across the western Soviet Union and Europe. Ambassador to Spain Angier Biddle Duke went for a swim in a nearby beach to prove the water was safe. These are the kinds of events the military calls ''broken arrows.'' Subsequent "Nuclear Mishap" marker in Eureka, NC.