TO THE EDITOR:
The Sept. 24 Daily Tar Heel includes” a conversation with”:http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/09/goldsboro-qa professor Klaus Larres about a nuclear H-bomb that “nearly” exploded near Goldsboro. I taught for many years a course at UNC on science, technology and the nuclear arms race. Based on this experience I would like to make a few comments about this event.
The current report about this event was published in the British newspaper The Guardian. It implies that this event has been a secret until recently declassified. But it has been well-known since its occurrence.
For example, a journalism student from UNC interviewed me about it long ago — the interview has been on the web under my name ever since. The interview is so old that modern computer programs even have problems reading it.
The reports also seem to vary greatly, with the number of failed safety mechanism ranging from three out of four to six out of seven. Always there is a report of only a single safety feature remaining. Hence published details must be compared to known facts about H-bombs.
Some parts of one of the H-bombs supposedly have never been recovered from the very deep mud; hence, the ground has been declared off-limits ever since.
But what was not recovered? The fission trigger; the non-radioactive lithium-deuteride material that would produce the fusion reaction; the natural uranium around the fusion part of the bomb? Or is “off-limits” an attempt to hide some design details?
I have my suspicion that this final safety feature was very critical, and hard to overcome. The design of an H-bomb involves a very complex sequence of chemical implosion to trigger the fission explosion.
The H-bomb may have come down by parachute. But it was not designed to explode on the ground — was the altitude for the explosion set? Hence we don’t know how intact the bomb actually was when it hit the ground.
