The Day the U.S. Air Force Almost Nuked North Carolina

Autothrust Blue said:
The museum in Pima is on my list of things to see. Maybe I should do the quintessential American thing and take a road trip someday.
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Good to see that, as well as go see the remains of one of the other sites still out in the desert. Some still on open land.
 
Mike It was site 571-6, I remember it because it was just off what is exit 40 on I-19, that is where me and my partner were posted.
 
queeno said:
Mike It was site 571-6, I remember it because it was just off what is exit 40 on I-19, that is where me and my partner were posted.
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You're right it is -6, the one south of the Green Valley site/museum which is -7. It became a ranch-house restaurant/hotel of some kind, but changed to something else....don't know who owns it now. Fly over it often coming back from Ruby/Arivaca area.

There used to be alot of cool stuff around TUS. Remember as a kid, U-2s operating out of DMA when a recon wing was based there. Never remember bombers there, as that was before my time.
 
@queeno @RDoug

When did DMA's tower move from next to base ops, to the west side of the field by the scrapyards? And has TRACON always been there on base?
 
The principle is of course that the warhead will not detonate unless specifically commanded to. An accident cannot cause detonation.

Back in the 60s this was less the case. Security measures are always a tough talking point and a softer target in the present day when using more and more contractors in defense.

Alex.
 
MikeD said:
@queeno @RDoug

When did DMA's tower move from next to base ops, to the west side of the field by the scrapyards? And has TRACON always been there on base?
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The TRACON (even called "RAPCON" back when I was there) has been down the street and across from the old tower/baseops building forever, as far as I know. I don't know when the tower was moved to the south side of the field, but it was at that location when I visited during the early or mid-90s for a controller reunion. I do know that the traffic was down to nothing compared to when I was there. Back in the day we were supposedly the busiest single-runway operation in the country, but that was before the Guard moved over to International.
 
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Titan II Missile Museum
 
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MikeD said:
We had 18 Titan IIs around TUS, one of the three locations. I remember them from gradeschool days, as TUS was the first of the three locations to begin decom in 1982, finished by '86 here. And even here, there were a number of times of liquid fuel leaks from the storage tanks and the like, what with the extremely volatile mixture they used. The old sites can still be seen from the air here, along with the one museum.
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While not a nuke base, there is a NIKE middle base up in the hills by my house that I visited as a kid. It was decom'ed by then, but still really cool. It's on top of Oat Mountain.
 
Actually, some Nike interceptor missiles were equipped with nuclear warheads. Helped turn a "miss" into a "hit."
 
MikeD said:
@queeno @RDoug

When did DMA's tower move from next to base ops, to the west side of the field by the scrapyards? And has TRACON always been there on base?
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What Doug said, winters were very very busy due to the snow birds. That's why they had the temp tower at Marina so the snow bird could do most of their pattern work there, main base was crazy busy from 7am to 5pm. After that the place was a ghost town.
 
PhilosopherPilot said:
It's apparently just South of Tybee. Not many people would cry about Tybee getting vaporized. Most of them would be vaporized along with the island...so...

It would make my house waterfront, perhaps. :) Glow-in-the-dark as well.
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Well, you'd be able to find your house easily. So you've got that going for you, which is nice.
 
mshunter said:
While not a nuke base, there is a NIKE middle base up in the hills by my house that I visited as a kid. It was decom'ed by then, but still really cool. It's on top of Oat Mountain.
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Several of them around southern Ca. Used to be an IFC station (had an above and below ground facility and launch pad- It was activated in '56 and deactivated in '62 or '63) at LGB (I believe it was for the Nike Ajax) until they expanded the industrial park area.
 
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RDoug said:
The TRACON (even called "RAPCON" back when I was there) has been down the street and across from the old tower/baseops building forever, as far as I know. I don't know when the tower was moved to the south side of the field, but it was at that location when I visited during the early or mid-90s for a controller reunion. I do know that the traffic was down to nothing compared to when I was there. Back in the day we were supposedly the busiest single-runway operation in the country, but that was before the Guard moved over to International.
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They call TUS a TRACON because it's FAA run, the only AF personnel there are the couple who come in to man the PAR scope during its operating hours. At other bases where the app/dep is AF run, they call the RAPCONs there.

I guess FAA radar controllers don't do PARs anymore? Only ASRs?
 
ahw01 said:
The principle is of course that the warhead will not detonate unless specifically commanded to. An accident cannot cause detonation.

Back in the 60s this was less the case. Security measures are always a tough talking point and a softer target in the present day when using more and more contractors in defense.

Alex.
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...this is still not the case...

An accident has yet to cause a detonation.
 
Autothrust Blue said:
...this is still not the case...

An accident has yet to cause a detonation.
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If by "yet" you mean the entire future existence of the universe, then, sure. Given that amount of "nearly infinite" time, just about any combination of events can occur. But if we are measuring by normal human standards of time, then pretty much no.

Without getting into too much detail (and classification issues), there is precisely only one way to make a modern US-arsenal nuclear weapon achieve a nuclear yield: with deliberate procedure.

The scientists and engineers at the various National Labs did not ignore the accidents and incidents that occurred over the years (only a small fraction of which have been referenced in this thread) and current (say, last 30 years) designs/builds reflect these lessons learned. They are intricate beyond belief, and have a ridiculous number of events which have to occur in-order-and-sequence for the actual procedure to occur which causes a nuclear detonation which achieves a nuclear yield. Any deviation from that precise order and sequence means no yield. The variation in these steps ensures that natural phenomena and even misguided human intention cannot complete that Rube Goldberg machine to get to the nuclear yield.

Obviously anything man-made can fail and, theoretically, anything can happen, but the statistical probability of that happening is beyond tens of thousands of human lifetimes.
 
It may not get go thermonuclear, but wouldn't it be ugly and dirty if the conventional warhead exploded and scattered uranium or plutonium all over the place?
 
PhilosopherPilot said:
It may not get go thermonuclear, but wouldn't it be ugly and dirty if the conventional warhead exploded and scattered uranium or plutonium all over the place?
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"All over the place" being a very relative term. The amount of conventional explosive inside most nuclear weapons is quite small.

It wouldn't be Chernobyl....it wouldn't kill a small city, either.
 
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