“Remember what I said to you on Monday morning?”
“Something about a nightmare you’d had the night before. Hiroshima. I’d told you Sunday night to put Hersey’s book down and stop reading it right before you went to bed.”
“And I asked you that next morning—”
“Not if anyone could ever drop a bomb on us, but whether we might ever accidentally drop a bomb on ourselves.”
Kenneth turns around and kisses his wife. “In light of yesterday’s atomic bomb mishap, I’d say your question was a pretty timely one.”
BEFORE THAT:
1724, 03/12/58
Lieutenant Daltry is sitting in the living room of Mr. and Mrs. Caleb Flowers. Caleb Junior is crying.
“Caleb,” says Caleb Senior, sternly, “go and get your atomic bomb fragments and give them to Lieutenant Daltry. They aren’t yours to keep.”
“The other kids got to keep theirs.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t true, Caleb,” says Daltry, the fatigue of the long afternoon beginning to wear on his even-tempered, spit-and-polish military mien. “I’ve visited the homes of all of your friends and they’ve turned over everything they have. You’re the last one on my list.”
“Molly Greaney said she was going to make an ashtray out of the piece she found.”
“Well, that would be a little hard now, son.”
“As if the Greaneys need another ashtray in that house,” opines Mrs. Flowers with puckered, judgmental lips. “That den of theirs is like an ashtray museum.”
“Go and get the pieces of the bomb you found,” says Mr. Flowers. “Give them to the lieutenant so he can go home. He has a long drive ahead of him. You have a long drive back to Savannah, am I right, Lieutenant? Be a good patriot, son.”
As the boy goes reluctantly and with residual sniffles to bring his bag of shiny metallic shrapnel from the Mark 6 30-kiloton bomb that was accidentally dropped on his neighborhood only the day before, Mrs. Flowers sighs and says, “I was reading the book Hiroshima, which I checked out of the library last week. I was wondering if someday a bomb might be dropped on us! ”
“By accident?” asks her husband.
“No. On purpose. I would never have believed that a bomb could be dropped by accident.”
BEFORE THAT:
2152, 3/11/58
Lieutenant Daltry receives orders to drive to Mars Bluff and assist in securing the area. There have been reports that children who live near the blast have been taking fragments of the bomb home as souvenirs. It will be his job to see that all fragments are collected, even if this means going door to door to confiscate them.
Daltry asks his commanding officer if it has been established that the area is free of radiation contamination. He is told that nothing has registered beyond the level of normal background radioactivity.
Daltry sighs with relief. Just the morning before, his wife had related the horrors of radiation poisoning that she had read about in Hiroshima by John Hersey.
BEFORE THAT:
1618, 3/11/58
Bill Gregg is out in his workshop building a bench with his son. His wife Effie is in the house, sewing. Their two daughters and the couple’s young niece are playing in the yard. Bill hears a plane overhead, then seconds later the detonation of a 7,600-pound bomb right in his back acreage. The concussion makes his ears ring. The walls of the workshop shake. The air becomes a maelstrom of dust and smoke. He runs out into the yard to search for the rest of his family. Huge clods of earth hurled high into the air from the bomb’s impact with the ground start their raining descent. One-hundred, two-hundred-pound soil boulders come crashing down on the house. Smaller chunks pelt the girls as they run and scream in terror. A gash is ripped in Bill’s side; large plaster patches from the house walls come crashing down on Effie.
A mushroom cloud rises up from the instantaneous crater — a crater that measures seventy-five feet wide and thirty feet deep. Several nearby homes and a church are struck by the falling debris. A state trooper, forced off the highway by the blast, shields his head as he rushes to the scene.
The bomb carries no fissionable material. This is not a poisonous mushroom cloud. The bomb is atomic in name only, but the TNT that provides its explosive charge wreaks havoc nevertheless. The Greggs, all of whom survive, find that several of their free-range chickens have been vaporized.
BEFORE THAT:
1616, 03/11/58
Co-pilot Charles Woodruff is having trouble with his bomb’s locking pin. Unlocked by regulation mandate during takeoff, the bomb must now be secured. The B-47’s commander, Captain Earl Koehler, suggests that the bombardier, Captain Bruce Kulka, try to seat the locking pin by hand. Because the bomb bay isn’t pressurized and the plane’s altimeter now reads fifteen thousand feet, the three crew members must strap on their oxygen masks.
The entrance to the bomb bay is too small to allow for both a man and his parachute, so Kulka goes into the bay without it.
Kulka can’t find the locking pin in the bomb-release mechanism. After twelve minutes of fruitless searching, the bombardier pulls himself high up in the bomb bay, where he thinks the pin might be hiding behind the bomb. Unfortunately, he uses the emergency bomb-release mechanism for his handhold. The bomb drops from its shackle. For a brief moment, it and Captain Kulka come to rest together on the bomb bay doors, Kulka straddling the bomb like a rider on a bareback horse. The enormous weight of the bomb forces the doors open. Kulka grabs hold of something — he doesn’t know what — which keeps him from plummeting earthward with the bomb.
Hunter Air Force base doesn’t understand the coded message the crew sends. Captain Koehler is forced to radio the civilian airport in Florence to ask that they communicate to Hunter the fact that they have lost a “device.”
BEFORE THAT:
0800, 03/11/58
A specialized loading crew consisting of two men work for one hour and seven minutes to implant a bomb in Aircraft 53-1876A. The bulbous, blimp-shaped weapon bears a strong resemblance to the infamous Fat Man that was detonated 1,800 feet above Nagasaki, Japan, a dozen years earlier. The plane is scheduled to participate in “Operation Snow Flurry,” part of an important “Unit Simulated Combat Mission and Special Weapons Exercise” programmed for later that day. The purpose of the mission, in which the plane would be accompanied by three other B-47s from the 375th Bombardment Squadron, is to transport a nuclear bomb to Bruntingthorpe Air Base in Great Britain and pretend to release it somewhere over that country.
The loading team has trouble with the bomb’s steel locking pin. They ask the weapons-release systems supervisor for help. He has the weapon removed from its shackle and put into a sling. Then he futzes around the pin with a hammer until it’s seated. The bomb is returned to its shackle. The two crewmen decide not to take the locking pin through its engage/disengage cycle; time is running out. They have to be finished by 1000 hours.
BEFORE THAT:
0715, 03/10/58
Lieutenant Kenneth Daltry and his wife Doris have finished breakfast. Each is indulging in a second cup of coffee before Daltry has to drive to Hunter Air Force Base for the day. Doris mentions the nightmare she had the night before.
“I wish you wouldn’t read that Hiroshima book before you go to bed.”
“I was thinking about that midair collision last month, Ken. The plane was carrying a nuclear bomb. They dropped it in the water, but what if it had hit Savannah?”
“I think you look for things to worry about. The bomb didn’t have nuclear capability. Do you know what the odds are that something like that could happen again? Give me a kiss. I’m late.”
BEFORE THAT:
1558, 02/05/58
An Air Force B-47 Stratojet leaves Hunter Air Force base and shortly thereafter collides with an F-86 Sabre. The B-47 is carrying a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb. The pilot of the crippled bomber (the fighter’s pilot ejects as his plane goes down) makes three attempts to land the plane at Hunter, with its nuclear bomb on board. A safe landing cannot be assured, given the condition of the craft. It is decided that the bomb, its nuclear explosion triggering capsule believed to be safely absent, should be released to allow the compromised craft to land. The weapon is jettisoned in the Wassaw Sound off Tybee Island and doesn’t detonate upon impact with the water. The plane lands safely.