In 1956, a cooling-water pipe broke leading to one of the tanks. It would be a lot of work to dig up the tank, find the leak, and replace the pipe, so instead of going to all that trouble, the engineers in charge just turned off the water and forgot about it.
A year passed. Not having any coolant flow and being insulated from the harsh Siberian winter by the fill dirt, the tank retained heat from the fission-product decay. Temperature inside reached 660° Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead and cast bullets. Under this condition, the nitrate solutions degraded into ammonium nitrate, or fertilizer, mixed with acetates. The water all boiled away, and what was left was enough solidified ANFO explosive to blow up Sterling Hall several times, being heated to the detonation point and laced with dangerous nuclides.[189]
Sometime before 11:00 P.M. on Sunday, September 29, 1957, the bomb went off, throwing a column of black smoke and debris reaching a kilometer into the sky, accented with larger fragments burning orange-red. The 160-ton concrete lid on the tank tumbled upward into the night like a badly thrown discus, and the ground thump was felt many miles away. Residents of Chelyabinsk rushed outside and looked at the lighted display to the northwest, as 20 million curies of radioactive dust spread out over everything sticking above ground. The high-level wind that night was blowing northeast, and a radioactive plume dusted the Earth in a tight line, about 300 kilometers long. This accident had not been a runaway explosion in an overworked Soviet production reactor. It was the world’s first “dirty bomb,” a powerful chemical explosive spreading radioactive nuclides having unusually high body burdens and guaranteed to cause havoc in the biosphere. The accidentally derived explosive in the tank was the equivalent of up to 100 tons of TNT, and there were probably 70 to 80 tons of radioactive waste thrown skyward.
It took a while for the government to rush into damage-control mode. A week later, the Chelyabinsk newspaper published a cheery story concerning the rare display of northern lights in the sky last Sunday, showing “intense red light, sometimes crossing into pale pink and pale blue glow.” It “occupied a large portion of the southwest and northeast part of the sky.” At the same time, massive evacuation measures were enforced, eventually emptying 22 villages along what would become known as the “East Urals Radioactive Trace,” or the EURT. No explanation was given as to why everybody had to leave. Over the next two years, around 10,000 people were permanently relocated. The reason for storing nitrate solution and organic solution together in the same tank has not been revealed. The EURT is now disguised as the “East-Ural Nature Reserve,” as an explanation for its prohibited access.
Although about 475,000 people were probably exposed to dangerous levels of radiation due to this incident, figures detailing radiation sickness and deaths are simply not available, even with the KGB files broken open and published. Refugees from the area reported that all hospitals within a hundred kilometers were inundated with people affected by the blast, coming in with burned skin, vomiting, hair loss, and every symptom of having survived an atomic bomb detonation. Hundreds of immediate deaths are commonly quoted, with thousands of sickened survivors. As has been noticed time after time in mass nuclear disasters outside the plant gates, an information blackout can turn a healthy population into a suffering mob just from the twisted psychology of fear and dread. Rumors can make people sicker than radiation exposure.
Studies of the effects of this disaster are extremely difficult, as records do not exist, and previous residents are hard to track down. A late study by the former Soviet Health Ministry cites 8,015 delayed deaths due to radiation effects in the area from 1962 to 1992, but on the other hand only 6,000 death certificates from all causes of death have been found. Add to that the possibility that just about everybody over 12 years old in the area smoked Turkish cigarettes, and cause of death is a toss-up between lung cancer and the effects of alcoholism. There are no hard records of immediate deaths due to the chemical explosion or acute radiation poisoning on site. Recent epidemiological studies suggest that 49 to 55 people along the EURT have died because of radiation-induced cancer, and at what is now the Mayak plant, 66 workers suffer from chronic radiation sickness dating back to 1957.
All this ranks the Kyshtym Disaster as possibly the worst, most senseless catastrophe in the history of nuclear power. Hopefully the conditions that caused it have subsided and this will never happen again. There would be more mischief in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the world became more information-conscious, and we will have a hard look at it. But first, let us examine how all those nuclear weapons, cited as necessary for world peace, were handled with loving care by the Armed Forces.
Chapter 8:
The Military Almost Never Lost a Nuclear Weapon
“The information in it is pretty good. In some cases, a little too good.”
In 1993, I was awarded a contract to solve a problem for the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), a now-vanished branch of the federal government that was responsible for placement and security of thousands of nuclear weapons.[190] It tried to be inconspicuous to the point of invisibility, and its headquarters were away from the bustle of Washington, D.C., in a plain, unmarked building out on Telegraph Road in Virginia. It was, however, obviously a secret government building, because the entrance was completely blocked to any vehicular traffic, in addition to the fact that it did not have an actual numerical street address, as far as I could tell.
On my first meeting with my sponsor, he started the briefing with a stern lecture detailing the fact that the armed forces had never lost a nuclear device. Always one to assert superior knowledge when possible, I casually blurted out that Chuck Hansen had documented 32 instances of atomic or hydrogen bomb loss between 1950 and 1980.
This was the wrong place and the wrong time to bring this up. Showing a marvelous level of self-control, my sponsor launched into a spirited criticism of Chuck Hansen, his abilities as a historian, and any of the people who had divulged this information to him. I felt the skin peeling off my face.[191]
Did the Air Force ever lose an A-bomb, or did they just misplace a few of them for a short time? Did they ever drop anything that could be picked up by someone else and used against us? Is humanity going to perish because of poisonous plutonium spread that was snapped up by the wrong people after being somehow misplaced? Several examples will follow. You be the judge.
Chuck Hansen was wrong about one thing. He counted thirty-two “Broken Arrow” accidents.[192] There are now sixty-five documented incidents in which nuclear weapons owned by the United States were lost, destroyed, or damaged between 1945 and 1989. These bombs and warheads, which contain hundreds of pounds of high explosive, have been abused in a wide range of unfortunate events. They have been accidentally dropped from high altitude, dropped from low altitude, crashed through the bomb bay doors while standing on the runway, tumbled off a fork lift, escaped from a chain hoist, and rolled off an aircraft carrier into the ocean. Bombs have been abandoned at the bottom of a test shaft, left buried in a crater, and lost in the mud off the coast of Georgia. Nuclear devices have been pounded with artillery of a foreign nature, struck by lightning, smashed to pieces, scorched, toasted, and burned beyond recognition. Incredibly, in all this mayhem, not a single nuclear weapon has gone off accidentally, anywhere in the world. If it had, the public would know about it. That type of accident would be almost impossible to conceal.
189
ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) is a tertiary explosive, commonly used as a blasting agent, consisting of a mixture of an oxidizer, ammonium nitrate, plus a flammable organic compound. On August 24, 1970, one ton of ANFO loaded into a Ford Econoline van was parked in front of the physics building, Sterling Hall, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a protest against the university’s military research, the explosive mixture was detonated at 3:42 a.m., causing massive destruction. Parts of the van were found three blocks away on top of an eight-story building, and overall damage to the university campus was over $2.1 million. A radical anti-war group called the “New Year’s Gang” claimed responsibility, and one member, Leo Burt, remains at large.
190
DNA was the Defense Atomic Support Agency (DASA) from 1959 until 1971, when it became DNA. In 1996 it was changed to the Defense Special Weapons Agency (DSWA), and in 1998 it was combined with three other agencies to form the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Every time it changed, they had to change the seal and all the stationery. I liked the old DNA seal, the blue background of which was peppered with little mushroom clouds. The latest seal has the Eagle of State looking to his right, at the olive branch of peace, but in his left talon he holds an A-bomb instead of a bunch of arrows.
191
Chuck Hansen published
192
A