Once they had climbed to 5,000 feet, Woodruff, sitting behind the pilot, rotated his seat 180 degrees so he was facing backward and pushed the lever to engage the locking pin on the bomb-release mechanism, which would prevent accidental release, as called for in the flight manual. The lever did not feel right, and the red light stayed on, indicating that the pin had failed to engage. For five minutes Woodruff tried wiggling the handle to make the pin drop in, banging on the handle with a palm, applying force with a knee, and criticizing it with abusive language, trying to shame it. Nothing worked. The not-engaged light remained on, indicating that the bomb was not locked into position and was free to be dropped on demand.
Captain Koehler asked Kulka, the bombardier, to go have a look at it and try to push the thing home. They were still climbing and had reached 15,000 feet. Kulka would have to enter the bomb bay, which was not pressurized, so they had to get this resolved before the air got too thin. The space was cramped, and the door to the bomb bay was small. Kulka had to take off his parachute and squeeze through, past the hulking, five-foot-wide bomb. He had no idea what a locking pin looked like or where it might have been in the complicated maze of levers and cables.
After 12 minutes of searching, Kulka decided correctly that it must be on top of the bomb, hidden from the casual observer. He tried to pull himself up off the bomb bay floor, where he could see over the bomb, groping for something to hang on to. He grabbed the emergency bomb release handle. Click, and down she went.
For a moment, the MK-6 seemed to hang there, resting along with Kulka on the bomb bay doors. It weighed as much as a Rolls Royce with six people in the back seat. The doors gave up, and the bomb exited downward. Kulka, finding his floor gone, flailed wildly for anything to hang on to. He grabbed a cloth bag, but it was not connected to anything. He felt himself, almost in slow motion, following the bomb into space. His hands found something solid, and he managed to pull himself up and out of the open doorway as he watched first the bomb and then the cloth bag get smaller and smaller, falling away.
On the ground underneath, it was 4:34 P.M. on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Walter Gregg, a train conductor, his son, Walter, Jr., and Jr.’s cousin were making benches in their workshop. Gregg’s wife was in the kitchen, and his three daughters were off in the yard somewhere. They had a playhouse next to the vegetable garden, but they were through pretending domestication for the day and were busy piddling elsewhere. They all heard the B-47 overhead. It sounded closer than it was.
All hell broke loose. The MK-6 centered the playhouse, the implosion charge ignited, and the garden went airborne. The blast and shock waves were tremendous, making an oblong crater, 75 feet long and 35 feet down at its deepest point. Huge chunks of earth, some weighing hundreds of pounds, were suddenly coming down all over the place, and in the thick fog of dust and debris Gregg could not see ten feet in front of his face as he and the boys staggered out the front of the workshop. Looking back at the woods, he could see the pine trees snapped off at the ground and laid out in a circle around the former garden. The house was shifted off its foundation, and the back wall was pierced by rocks and shrapnel, as if a huge shotgun had been discharged at it. The roof appeared to have melted onto the rafters. He could hear his family screaming all over the place before the air cleared and the reverberations stopped.
Captain Koehler and the crew felt the shock wave seem to lift their airplane several feet. Fearing the worst, they turned around and immediately saw the vertical column of smoke rising over Mars Bluff. They sent a specially coded digital message back to Hunter indicating that they had laid an egg. On the receiving end, they had never before seen such a message and did not know what to make of it. Getting no acknowledgement, Koehler radioed the tower at the Florence municipal airfield and persuaded the radio operator to place a collect call to Hunter Air Force Base and tell them that aircraft number 53-1876A had lost a device somewhere near here. The impact point would be easy to find.
Back on the ground, Gregg was certain that a jet plane had crashed on his property. Nobody was dead, but his wife had a cut on her head from flying plaster, he had a cut on his side, the cousin was bleeding internally and would have to get to a hospital, everybody was bruised all over from flying rocks, and neither of his automobiles would ever roll again. Neighbors came running, thinking that his propane tank had exploded. The family doctor took them in for the night after stitching up some cuts.
The bomber crew saw their careers melting before their eyes as they flew in circles around Mars Bluff. Evaluating the remaining fuel, Kulka suggested that they might do better to fly to Brazil. They were met on the airstrip at Hunter by security guards who deprived them of their side-arms before locking them in a room. It took a while to convince the Air Force that they had not dropped a bomb on South Carolina on purpose. The national and international press were all over it, descending on Mars Bluff like the black death. Newsreel cameras rolled, peering into the crater and showing airmen examining the ground with Geiger counters. After three days, the excitement died away. Eventually the Air Force was able to find 25 pounds of fragments identified as belonging to a MK-6. When it left the bomb bay, the thing had weighed 7,600 pounds. In August 1958, the Gregg family was paid $54,000 for their losses. They moved elsewhere.
Today, the crater is still there, although it is somewhat filled in and obscured with plants and trees. It is visible on Google Earth. Just look for Mars Bluff. The flight rules were changed immediately. After Mars Bluff, the locking pin was inserted by the bomb-loading crew while the plane was on the ground and remained in at all times, unless you were intending to drop the device. At great expense, all the existing nuclear weapons were upgraded to have reformulated chemical explosives that would not detonate on contact. The three crewmen were reassigned overseas and were never seen again.[209]
In the next few years, five nuclear drop-weapons were lost or destroyed in places that were non-residential, and thus escaped the same level of scrutiny as Mars Bluff. In 1960, a BOMARC IM-99B nuclear-tipped cruise missile exploded and burned at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey when its helium fuel-pressurizing tank blew up without warning, but there was little notice outside the base. The next unusually serious accident occurred just after midnight on Tuesday, January 24, 1961, in the tiny farming community of Faro, North Carolina. It is forever known as The Goldsboro Incident, and it was impossible to keep it quiet.
By 1961, the big, technically sophisticated Boeing B-52 had taken over as the Strategic Air Command’s most prized long-range bomber and the twitchy, crash-prone B-47 took a back seat. The B-52 carried two MK-39 mod 2 thermonuclear weapons, individually strapped into the double bomb bay by what looked like a very heavy bicycle chain.
The MK-39 was an ugly-looking, blunt-nosed cylinder, nearly 12 feet long, painted olive drab with notations (part number, serial number, modification level, etc.) stenciled on the sides with yellow paint. On top was stenciled “DANGER,” in red, “DO NOT ATTEMPT TO REMOVE ARMING RODS.” The rear section of the bomb was slightly larger than the rotund body, containing four tightly packed parachutes.[210] Four very stubby aluminum fins were bolted to the rear section, looking like an engineering afterthought. It was designed to drop nose-down, with the parachutes out the back slowing its fall. The “frangible” nose section, painted yellow, was made of crushable aluminum honeycomb, intended to ensure a soft landing before it detonated. It weighed over 9,000 pounds, and would explode with the force of 3.8 megatons. To put that in perspective, that is more explosive power than the sum of what has been detonated in every war in the history of the world, including the two A-bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. These bombs were sealed and ready to go, with no removable capsules as had been the saving grace in so many previous accidents. They were protected from accidental detonation by a series of six steps that must occur before the device will explode. The newly implemented boosted fission feature prevented the plutonium-fueled fission stage from ever exploding because of fire or shock to the system.
209
Attempts to find Bruce Kulka, known to his colleagues as the “Nuclear Navigator,” dry up after his service in the Vietnam conflict. He moved to Thailand and stopped answering his mail.
210
The rear section was a combined desiccant pack and parachute tube, with the arming rod sockets on top. The four parachutes were deployed sequentially. First, a six-foot drogue chute deployed, and the drag from it pulled out a 28-foot ribbon drogue to stabilize the bomb and make sure it was pointed down. The third chute was a 68-foot octagonal canopy to decelerate the bomb, and the last chute was a 100-foot solid canopy to lower it gently to the ground.