Wild animals and rogue computers . . . the secret nuclear mishaps

EVERYONE knows about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but there were numerous other occasions when nuclear weapons could have brought terrible destruction.

IN 1957, while practising touch-and-go landings at RAF Lakenheath near Cambridge, an American B-47 bomber crashed into a bunker housing three nuclear bombs.

Blazing jet fuel threatened to set off the TNT in the trigger mechanisms of the weapons. Fortunately fire-fighters put out the flames and prevented East Anglia from being turned into a nuclear wasteland.

IN 1961, a B-52 bomber flying over North Carolina split apart in mid-air and its two 24-megaton thermonuclear bombs fell to earth. One was quickly recovered, but the other landed in waterlogged farmland and has never been found. When the recovered bomb was examined it was discovered that five of its six safety devices, designed to prevent an accidental explosion, had failed.

IN 1966, a B-52 bomber on a routine patrol collided with a tanker aircraft while refuelling over the Mediterranean. It was armed with four thermonuclear bombs, three of which dropped to earth near a Spanish fishing village. A small nuclear cloud contaminated about a square mile of Spanish territory with radioactive plutonium. The fourth landed in the sea and was not recovered for three months.

DURING the Cuban missile crisis, an intruder was seen trying to climb over the fence into a U.S. air base in Minnesota. A sentry sounded the alarm, which also set off security warnings at other air bases. At one of these, the siren that went off was the one signalling that nuclear war had begun. Pilots

scrambled to their planes armed with nuclear weapons and were lining up to take off when the base commander recognised the error. He drove his car into the middle of the runway and flashed its lights to abort the take-offs.

Back at the original base, it was discovered that the intruder had been a grizzly bear.

IN THE early hours of November 9, 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, was called at home by his military assistant, William Odom, who said he had just heard on his communications net that 220 Soviet missiles had been launched against the U.S. Brzezinski got up, took a deep breath and was about to wake the President to suggest a full-scale retaliation when Odom called again, to say that other systems had not picked up any missile launches and it must be a false alarm.

Someone had mistakenly fed a tape from a military exercise into a defence HQ computer and this had temporarily muddled the early warning system.

It was quickly sorted out and Brzezinski went back to bed. He had not even woken his wife, assuming that, if the warning was real, everyone would be dead within half an hour.