Major Kong IRL

My friends have heard me say “Dr. Strangelove was a documentary,” and today I learned that that quip is even more apropos than I previously believed.

It turns out there was a real-life event that pre-figured Major Kong’s nuclear rodeo ride.

In 1958, a B-47 carrying a simulated nuke (it was fully armed with explosives but the core was removed) was flying over Savannah, Georgia. The pilot noticed a warning light that the bomb was not properly locked into it’s rack and sent the navigator back to lock it manually.

While trying to fix the problem, the navigator accidentally grabbed the manual release switch, and the bomb released and fell onto the (closed) bomb bay doors. He lost his balance and fell on top of the bomb. A few moments later, the weight of the device caused it to crash through the bay with the navigator still on top.

Fortunately, the was able to grab onto a stable fragment of the bay and hung onto the plane. The bomb itself fell into a farm yard and detonated. The explosion knocked out the doors and windows of the farmhouse, destroyed the family car, killed several animals, and caused some minor injuries to the family there. Had the bomb been armed, there would have been plutonium scattered over a chunk of Georgia or even a mushroom cloud.

Source: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, an excellent and well-documented (100pp of footnotes) history of accidents and near accidents concerning the US nuclear arsenal.