MARS BLUFF BOMB

When the US military accidentally

Nine-year-old Ella David Hudson was playing house in her cousin’s yard when she heard
the whistle. It sounded like something out of Looney Tunes— bending in pitch and
getting louder, fast. Ella had just enough time to think to herself, “Is that a jet flying low
over us?” before…PWWUCCCHHHHHHH!
The world around her exploded. Dirt, buzzing electrical wires, and smoke hung thick in
the air. Ella ran as fast as she could. Blood gushed from a gash in her forehead. Her
ears rang from the blast, and she could barely hear the muffled sound of screams.
When Ella finally stopped running, she found her cousins standing in the garden, on the
edge of a crater fifty feet wide and thirty-five feet deep.
Meanwhile, 15,000 feet above them, US Air Force Captain Bruce Kulka was hanging
above an open trapdoor, staring down at the plume rising toward him…and probably
thinking something along the lines of “Oh *%$!”

SAFTEY FIRST

The plan on the morning of March 11, 1958, was never to drop a bomb on Mars Bluff,
South Carolina. In fact, when Bruce Kulka boarded the B-47E bomber that day, he and his
three crewmates were planning on flying to England.
They were part of Operation Snow Flurry—what was meant to be a simu- lated combat
mission. Four planes intended to ferry four nuclear bombs across the Atlantic from Hunter
Air Force Base in Georgia to Bruntingthorpe. Before they landed in England, each crew would
simulate a bomb drop. Emphasis on simulate! Instead of dropping an actual, thirty-kiloton
explosive on an unsus- pecting British town (which would be frowned upon), the crew
would hit a button at exactly the right moment, transmitting an electronic signal to a
computer on the ground, which would calculate their accuracy.
You might be wondering, why bother carrying an actual nuclear weapon on a
training mission? Well, Cold War–era wisdom dictated that you could never be sure
when a fake war might suddenly be interrupted by a real one. Thus, the US Air Force
liked to keep their aircraft armed and at the ready.
With that in mind, at eight a.m. on March 11, a two-man crew loaded the 7,600-
pound bomb into Bruce Kulka’s B-47E. The bomb, which was ten feet, eight inches
long with a belly sixty-one inches around, hung snugly from a pneumatically powered
catch in the back of the plane. For most of the flight, it would also be held securely in
place by a steel locking pin, which when inserted made it impossible for the bomb to
be released from the catch.
 But as the crew loaded the bomb, they found a small problem with the
aforementioned locking pin. For some odd reason, it wouldn’t engage. Per air force
safety regulations, the locking pin had to be removed for both takeoff and landing.
Yes, you read that correctly: The safety regulation called for unlock- ing a bomb. This
was because the B-47 was heavy—so heavy that it couldn’t land safely with a full tank
of fuel. Most of the time, this wasn’t a problem; a B-47 crew could simply fly around
until they’d burned off enough fuel weight to land without crashing. But in case of an
emergency landing, they needed a way to jettison a bunch of weight, and fast.
Unlike other aircraft, the B-47 wasn’t built to dump its fuel tanks during flight, so
the engineers looked around for another easy solution. And the 7,600-pound explosive
hanging out in the bomb bay seemed like a good one. In case of emergency on takeoff
or landing, all the crew had to do was hit the pneumatic trigger in the cockpit, and the
bomb would tumble out of the bomb bay door, freeing up enough weight for the heavy
plane to land safely. On training flights, the plutonium and uranium core of the bomb
was either stored separately within the plane or not carried on board at all. So, either
way, while the ditched bomb would explode upon impact, at least it wouldn’t be a
nuclear explosion.
But don’t worry, folks, this was just a worst-case scenario. For almost all of the
flight, the locking pin would be engaged, and the bomb definitely, surely, don’t be
silly, wouldn’t go anywhere. Safety first!
On the morning of the eleventh, the loading crew wasn’t too worried when they
couldn’t get the locking pin to engage right away. They called in a supervisor, who
helped them hoist the bomb into a sling, taking its weight off the pneumatic catch.
Then, they were able to jiggle and hammer the pin into place. Satisfied, they put the
weight of the bomb back on the shackle, and moved on with the rest of their preflight
checks. The team would be awarded points if they finished up by ten-thirty a.m. as
part of a recently implemented performance review system. Down the line, those
points could be traded in for a promotion. So, feeling highly motivated to wrap things
up, the loading crew didn’t bother double-checking the locking pin with the full
weight of the bomb in place.

EMERGENCY RELEASE

Four hours later, at 3:51 p.m., the B-47 was preparing for takeoff. The copilot
pulled a lever in the cockpit to disengage the locking pin.
Within a few minutes, the plane had reached an altitude of 5,000 feet. The copilot
reached for the lever again, to re-insert the pin. But, just like it had been that morning,
Chekhov’s locking pin was stuck in its disengaged posi- tion. The bomb was hanging
loose on its shackle.
Twenty-nine-year-old Bruce Kulka was the bombardier and navigator on the
flight. His job was to help identify the bombing targets on the mission and to operate
the equipment when they simulated the drops. Not in his job description? Crawling
back into the depressurized bomb bay with an oxygen mask to search for the pin and
insert it by hand. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Bruce wasn’t wearing a parachute when he shimmied through the narrow opening
to the bomb bay. He’d never inserted a locking pin before, so he didn’t know where to
look for one. With the threat of the loose bomb quite literally hanging over him, Bruce
spent about twelve minutes searching around the bomb’s release mechanism before
deciding the pin was probably above the bomb, attached to the shackle. He wasn’t
wrong. But, inconveniently, this was the only part of the bay Bruce couldn’t see. The
bomb was hanging in the way. So he perched his weight just forward of the bomb’s
smooth, curved nose.
He reached up toward the ceiling and felt a solid metal handhold. He began to pull
himself up, to see over the top of the bomb.
But, suddenly, there was no bomb. Because the lever Bruce had chosen to pull
was the emergency release mechanism. In a flash so quick it was hard to comprehend,
the dark green mass of metal dropped. As he fell with it, he felt it

land for just the briefest of moments on the closed bomb bay door. And then, in
the span of a millisecond, Bruce reached out for something, anything, to hold on to,
because the bomb was crashing through the trapdoors, hurtling toward Mars Bluff,
South Carolina, 15,000 feet below.

FREE SWIMMING POOL

Ella David Hudson’s family drove her to the hospital in a car doing eighty miles
per hour on country roads. When they reached the emergency room, the wound on her
head required thirty-one stitches and an overnight stay. Everybody else was okay for
the most part—one of her cousins was treated for a cut behind her ear, and another for
back and side pain. Doctors scanned all of them with Geiger counters. The air force
knew the bomb hadn’t been loaded with the plutonium and uranium core, but, you
know…best to check, just in case.
When Ella’s cousins, the Gregg family, returned home, they found their house
knocked off its foundation, and the garage and tool shed flattened. Their Chevrolet
sedan was totaled. The pine trees surrounding their property had been blasted to
smithereens, and most of the family’s fourteen free-range chickens had apparently
been vaporized by the blast.
“It’s incredible, if you think about it, that nobody got killed,” Walter Gregg told a
reporter from the Sun News years after the accident. And it’s true that things could
have ended far worse. When the bomb collided with the Gregg family’s garden, the
earth was soft and soggy from weeks of rain. So upon impact it sank into the ground,
and when the TNT nestled in its core deto- nated, the surrounding dirt cushioned the
blow.
At first, Walter Gregg appeared to have had a pretty good attitude about the whole
situation. He’d served as a paratrooper during World War II, so maybe he was
predisposed to give the air force the benefit of the doubt? In a quote that was reprinted
over and over again, he said, “I always wanted a swimming pool, and now I’ve got the
hole for one at no cost.”
But when the air force official who was dispatched to evaluate the fam- ily’s
property claims denied them a housing allowance (they were staying with a friend, so
he argued they didn’t need to be reimbursed), Gregg’s feel- ings started to sour. When
the air force generously provided the family with a rental car for one week (plenty of
 time for Gregg to secure the insurance money to buy a new one, they thought!), he
was unimpressed. And when the air force ultimately offered the family only $44,000
($474,109.17 today) in restitution for the destruction of their home and most of their
belongings, Gregg had had enough. He called a lawyer.
After years of back-and-forth, the family settled for about $10,000 more than they
were originally offered. “The way it’s written up, it sounds like a lot of money,”
Gregg told a local paper in 1961, “but it doesn’t go far when you are trying to replace
almost everything you’ve got.”
The Gregg family never moved back to the house the air force acciden- tally
destroyed. They never filled in the crater in their front yard. Every year, it becomes a
little more overgrown, a little harder to spot. But it’s still there.

SOUL-SEARCHING IN THE SKY

After accidentally dropping an (unloaded) atomic bomb on Mars Bluff and the
Gregg family, Bruce Kulka scrambled back into the cockpit of the B-47. The crew
radioed an airport six miles west of Mars Bluff to report a lost “device.”
It may or may not surprise you to learn that this was not the first “whoop- sie”
involving a nuclear weapon on American soil. According to a Depart- ment of
Defense report, the United States was involved in at least thirty-two such accidents
between 1950 and 1980. Just a month before the Mars Bluff incident, another B-47
based out of Hunter Air Force Base had dropped an unloaded atomic bomb after it
collided with another aircraft. But that time, the drop occurred over the Atlantic
Ocean, so it didn’t make the news.
The Mars Bluff bombing, however, put an unwanted spotlight on the air force’s
activities. In London, perhaps sensing a dodged bullet (or, more accurately, a dodged
MK-6), members of the British Parliament demanded that American bombers stop
carrying nuclear weapons over their territory. Which…fair. Not that we listened.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Soviets pointed out that if the bomb had been loaded with
a nuclear weapon when it dropped over South Carolina, it likely would have started
World War III. The United States could have retaliated before realizing the bomb
came from one of their own planes. Whoops.
So, under some pressure, the mishap in Mars Bluff motivated the US Air Force to
do a little soul-searching. First, they re-engineered their nuclear weapon triggers so
they’d be set off by an electrical impulse instead of concussion. If—or when—an
unintended explosive fell from the sky again, it wouldn’t explode upon impact.
Within days of the accident, the air force also issued a new regulation concerning
locking pins. Moving forward, the locking pin was to remain inserted in the nuclear
bomb shackle for the duration of the flight, including during takeoff and landing.
Better safe than sorry.

Excerpted from SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups