Bombs were not purposefully DROPPED on Goldsboro. The B-52 transporting those broke up in mid-air and as a result lost the cargo of the couple of megaton-range bombs. Thank you for purposefully misaligning the actual event with your words of intent attack on the city.
Please don't cross into personal attack or post snarky comments to HN. Your comment would be just fine with just the first two sentences.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also—it's a smaller point, but while I have you: can you please not use uppercase for emphasis on HN? That's also in the guidelines, and it looks like your comments have done that a lot. As the guidelines explain, if you want to emphasize text, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. Using allcaps is basically yelling, and it has the effect of evoking worse from others.
No one said purposefully, and they were dropped.
It's the sort of incident Dr. Strangelove predicted might accidentally cause a nuclear war.
Pretty sure you have to purposely arm them before there's any chance it would go off for just such a scenario.
Otherwise every time you transport one it could end in disaster.
That's the intention, yes. But in at least one case, the fail safe came very closing to failing, and not in a good way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
> Information newly declassified in 2013 showed that one of the bombs came very close to detonating.
> In 2013, Revelle recalled the moment the second bomb's switch was found: "Until my death I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, 'Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch.' And I said, 'Great.' He said, 'Not great. It's on arm.'"
If I'm reading the article right, the other bomb also had the other three arming steps happen and was stopped only by the arm/safe switch, so between the two bombs, each of the four safety steps failed.
For modern nuclear weapons yes. For the ones we were still carrying around in 1960 much less so.
Thank you for adding sarcasm to your comment, it really helps.