NE SC did have a nuclear bomb dropped on it. Luckily the PU core was stored elsewhere on the plane.
(The first few paragraphs are a riff about soybeans? Whatever. The part I posted is where the story really begins. It is long, but it is fascinating. Don't stop before you read about the geiger counter and a piece of a pig.)
A Perfectly Understandable Mistake
The true story of the albino raccoon, the pig farmer, and the only NUCLEAR BOMB ever to be dropped on America
<snip>
The collisions were about to begin. The prototype of the Mk-6 device sat on top of a three-hundred-foot-tall tower in the Enewetok Atoll. It was 6:34 on the morning of April 8, 1951. A few shakes earlier, someone had sent a signal to the Mk-6, and sixty panels of high-energy explosives inside it had detonated around a hollow sphere of uranium and plutonium. People who study really fast things define a shake as a hundred millionth of a second. The shock waves from the high-energy explosives began collapsing the hollow sphere of uranium and plutonium until it was no longer hollow. Then they collapsed it some more.
At the very center of the sphere was the "initiator"--a tiny piece of beryllium. As the walls closed in around the beryllium, it reacted by spitting out neutrons. One of those neutrons collided with the nucleus of one of the atoms in the crushed sphere. The nucleus split, releasing a tiny jolt of pure energy and a few neutrons of its own. These neutrons flew off into the dense atomic forest. There were more collisions.
And so on.
A man who watched what happened next described it like this: "The predawn darkness was rent with a brilliance greater than noon, and the islands of the atoll shook with the force of the blast."
Beryllium, the metal seed that initiated the spectacle, is named after beryl, a mineral. Beryl takes its name from an ancient Greek word, beryllos, from which we also derive the English word brilliance.
<snip>
Newsreel about bombing:
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0505BOMB_122
= new reply since forum marked as read
