EasilyDistracted: So the warhead wasn't armed and all of the fail safes that were in the design ensured that it didn't go off  Hardly an "almost" scenario.

UberDave: cide1: Early in my career I worked with a few older technicians that came out of the Air Force missile silos, this incident was well known to them.  The way it was told to me was that a tech skipped some steps in the service procedures, and only de-powered certain circuits while doing maintenance.  A wrench was dropped, which bridged power to a place it shouldnt have been and explosive bolts fired, resulting in a displaced warhead.  It was all assholes and elbows from that point on.

That may have been a different incident than this one...can't remember off the top of my head.

But the "service procedures" is typically called "tech data".  And during weapon maintenance or anything related to weapon maintenance, there is tech data....like *tomes* of tech data.  Some is for reference that you *must* have on hand but anything you do will follow a specific procedure - *everything* is read aloud and checked off like a astronaut would do flying to the moon.  You don't have to check it off one at a time or read everything verbatim but it must be checked in order - if an inspector (USAF or DOE) comes up and says, "Let me see your tech data..." it better be checked to the step you are on.

scanman61: Theeng: Maintenance is often boring as fark, but will fark you up if you don't do it right *Shrugs*.

Call it "readiness" and it explains why the Russians are getting farked so hard in Ukraine.

Entropy is a remorseless biatch that never sleeps.

UberDave: Theeng: EasilyDistracted: So the warhead wasn't armed and all of the fail safes that were in the design ensured that it didn't go off  Hardly an "almost" scenario.

When it comes to explosives, especially nukes, farking up to the extent they did qualifies as an almost.  Relying on a failsafe to save your ass is a very bad idea, so getting to the point you need them is a butthole clencher.

That warhead has a safe evacuation distance of 1000' (may be 500'...can't remember off the top of my head).  An Mk82, which is a common 500lb "dumb" bomb, has an evacuation safe distance of 5000'.  Just to give you an idea of the explosive hazard.

You could have lit a bonfire around that nuke and it would have done nothing but smolder.  When you consider all the things that have to be perfect for that thing to produce a nuclear yield, it was no where *near* "almost".