Stupid: More Dangerous Than Terror

At least with Al-Qaeda terrorists we have some chance to prevent horrible catastrophe’s but we can’t fix stupid and that’s exactly what we face constantly with our own bloated, incompetent out of control government and it’s gung-ho military aggressors.

Yes, neither the Pentagon nor the Department of Homeland Security can safely protect us from the dangers posed by the government’s own incredibly stupid blunders. Sooner or later that stupidity will result in an American, perhaps global, apocalypse.

Fifty-two years ago it almost did. We all know about the infamous Cuban missile crisis which brought the United States of America to the brink of an all out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a war which might have wiped us all off the face of the Earth. 

That was the result of stupid.

But did you know that in 1961 the U.S. Air Force nearly detonated by stupid mistake a hydrogen atomic bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that destroyed Hiroshima?

Of course, you probably didn’t know that, and neither did I, until just last Friday when The Guardian, a British news service, published a declassified formerly top secret report obtained from our government by way of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI).

The 1969 document, obtained by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, reveals a Jan. 23, 1961, B-52 crash near Goldsboro, North Carolina, in which two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs broke up in mid-air. One of them behaved exactly as a nuclear weapon is designed to function in wartime, and the only thing that prevented detonation was the failure of a single low-voltage switch.

Parker Jones, a senior engineer in the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., wrote in the report that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe".

Jones noted from the crash evidence, in which three of eight crew members died, that the bombs "did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," and concluded that the detonation "would have been bad news – in spades." Had the hydrogen bomb detonated as designed fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City, according to the report.

"The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," Schlosser told the newspaper. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."

So now we know after more than half a century of incompetent government cover-up that the U.S. military almost stupidly nuked a huge area of our nation which would have decimated our capitol city, Washington, D.C., the White House, Capitol Hill, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City, killing millions of Americans, and making the 9/11 Al Queada terror attack seem like a simple fireworks mishap by comparison.

Why in the name of all reason and logic was an Air Force B-52 bomber loaded with fully armed and ready to detonate hydrogen bombs flying around over North Carolina in U.S air space in the first place?

I’ll tell you why: it was stupid and stupid is more dangerous than terror.