An obituary for the man who saved North Carolina from Nuclear Disaster
<i>> On the eighth day, Jack fished it all out of the muddy water at the bottom of the pit. One of his sergeants found another crucial piece.</i><p><i>> “Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,” he told Jack.</i><p><i>> “Great,” Jack said.</i><p><i>> “Not great,” the sergeant replied. “It’s on arm.”</i><p><i>> There’s far from a consensus on how close those bombs were to going off. Jack himself couldn’t say. But had one of them exploded, the other one would have as well (The military refers to this as a “sympathetic detonation”). Each bomb was 250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an explosion that large would have permanently altered the geography of this state. Even thought it would have been at least 50 miles from the Pamlico Sound, Jack says the blast would have been powerful enough to create a new “Bay of North Carolina.” There would have been a 17-mile-wide “kill zone” around the blast site. Heavy fallout would have spread as far north as New York.</i><p>This is one of those moments that could have been a turning point in history. Consider the implications of these bombs exploding. Tens of thousands of Americans dead at the hands of their own military. Imagine how it would change the JFK presidency; he would have been in office for a total of <i>three days</i> at this point. Imagine the effect on the state of North Carolina; Raleigh is just 40 miles from blast site, and millions would be evacuated. Imagine how it would change the Cold War. Imagine how it would change the perception of nuclear technology not just among the American public, but among the British (who have had the bomb for eight years) and French (who have had the bomb for one). It would be one of the top ten defining moments of the 20th century, and would have changed the world as much as 9/11 changed ours.