http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24183879

now this bombshell (pun intended)

Didn't they make a movie about it with Peter Sellers in it ?

Dr. Strangelove I believe.

260 times more powerful than Hiroshima. That is frightening !

Would the Americans have covered it up or would they have blamed the Soviets?! We're lucky not to know the answer.

Hard to do so since it happened over US soil with an american aircraft

I naively assumed that bombs of any kind were never armed unless a state of war existed

(and no they never made a movie of the incident, dr strangelove is unrelated)

When did reality ever get in the way of US government propaganda ?! It would have been there easy to claim the plane was shot down by the Soviets or even that it was Soviet plane. No internet or CNN back then, as you know...

I think the only reason not to blame the Soviets, would be the need for a counter-strike, so it might have been blamed on rouge-forces in Russia; so links to Dr Stranglove do come to mind.

Given that this was North Carolina, it remains moot whether this would have been a good or a bad thing.

And you'd be right.

According to technical forums where people appear to know about the subject, the battery that actually detonates the warhead wasn't charged, so it wouldn't have exploded in any case.

But it makes a good news story.

There are technical forums for nuclear bombs? Who knew.

Apparently the safety feature in the earliest British air-droppable A-bombs was filling the nuclear core with ball-bearings so if the explosives went off, the core couldn't reach critical mass. Unfortunately that meant it could only be armed on the ground, because someone had to go outside and remove the plug that held them in place, and it couldn't then be disarmed without dismantling the bomb.

I still think that the USAF allegedly using 00000000 as their nuclear missile launch code for many years, so they could still launch them if someone lost the code list, is more amusing, though.