Drooping, knife-edge wings raised to flight, black exhaust streaming from six jet engines, the Strategic Air Command's B-47 No. 876 hurtled into the air from the runway at Hunter Air Force Base at Savannah one afternoon last week. Along with most of SAC's 308th Bomb Wing, No. 876 was headed off on a highly classified flight—Operation Snow Flurry—to one of the four SAC fields in North Africa.
As the plane climbed toward 15,000 feet, Captain Earl Koehler, 36, the plane commander, saw a light flash on his instrument panel. This was a warning and an urgent one: the electrical bomb-locking system was malfunctioning, and in the bomb bay lay an unarmed nuclear bomb.
Slipping Pig. Navigator Bruce Kulka unbuckled his seat and shoulder harnesses, scooted up from his seat in the nose to the crawlway, opened a hatch and squeezed into the floodlighted bomb bay. There the big bomb—SACmen call it a "pig"—hung from its single shackle. Cautiously, Kulka tried to slide a big steel pin through the shackle to hold the pig in case the electrical lock let go. The bomb began to wobble. Desperately, Kulka worked on.
Suddenly the bomb unhinged, dropped through the fragile bomb-bay doors, which flapped open, fell out of the B-47. Somehow Kulka managed to catch hold of something—he cannot remember what it was—and hung on for his life in the empty bomb bay in the whistling wind. Back in the flight cabin, Koehler heard a rumble, and Copilot Charles Woodruff idly noticed a shock wave radiating on the ground. "Just like a concussion wave from a bomb," Woodruff told himself. Then, with a shock, he realized what had happened. Captain Koehler closed the bomb-bay doors and reported to his flight leader: "This is Garfield 13. I am aborting the mission." He explained why, radioed his story for relay to his home base.
As No. 876 circled the area, taking photographs, logging everything, the airmen watched pale-faced as tiny ambulances sped toward a South Carolina community with the incredibly appropriate name of Mars Bluff.
Vaporized Hen. The unarmed bomb slammed down in the gummy loam near Florence (pop. 30,000) and went off with the impact and power of a 2,000-lb. World War H-type RDX bomb. Its exploding charge of TNT, part of the nuclear trigger device, dug a 20-ft. crater in the backyard of the asbestos-shingle home of Railroad Conductor Walter ("Bill") Gregg, 37, cut and bruised Gregg, his wife, his three children and his niece, damaged seven buildings, killed one hen and probably vaporized a dozen more. Within minutes the curious began pouring toward the crater. Kids soon spotted jagged chunks of shiny metal, carted them home in paper bags until Air Force police moved in.
Technicians deployed their Geiger counters to check the level of radioactivity. Report: no danger. Reason: nuclear bombs have been painstakingly designed so that they cannot function unless they go through a complex arming process, and the Air Force is not likely to fly with armed nuclear bombs this side of the Iron Curtain or the Pole.
Dangers in Defense. No. 876's unarmed atomic bomb nonetheless went off thunderously around the world, and nowhere more so than in London, where Socialists, pacifists and many Fleet Street editors latched on to a new gimmick for their campaign against U.S. Air Force nuclear patrols over Britain (see FOREIGN