Carguero espacial ruso caerá cerca de Cuba

ELESPECTADOR.COM

El Mando Norteamericano de Defensa Aeroespacial (Norad) logró determinar la fecha y lugar de impacto del carguero espacial Progress M-27M que envió Rusia el pasado 28 de abril con destino a la Estación Espacial Internacional y que se precipita hacia nuestro Planeta, y afirmó este lunes que, luego de girar 186 veces alrededor de la Tierra, el aparato espacial caerá en la parte central del Océano Atlántico, a unos 1.600 Kilómetros al este de Cuba.

Así mismo, según RBC, una cadena de información de Rusía, el Norad tiene presupuestado que la nave Progress caerá en la Tierra a las 17:33 GMT del próximo 9 de mayo.

Accidente fatal en carrera de motos en Cuba [Video aficionado]

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Mind the gap: Man survives scary fall under moving train

Fuertes imagines de accidente de transito en Cuba

AmericaTeVeCanal41

665 fallecidos por accidentes de transito en Cuba

el numero de personas fallecidas en el 2014 a consecuencias de accidentes de transito en

www.noticiasmvs.com

cuba ascendio a 665,  lo que representan 63 mas que en el ano anterior. entre las causas fundamentales de esta lamentable situacion se senalan la indisciplina de los conductores, el pesimo estado de la red vial y el sistema de senalizacion, asi como el deplorable estado tecnico de los medios de transporte. las soluciones propuestas por la comision de seguridad vial del ministerio de transporte y el ministerio del interior es incrementar las acciones represivas: decomiso de vehiculos particulares, suspensiones de licencias a los choferes y matriculas a los vehiculos, etc. las estadisticas del indice de gravedad son realmente escalofriantes, por cada 10 sucesos se producen 8.4 victimas.

el articulo original se puede leer en el granma >>

Niño cubano sobrevive a arponazo que le atravesó la cabeza [+Fotos]

juventud rebelde 

BAYAMO, Granma.— Miles no lo pueden creer todavía: Yoan Alex Torres López, de 15 años, está vivo luego de que un arpón de 60 centímetros atravesara de lado a lado su cabeza y le ocasionara un coma profundo, del que logró salir milagrosamente.

El adolescente, del barrio de Manta, en la periferia de la cabecera de Pilón, provincia de Granma, se disponía a pescar junto a un primo el pasado 14 de noviembre cuando la escopeta de aire, acomodada en una balsa, se disparó por accidente y la flecha de acero quedó incrustada en su cráneo.

El paciente antes de la complicada intervención quirúrgica, que duró tres horas y 45 minutos. Foto: Cortesía del Hospital Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

«El niño iba a subir a la balsa cuando se produjo el accidente, cayó al fondo del mar, como a un metro y medio de profundidad; su primo, que es como dos años mayor que él, creyó que había muerto. No sabía cómo sacarlo. Por suerte en ese momento llegó otro primo, de 20 años, logró rescatarlo y montarlo en un auto para llevarlo al hospital de Pilón», contó a JR el campesino Alexis Torres Sánchez, padre de Yoan.

Foto: Cortesía del Hospital Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

Desde esa institución fue trasladado al hospital provincial Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, en Bayamo, en el que ya estaban creadas las condiciones para una complejísima intervención quirúrgica.

«Se trataba de un traumatismo cráneo-encefálico notablemente grave. El paciente llegó en coma profundo, conservaba los reflejos de tallo cerebral muy tenues», narró el especialista de primer grado en Medicina General Integral (MGI) y en Neurocirugía Maikel García Chávez, de 34 años, uno de los que participó en la operación.

Foto: Cortesía del Hospital Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

La cirugía de emergencia, que se extendió casi por cuatro horas, resultó difícil en extremo pues el arpón «tiene gran capacidad perforante, penetró por la región temporal derecha con orificio de salida parietal izquierdo alto; es decir, perforó el cráneo, las membranas envolventes del cerebro y el cerebro en sus dos hemisferios, y salió contra lateral, afectando estructuras nerviosas y vasculares», agregó el galeno, quien ponderó el trabajo de todos los profesionales de salud que participaron en el traslado del niño, el acto quirúrgico y los cuidados post operatorios.

Foto: Cortesía del Hospital Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

También acotó que la intervención implicó realizar un cuidadoso cierre para dar continuidad anatómica al organismo después de lesiones vasculares y nerviosas.

Foto: Cortesía del Hospital Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

García Chávez, graduado en 2004 y quien operó a Yoan junto al también especialista en MGI y en Neurocirugía Osmán Ramírez Tasé, de 32 años,  explicó a este diario que este tipo de traumatismo tan severo tiene cerca de un 98 por ciento de pronóstico fatal, según los reportes conocidos internacionalmente.

«Incidió mucho en la supervivencia del niño que nadie moviera el arpón, que es una de las recomendaciones esenciales para este tipo de situaciones: jamás debe retirarse el objeto penetrante antes del momento quirúrgico», dijo.

Afortunadamente tampoco hubo infección, algo posible porque el arpón —que hubo de cortarse con una segueta— es de acero oxidable y tenía una espoleta de diez centímetros, la cual se había impactado dentro del cerebro, señaló.

Agregó que Yoan tuvo una evaluación favorable desde el principio porque al tercer día de la operación le fue retirada la ventilación artificial, al cuarto tuvo apertura ocular, al séptimo obedecía órdenes sencillas y al décimo «logró hablar con coherencia».

El neurocirujano apuntó que, en la historia de la especialidad en la localidad, este es el segundo caso recordado de un objeto penetrante en la cabeza, aunque el primero no fue tan profundo y complejo.

Probablemente Maikel se refiera al paciente Walberto Vázquez, del poblado de Babiney, en Cauto Cristo, quien el 4 de marzo de 1998 vivió la amarga experiencia de ver un machetín cuatro centímetros dentro de su cráneo. Entonces fue operado en una hora y 45 minutos por un grupo de especialistas encabezados por el doctor Guillermo Sánchez Paneque.

Foto: Cortesía del Hospital Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

Desde su casa en el barrio de Manta, Yoan Torres contestó telefónicamente a JR que fue dado de alta hace dos días, se encuentra bien, «con mucho deseos de comer» y que lo han ido a visitar «una pila de personas».

Su madre, Anabel López, detalló que el muchacho tiene como secuelas afectaciones en el lado izquierdo, algunos reflejos borrosos y un sueño intranquilo por momentos, «pero tiene tremendo ánimo y deseos de vivir».

Por su parte, García Chávez expuso que hay optimismo entre los médicos, «porque el cerebro de un niño goza de mucha capacidad de regeneración».

Foto: Rafael Martínez Arias.

La madre del adolescente, una humilde ama de casa, remarcó que está infinitamente agradecida a «todos los que se preocuparon y salvaron a mi hijo, quien ha vuelto a vivir por milagros que solo se dan en Cuba».

Loose screw from Air Canada propeller smashes into passenger's window mid-flight (PHOTOS)

Vancity Buzz

By Jill Slattery

On a recent flight from Penticton to Vancouver, an Air Canada passenger was startled by a loud pop outside his passenger window. A bolt had broken off the plane and burst through the outer pane of the window glass.

Reddit user Skips_LegDay posted his story earlier this week. “So about halfway through my flight I heard a loud POP, looked out my window at a bolt that flew off the prop and broke through the outer pane.”

“People around me heard it and seemed nervous once they saw the source of the sound. I got up and went to the flight attendant and quietly told her what happened, she came over to see it then called the pilot. He said it will be fine until we land as the cabin’s pressurised.”

“Once we landed and people stopped snapping pics, the pilot talked to me for a while. Said he’s never seen this happen in over 25 years of flying,” he added as comments piled up on his Reddit post.

Air Canada has confirmed the rare incident.

“While on descent into Vancouver on Nov. 25/14, (from Penticton, BC) flight #8353 had one of those twelve one-inch (2.5 cm) bolts come loose and strike one of the aircraft windows. The bolt struck the exterior pane (of two acrylic window panes) which resulted in a small hole in the exterior window pane – the interior pane was not impacted,” a spokesperson for the airline told MailOnline.

The aircraft safely landed in Vancouver. Air Canada admits the incident was highly unusual and maintenance personnel are inspecting the plane and making any necessary repairs. They have also apologized for any stress or concern the issue may have caused.

This follows an earlier Air Canada incident this month when a propeller smashed through a passenger’s window during an emergency landing in Edmonton and four passengers were sent to hospital.

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Featured Image: Skips_LegDay via Imgur

Más de 500 fallecidos por accidentes de tránsito en Cuba

Lino Luben Pérez/AIN

Más de 500 cubanos perdieron la vida en accidentes de tránsito de enero a septiembre, cuando hubo 29 fallecidos más en comparación con similar período del año anterior, en un fenómeno atribuido a indisciplinas e irresponsabilidades.

Los decesos ocurrieron en ocho mil 412 contingencias por colisiones de vehículos en marcha y estacionados, vuelcos, atropellos, obstáculos fijos, despeñamiento, caída de personas de carros, ciclistas y peatones, según la Comisión Nacional de Seguridad Vial (CNSV).
Sin embargo, la cifra de contingencias disminuyó en 111 en relación con 2013, indicó uno de los integrantes de ese grupo, la Dirección Nacional de Tránsito (DNT), que este mes promueve su jornada 52 por la seguridad vial.
Añadió que en total hubo seis mil 545 lesionados, 504 más comparativamente con la misma etapa del año anterior, en autos, ómnibus, camionetas, motos, paneles, jeeps, bicicletas, camiones, taxis, microbuses, ambulancias, cuñas, rastras, tracción animal y otros.

Mas >>

Virgin Galactic spaceship crashes

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Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified

Discovery News

A fragment of Amelia Earhart's lost aircraft has been identified to a high degree of certainty for the first time ever since her plane vanished over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.

New research strongly suggests that a piece of aluminum aircraft debris recovered in 1991 from Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, does belong to Earhart’s twin-engined Lockheed Electra.

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Amelia Earhart Search Continuing

The search for Amelia Earhart is about to continue in the pristine waters of a tiny uninhabited island, Nikumaroro, between Hawaii and Australia.

TIGHAR

According to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 77 years ago, the aluminum sheet is a patch of metal installed on the Electra during the aviator’s eight-day stay in Miami, which was the fourth stop on her attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

Photos: Where Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Came From

The patch replaced a navigational window: A Miami Herald photo shows the Electra departing for San Juan, Puerto Rico on the morning of Tuesday, June 1, 1937 with a shiny patch of metal where the window had been.

“The Miami Patch was an expedient field repair," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News. "Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual."

TIGHAR researchers went to Wichita Air Services in Newton, Kans., and compared the dimensions and features of the Artifact 2-2-V-1, as the metal sheet found on Nikumaroro was called, with the structural components of a Lockheed Electra being restored to airworthy condition.

The rivet pattern and other features on the 19-inch-wide by 23-inch-long Nikumaroro artifact matched the patch and lined up with the structural components of the Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR detailed the finding in a report on its website.

Photos: Clues Pointing to Amelia Earhart's Plane

“This is the first time an artifact found on Nikumaroro has been shown to have a direct link to Amelia Earhart,” Gillespie said.

The breakthrough would prove that, contrary to what was generally believed, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did not crash in the Pacific Ocean, running out of fuel somewhere near their target destination of Howland Island.

Instead, they made a forced landing on Nikumaroro' smooth, flat coral reef. The two became castaways and eventually died on the atoll, which is some 350 miles southeast of Howland Island.

Failed NASA launch puts Soviet-era Russian rockets in the spotlight

Fox News

By James Rogers

The explosion of an unmanned U.S. rocket to the International Space Station late Tuesday has shone a spotlight on America’s reliance on overseas space hardware, some of which dates back to Soviet era Russia.

Built by Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences as part of a $1.9 billion contract with NASA, the Antares rocket exploded in a fireball just 6 seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island in Virginia.

It’s too early to say what caused the blast, according to Orbital Sciences and NASA. During a press conference late on Tuesday, however, Orbital Sciences executive vice president Frank Culbertson was quizzed about Orbital’s use of refurbished Russian engine hardware.

“We don’t know whether the engine was involved in this or not,” he said. “That’s something that we will try to determine as quickly as possible.”

Orbital uses AJ26 rocket engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne. The engines are a "commercial derivative" of the NK-33 engine that was initially developed to power the Russian N-1 rocket on a lunar mission in the early 1970s, according to Sacramento, Calif.-based Aerojet.

“Basically, this was an engine that was designed to carry cosmonauts to the moon – a number of them were bought by Aerojet several years ago to be refurbished and ‘Americanized’ and provided to American industry,” explained Culbertson. “It’s an extensively tested engine – it’s very robust and rugged.”

The Orbital Sciences executive added that no “anomalies” or other issues indicating a problem were identified during testing.

Culbertson also acknowledged the difficulties getting hold of rocket hardware, particularly in the U.S. “When you look at it, there are not very many other options around the world, in terms of using power plants of this size, and certainly not in this country, unfortunately,” he said.

Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit organization which aims to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars within the next two decades, told FoxNews.com that the U.S. has to be careful not to become over-reliant on foreign technology to support its space program.

“The U.S. has been taking steps to become less reliant on Russian engines as a result of recent tensions with Russia,” he noted, in an email to FoxNews.com.

The U.S. Air Force, for example, is seeking out alternatives to Russian rocket engines for its satellite launches.

Set against this backdrop, Orbital Sciences’ rival SpaceX has been vocal about the fact that it builds its own rocket engines. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk even poked fun at Orbital Sciences’ engine technology during a 2012 interview.

Last month NASA awarded its highly-anticipated space taxi contract to Boeing and SpaceX, which aims to end the agency’s reliance on Russian technology to transport U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station.

Underlining the failure the Antares launch, however, Russia successfully launched its own unmanned supply ship to the International Space Station early on Wednesday.

John Logsdon, professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, told FoxNews.com that both the Obama and the Bush administrations have not provided adequate funding for "a high-quality U.S. space effort."

Orbital Science's use of old Russian engines also reflects the global character of the space business, according to Logsdon. 

"When Orbital Sciences decided to develop what turned out to be the Antares rocket almost ten years ago, it examined the supply of rocket engines from around the world and decided that the former NK-33 engines, which another U.S. company had already purchased from Russia, gave the best mix of cost and performance," he explained, in an email. "One can criticize that choice in retrospect, but it was a commercial decision, not symptomatic of anything except the U.S. not investing for many years in new propulsion capabilities."

Carberry told FoxNews.com the cause of the Antares blast must be determined as quickly as possible.  The incident’s impact on Orbital Sciences “will depend on how quickly a cause of the failure can be determined and fixed - and how quickly the launch pad can be repaired,” he said.

Roger Franzen, technical manager of the Giant Magellan Telescope at the Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory just outside Canberra, said that the business of launching rockets is fraught with difficulties.

“As the 4th launch of Antares, it could be reasonably considered as still in the proving stage and most new rocket systems will require a convergence to reliability after bugs are ironed out, despite all the design and test rigour,” he said, in an email to FoxNews.com. “Launching rockets remains a risky business and in the end, every payload is riding on top of a controlled explosion.”

Update: Avion penetra espacio aereo de Cuba

extremadamente cuidadosas las autoridades norteamericanas al informar a cuba sobre los acontencimientos en proceso, en clara referencia al derribo en aguas internacionales de las dos avionetas de hermanos al rescate en 1996.

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Leer en CNN >>

Mind the gap: Commuters push train to save trapped man in Perth

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Teen Pilot on Around-World Flight Found Dead in Samoa

                
           

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Man trapped in German cave is seen for first time on helmet camera

ITN

 

Canadian family discovers how “very sinister” Castrogonia can be

Babalú Blog

By Carlos Eire, on June 11, 2014, at 9:53 am

Mr. Gigel Tonea

Canadians are the world's biggest supporters of the Castro regime.

Every year, they flock to the slave plantation resorts by the hundreds of thousands and make up about one half of the total number of tourists.

These tourists could not care less about human rights issues.  Obviously, they consider Cubans inferior beings lacking in the same human dignity as Canadians, and they care nothing about the abuses suffered by the enslaved  Cubans who wait on them hand and foot.

Every now and then, however, a story surfaces in the Canadian news media about some Canadian family that ends up being treated like Cuban natives.

When this happens, the Canadians involved howl in protest. "How can they treat us like this?, " they ask.

Sad as all these stories are -- and natural as it is to feel compassion for these Canadians -- one cannot help but wonder why these true life accounts do nothing to stem the flow of tourists to the island.

Will they ever admit how wrong they are?  Will they ever mount a campaign to shun this tourist destination?

Don't hold your breath.

This story involves a death and the cruel twists and turns experienced by the dead man's family.  Read on.  But also add this detail, missing from the news story: when foreigners die in Castrogonia, their loved ones are charged exorbitant fees for the handling of the corpse.  It's one of the cruelest means of extortion practiced by the Castronoids, yet that gross detail hardly ever surfaces in any of these news stories.

....And... don't even ask what has happened to the other tourist who killed this Canadian with his rented speedboat.

From Metro:

Toronto man’s death by speedboat in Cuba shrouded in secrecy

Sitting on the shore of Cuba’s Santa Lucia beach last month, Anca Tonea could see a speedboat stopped in the bright blue waters, close to the reef where her husband, Gigel, was snorkeling.

When she saw a passenger lift a man out of the water, Tonea knew something wasn’t right. The man’s flippered feet, she says, were dangling off the side of the boat, lifeless.

Tonea watched the boat speed away, and when her husband failed to return to the beach, she knew it had been his body hoisted aboard.

After a chaotic few hours seeking answers — Where was her husband taken? Could she see him? How was he doing? — she says she was brought to the hotel lobby, where a resort employee delivered the devastating news.

Gigel, a vibrant 66-year-old dental technician and father of three, was dead.

The Toronto man’s grieving family is now left with questions about what led to Gigel’s death and reeling from the way they say Anca was treated.

The Toneas say Cuban officials did not allow Anca to see her husband’s body, asked her to identify him using just the mass-produced flippers he had brought from Toronto, and — most painfully — failed to inform her of the cause of death while she was still in Cuba. Until she arrived in Toronto the following day, Anca says, she believed Gigel had suffered a stroke or gone into cardiac arrest in the water.

It wasn’t until her three kids used Google to translate the Spanish police report, they say, that they learned he was run over by a speedboat while snorkeling.

“It was the word ‘propeller’ that told us,” said her eldest, Alexander Dandy, referring to a Cuban police report that says Gigel suffered fatal injuries to his head and back after being struck by the boat. “The idea that she left Cuba without knowing how he died, that’s very sinister.”

Continue reading HERE >>

Man slammed into roof after out of control lift rushes up 30 floors in 15 secs

ITN

 

New Details on the 1961 Goldsboro Nuclear Accident

National Security Archive
Multi-Megaton Bomb Was Virtually "Armed" When It Crashed to Earth in North Carolina, Sandia Lab Report Concluded

Nuclear Stockpile Safety Review from the Mid-1970s Identified Four Weapons Systems that Needed "Time Urgent" Evaluation Because of "Nuclear Detonation Safety Concerns"

1986 Sandia Lab Study Found that, with Respect to "Fully Assembled" and "Combat-Ready" Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Could Not Claim "in an Absolute Sense, that We Take Every Action to Ensure their Safety"
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 475
Posted - June 9, 2014
For more information contact:
William Burr - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

One of the two Mk39 thermonuclear weapons that landed when a B-52 bomber broke up over Goldsboro, North Carolina in February 1961. This was the weapon that came closest to detonation.

The T-249 switch used to arm nuclear bombs on Strategic Air Command bomber aircraft. Photo courtesy of Glenn's Computer Museum

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Safety Issues, 1957-1986

Washington, D.C., June 9, 2014 – A recently declassified report by Sandia National Laboratory, published today by the National Security Archive, provides new details on the 1961 Goldsboro, North Carolina, nuclear weapons accident. While both multi-megaton Mk 39 bombs involved in the mishap were in the "safe" position, the report concluded, by the time one of them hit the ground it was in the "armed" setting because of the impact of the crash. If the shock had not also damaged the switch contacts, the weapon could have detonated.
Since the advent of the nuclear age, the nightmarish possibility of an accidental detonation has made weapons safety a boiler-plate item in the U.S. nuclear weapons program — yet potentially serious errors continue to occur. A series of 2013 reports on the Goldsboro accident provided a fresh reminder of the role of luck in preventing nuclear disaster: the same switch involved in the 1961 event had failed in other incidents.[1]
Eric Schlosser's extraordinary book Command and Control Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, raises important questions about the record of nuclear weapons safety in the United States during and after the Cold War. Two major studies by Sandia National Laboratory, cited by Schlosser in his book, have been recently released by the Department of Energy in response to National Security Archive Mandatory Declassification Review requests and are included in this publication. Both are demanding studies which require attentive readers. One is a 1959 study of nuclear weapons safety when experts at the national nuclear laboratories were beginning to review the problem more comprehensively. The other is an overview of safety history published in 1987 which reviews the impact of changing weapons design on safety policy, the impact of accidents on policy, and initiatives taken by experts at Sandia to improve safety.
Also included in today's posting are recently declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff documents from early 1958 which address a problem that increased apprehensions about safety: the introduction of sealed-pit nuclear weapons into the arsenal. Embedding plutonium pits or highly-enriched uranium in the bombs or warheads themselves, unlike previous nuclear weapons where fissile material capsules were kept separate until arming occurred, this development made the weapons ready for use but created new vulnerabilities, including greater contamination risk. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff dismissed the risk of an accidental detonation — special features on the weapons allegedly made the probability a "negligible factor" — sealed-pit weapons would figure in the major accidents of the following years, including Jonesboro (1961), Palomares, Spain (1966) and Thule, Greenland (1968), where they would do considerable environmental damage.
Some of the highlights of the documents:

• A memorandum of conversation involving President Dwight D. Eisenhower, JCS Chairman Nathan Twining, and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in which the two Americans made optimistic statements about weapons safety. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss soon asserted that those statements did not address the conditions that would emerge when sealed-pit weapons entered the stockpile. He presciently observed that "In case of [high explosives/HE] detonation on crash there would be plutonium scattered outside of the HE danger area, and this might necessitate evacuation of personnel and even clean-up operations."
• A statement in one of the JCS papers laid out the requirement that made future accidents possible by SAC bomber aircraft flying sealed-pit weapons: "A portion of SAC must be kept on continual alert status fully armed and ready for instant implementation of emergency war plans."
• A declassified State Department letter from early 1958 indicating a growing risk of accidents in the European Command area because of the eventual "saturation" of nuclear stockpiles.
• According to a Sandia Laboratory 1959 study, the Cold War goal of keeping nuclear weapons in a high state of readiness meant that safety was "fundamentally a matter of playing percentages." This meant that "absolute" nuclear safety was illusory and that giving ground "safety-wise" was necessary in order to have "useful" weapons.
• According to the same report, one of the dangers of an accidental nuclear detonation was that it could produce "public and diplomatic reactions leading to disastrous curtailment of military readiness and nuclear capability." Even worse, "an accident might be mistaken for the opening round of an unannounced nuclear war."
• A safety policy review performed in the late 1960s developed risk criteria for accidental nuclear detonations: in either "normal" or "abnormal" environments (where an accident had occurred) the annual risk of such an accident would be no greater than one in a million for an arsenal of ten thousand weapons or more.
• Studies at Sandia Laboratory of stockpile safety in the mid-1970s identified four nuclear weapons systems which needed review on a "time-urgent basis because of nuclear detonation safety concerns."
• The author of the 1986 safety policy history asserted that "the perceived need to keep weapons fully assembled and deployed on combat-ready systems … prevents us from claiming, in an absolute sense, that we take every action…. to ensure their safety."

This collection includes a declassified State Department history on two major U.S. overseas nuclear accidents, one near Palomares, Spain in January 1966, the other near Thule, Greenland, two years later, in January 1968. First published on the Archive's Web-log Unredacted, this history, prepared by James Miller, provides a detailed account of how the U.S. government tried to manage the diplomatic furor that both accidents triggered. As the AEC had forecast in 1958, accidents involving sealed-pit weapons posed risks of contamination of radioactive material and the Palomares and Thule incidents required major clean-ups which the United States had to undertake. The recovery operation at Palomares was particularly challenging because one of the hydrogen bombs was lost underwater for several months.
Keep reading at  National Security Archive >>

Man jumps onto railway track to save woman from oncoming train

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Sail Fail: $10 Million Yacht Sinks During Launch

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