Bomarc Missile accident

Earth Bound Misfit posted a couple of pics today, so I thought I would see if I could match them up to their locations on a map. Google Maps has a placemark for Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station, but it is outside of the gray area that indicates the adjacent military base, so I went to Wikimapia to see if I could get any more information. Turns out Lakehurst NAS is just one part of the entire complex. So I'm poking around with my mouse, just to see if I turn up anything interesting, and this pops up:

Site of Bomarc Missile accident 

June 7, 1960 /BOMARC/ McGuire AFB, New Jersey:

A BOMARC nuclear air defense missile in ready storage condition (permitting launch in two minutes) was destroyed by explosion and fire after a high-pressure helium tank exploded and ruptured the missile's fuel tanks. The warhead was also destroyed by the fire although the high explosive did not detonate. Nuclear safety devices acted as designed. Contamination was restricted to an area immediately beneath the weapon and an adjacent elongated area approximately 100 feet long, caused by drainoff of firefighting water.

Courtesy of GlobalSecurity.org

Link to Wikimapia.org

Regular readers may recall my interest in the Bomarc due to my father's involvement, so you may understand why this piqued my interest. I like the way they mention that "the high explosive did not detonate" as if anyone would give a shit. The thing carries a nuclear bomb! (I am presuming they are referring to the high explosive used to detonate the nuclear "device".) Of course if the big bomb went off there would be no covering it up.

Then there's the bit about the "high-pressure helium tank". Why would you even have such a thing? What possible use could there be? Are we blowing up balloons for the kiddies during show and tell? A little more digging turns up this on Tails Through Time:

The booster rocket of the missile used hypergolic fuels- red fuming nitric acid as an oxidant and aniline fuel that would spontaneously ignite when mixed. The fuels were stored on the missile for 90 days at a time. When a launch order was received, a helium tank on the missile would be pressurized to provide propellant tank pressurization for the booster rocket. It would take 15 seconds to pressurize the tank, during which time the Bomarc was raised to the vertical position for launch. At the end of each 90 day period, the missile would have to be defueled, decontaminated and then refueled. Pressurized helium would be used to empty the tanks to defuel them as well as in the refueling procedure.

Hypergolic just means that the fuel and oxidizer spontaneously combust when they are combined. Using the word and then explaining it is redundant, and annoying when you don't connect the two. "Red fuming nitric acid"? Regular old nitric acid isn't good enough, you need not just fuming acid, but red fuming acid? And what's this aniline fuel? This one isn't nearly so nasty, but it's still not what you would call pleasant.

Bomarc

Dad worked on the Bomarc anti-aircraft missile when I was a kid and we were living in Seattle. Recently I discovered the it carried a nuclear warhead. Manfred (one of the guys that I worked with at Stevens) was an electronics technician in the military working on Nike anti-aircraft missile systems. While he was in the military he took a course in thermonuclear warfare, and the Bomarc was one of the weapons they covered. Seems that the Bomarc was to be used against a group of enemy bombers. The Bomarc would be set to detonate above the squadron of enemy bombers. The explosion would knock the wings off the planes and they would fall into the sea.

Blast From The Past

Scott sent me a link to a site about Nike anti-aircraft missile sites. Back during the cold war, we (the USA) set up a bunch of these, many times the number of BOMARC sites. Some Nike missiles used a conventional explosive, some used a nuclear warhead.

 

Incredible Footage of B17 Bomber Destroyed by Nike Missle (1954) | British Pathé
War Archives
This video shows a four engine, propeller driven bomber being destroyed by a Nike missile. I wonder how they were able to record this. I imagine this was a test and the bomber was unmanned. The bomber could have been on autopilot, I mean autopilots have been around forever, but how did they get the plane far enough off the ground to engage the autopilot? And who was filming this? Another unmanned drone? And how far away would you have to be to ensure that the aircraft with the camera wasn't the one targeted by the missile? This is another fine example of the Cold War mentality gone wild.

Update: Clyde & IGOR got the shot.

Update March 2022 replaced missing video.

Atomic Rockets

I was looking for information about nuclear rockets and I came across this photo of a test engine from Project Pluto:

It's from of a set of historical photos from Lawrence Livermore Labs. There are a bunch of other interesting photos there. I sent the link to my gang, and Don wrote back with this story:

My uncle-in-law, Ted Fahrner, was a physicist sequestered at Lawrence Livermore for the Manhatten project. My Dad was an undergrad at Berkeley at the time, doing work-study as a garbage man for the campus. He used to violate the sequestering by sneaking love letters back and forth between my uncle and his sister, taped to the bottom of garbage cans. Makes me proud.

My Uncle Bill worked on nuclear rocket engines in Los Alamos. He introduced me to goat skin gloves, which are really nice for mechanical work because they are so thin, they make it easier to grip small things. They used them at the labs because they were dealing with chunks of graphite that went into the rocket motor. My father worked on the guidance system for the BOMARC anti-aircraft missle, which carried a nuclear warhead.