Nearly A Nuclear Disaster -- Wind Shifted Fire On B-52 Away From Bomb, Experts Say

WASHINGTON - A stiff southwest wind blowing across the Dakota prairie nearly 11 years ago apparently saved the United States from a nuclear disaster that a weapons expert called "probably worse than Chernobyl."

Had the wind shifted, a fire that raged for three hours on a B-52 bomber at the Air Force base near Grand Forks, N.D., would have reached the plane's thermonuclear weapons and touched off the conventional explosives inside them.

The resulting blast would have blown particles of radioactive plutonium over a 60-square-mile area of North Dakota and Minnesota, said Dr. Roger Batzel, who was head of a nuclear-weapons lab when he testified before a closed Senate hearing in 1988. Many of the 75,000 people living within 20 miles of the air base could have been exposed.

Breathing or ingesting plutonium particles can lead to death, tissue damage or a higher risk of cancer, depending on the dosage. And such particles in the soil would remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

The Grand Forks fire on Sept. 15, 1980, received little public attention, partly because the Air Force insisted that there was no chance of a thermonuclear accident. And what actually happened has been obscured by Air Force secrecy and the reluctance of experts in the nuclear-weapons community to speak publicly.

Experts say a repeat of the Grand Forks incident is highly unlikely because the weapon involved, almost certainly a missile carried inside the plane's bomb bay, has been banned from bombers. But they say the country has thousands of bombs whose safety devices are not up to date.

A frightening picture of what almost happened in Grand Forks that September evening, when a fire fed by fuel in a B-52's wing tank burned like a blowtorch for nearly three hours, emerged during a closed hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense in 1988. An edited transcript was later made available.

Batzel, the witness, was then director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., one of the nation's three nuclear-weapons testing labs. He is one of the world's foremost experts on such weapons.

Batzel said if the stiff 26-mph wind had blown the fire into the B-52's bomb bay, instead of away from it, it would have detonated conventional explosives in the triggering mechanism of the bombs. Although a thermonuclear blast would not have occurred, the explosion would have blown the plutonium into microscopic bits and thrown it into the atmosphere to drift downwind.

"You are talking about something that in one respect could be probably worse than Chernobyl," Batzel said, referring to the Soviet nuclear-reactor accident.

Batzel said the "high explosives, which are in those particular warheads would have detonated. It would have happened in that environment."

Batzel, now retired, refused to be interviewed for this article. But Robert Peurifoy, a retired vice president of the Sandia nuclear testing lab in Albuquerque, N.M., confirmed the outline of his testimony.

"It was one of the more risky incidents we faced," Peurifoy said.

Air Force and Defense Department officials contacted recently, downplayed the danger of the Grand Forks fire, saying the Air Force would have taken more drastic measures to fight it if the wind had been blowing in a different direction. They refused to discuss the incident in any detail.

The weapon on the Grand Forks B-52 was almost certainly the SRAM-A short-range missile. In 1990, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the missile taken off bombers after the directors of the nation's nuclear-weapons labs told Congress it posed a risk.

The labs had been warning the Defense Department about the SRAM-A for more than 15 years before action was taken. The labs believed there was a high risk of a nuclear accident if the conventional explosives in the SRAM-A were exposed to a hot-enough fire.

Dr. Sidney Drell, a Stanford physicist who recently headed a government panel on nuclear-weapons safety, said there were several reasons the military has been reluctant to change weapons .

Nuclear warheads have a long shelf life, Drell said, and Pentagon planners don't want to spend defense dollars replacing weapons that are still effective.

In addition, the U.S. military takes pride in its safety standards. Not one life has been lost because of a nuclear-weapons accident in the United States.

Still, the Drell panel urged the military to use explosives that didn't go off in a fire. It also called for safer detonating mechanisms and "a fire-resistant pit" that protected the explosives. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation's 19,000 nuclear missiles, bombs and shells include such a pit.

And although the chance of an accident is very small, he said, the country would benefit from an open discussion of the safety of nuclear weapons, particularly as the stockpile shrinks and is modernized.