Air Turbulence Led to H-Bomb Drop

A crew member of the bomber that dropped a hydrogen bomb near Albuquerque, N.M., said Thursday the accident occurred when the plane hit turbulent air just as an officer was setting a safety pin that secured the bomb for landing.

George Houston, 61, radio operator of the B-36 that dropped the 42,000-pound bomb 29 years ago, said that to keep from falling, the officer grabbed the mechanism the bombardier uses to release the bomb. The bomb crashed to earth without setting off a nuclear blast.

For a few moments members of the crew thought the man might also have gone down with the bomb, Houston said.

“It’s one of those things that’s terrifying at the time, but is funny afterward,” Houston said. He compared the sequence of events that caused the 1957 accident to the closing scene of the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove,” in which a bomber pilot releases a stuck H-bomb by hand and rides it out of the plane to his death in a nuclear explosion.

But in the accident described by Houston in an interview, the navigator was trying to secure, not release the bomb. He saved himself from falling and crawled back from the bomb bay “whiter than any sheet you ever saw.”

The May 22, 1957, accident involving a nuclear weapon was first confirmed by the Air Force in 1981. But no specifics were released until Wednesday, when the Albuquerque Journal published an account based on military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.