OOPS!

The Bomb Bay Flub

On the afternoon of March 11, 1958, a Boeing B-47E Stratojet took off from Hunter Air Force Base near Savannah, Georgia. Accompanied by other B-47s, the high-altitude, long-range bomber headed for Bruntingthorpe Air Base in England, where it was to simulate the delivery of a nuclear device. The crew of four included Captain Bruce Kulka, the navigator and bombardier, who was sitting in front of the bomb bay area and a Mark 6 nuclear bomb—a Cold War hedge in the event of Soviet hostilities. Not long after takeoff, as Captain Earl Koehler piloted the six-engine aircraft to 15,000 feet, a cockpit warning light alerted him that something was amiss with the steel pin that locked the nuclear bomb into its harness. When the lever designed to remedy the problem didn’t work, Koehler directed Kulka to crawl into the bomb bay to make repairs by hand. Kulka was unable to locate the locking pin and thought it might be somewhere above the 10-foot-tall, egg-shaped bomb, but when he jumped up in the hope of finding the pin, he accidentally pulled the emergency bomb-release trigger.

In an instant, the 30-kiloton nuke dropped onto the bomb bay doors, forcing them open. Kulka managed to grab hold of something so as to not follow the payload toward a wooded area in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, not far from Walter Gregg’s house. Gregg and his young son were building benches in his workshop, his wife was sewing by