Four Times The US Gov‘t Nearly Killed Us All With Nuclear Armageddon

Camp both brings to light stories that are (intentionally) ignored by the corporate media and digs deeper when the mainstream media only reports on the surface-layer reality. Having been a professional stand-up comic for 20 years, a writer for The Onion, and the host/head writer of Redacted Tonight, Camp is also uniquely suited to bring humor to these topics.

Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan to try to start a proxy war with China helped remind a lot of Americans that our “leaders” do not have our best interests at heart and, in fact, willfully push us all toward nuclear Armageddon. Of course, this is just the latest moment when the U.S. empire has nearly caused a doomsday scenario. Here are some of the other greatest hits over the past 70 years.

One night in 1961, the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on North Carolina! A B-52 crashed in the middle of the night in Faro, North Carolina, but it was more than just a downed aircraft. As National Geographic magazine reported, “…somewhere out there in the winter darkness lay… the remains of two 3.8-megaton thermonuclear atomic bombs. Each contained more firepower than the combined destructive force of every explosion caused by humans from the beginning of time to the end of World War II.”

This was a time before most people had color TVs, but we were creating bombs that explode in Washington, D.C. and knock the paint off the buildings in Oklahoma?! One gets a feel for what humankind really cares about by looking at the things we truly work hard at making bigger and better.

Atomic bombs are unveiled in the 1940s and 15 years later they’re, like, more powerful than the sun. Meanwhile, the first blanket is probably 10,000 years old, and they didn’t come up with putting sleeves on the fucking thing until 1997. We could’ve had the Slanket™ hundreds of years ago, but no one cared. All the great minds were working on how best to destroy humanity.

Anyway, there’s a crash in 1961 in North Carolina. But how much can you really blame our military? Planes go down sometimes and some of those times, they have thermonuclear bombs onboard. The military couldn’t have known, right?

Actually, “A few weeks before, the Air Force and the plane’s builder, Boeing, had realized that a recent modification—fitting the B-52’s wings with fuel bladders—could cause the wings to tear off.”

Oh, just the wings to tear off. Nothing serious. You can still fly without at least a couple of the wings. (I learned that from a Bette Midler song – I don’t know much about planes.)

The article continued, “Robert McNamara, who’d been Secretary of Defense at the time of the incident, told reporters in 1983, ‘The bomb’s arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go through to detonate, and it went through all but one.’

ALL BUT ONE?! One would think that if a nuclear bomb is on a plane, someone would have to type in a code or something to set it off. Even if the code’s just 1-2-3-4-5! Because the odds of the mountain the plane careens into typing that code are, well, slim. But nope, apparently not. No code at all. These bombs are just programmed to go off if they feel scared, apparently.

While the military recovered most of the pieces of the two bombs, they actually didn’t recover everything. In 2021 a reporter said while standing at the farm where the crash took place, “…about 180 feet below our shoes, gently radiating away with a half-life of 24,000 years, lies the plutonium core of the bomb’s secondary stage.”

Oh great, so when worms the size of tow trucks come out of the ground and start eating farmers in North Carolina, I guess our military will just call it “collateral damage.”

For the rest of the “greatest hits” of times our government and military nearly caused nuclear armageddon, be sure to watch the full video.

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines’ new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.