New Mexico. The navigator of a B-36 bomber loses his balance after an air pocket and grabs the first handhold he finds, the bomb’s manual release handle. It’s an H-bomb, fortunately without a nuclear core, which falls in a desert area not far from the Sandia laboratories. The incident won’t be made public immediately. At 11:50 a.m. local time, a U.S. Air Force B-36J-5-CF Peacemaker, 52-2816, was ferrying a Mark 17 ten-megaton thermonuclear device carrying a 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb from Biggs AFB, Texas, to Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, when a crew member in the bomb bay was shaken by turbulence and inadvertently grabbed the bomb’s manual release lever to stabilize himself, accidentally releasing the hydrogen bomb and dropping it directly through the Peacemaker’s closed bomb doors, allowing the nuclear bomb to fall freely until impact 4.5 miles south of the Kirtland tower. The nuclear chain required for detonation fortunately did not occur, however, the non-nuclear high explosives detonated on impact, creating a 25-by-12-foot crater. The incident was revealed to the public in the 1980s.
