The one-point safety tests of the Mark 28’s core, performed secretly at Los Alamos during the Eisenhower administration, had been money well spent. If the Mark 28 hadn’t been made inherently one-point safe, the bombs that hit the ice could have produced a nuclear yield. And the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon, or two, or three—without any warning, at the air base considered essential for the defense of the United States—could have been misinterpreted at SAC headquarters. Nobody expected the Thule monitor to destroy Thule.
