On January 18, 1957, five planes took off from Castle Air Force Base in California on "by far the most colorful and perhaps the most important of all peacetime operations ever undertaken by the United States Air Force,”
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.