The 1960 "U-2 incident" revealed what the Soviets had claimed for years, that the US was violating Soviet airspace with covert spy missions. But the breadth of the so called “ferret flights” remained a state secret that only started to emerge decades later. Many of those flights were made in a special reconnaissance version of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet.
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.