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Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast?
securitas writes "Both CNN and ABC News report that a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 may have been found. The 'Mark 15, Mod 0' nuclear bomb was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean off Savannah after a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter collided in mid-air. 'The 7,600-pound, 12-foot-long thermonuclear bomb contained 400 pounds of high explosives as well as uranium' and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke,, who said that radiation levels were from seven to 10 times higher than normal. If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
I think we should deny we have it, and then detonate something like it near south america. We should then have an impromptu parade in our honor.
Then after we make everyone think we blew it up, we claim that it is a smear campaign by south america.
(In case you missed it mods, that was making fun of North Korea)
Chris
and put it in a museum.
This is a much bigger thing to be concerned about.
I have a few ideas on what they could do with it. They could bring it up, take it apart and see how everything held up after being submerged for so long or perhaps take at the nuclear material and put it on display in one of the smithsonians.
The report also estimated it would take as long as five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.
Can anyone explain why the retrieval process would take so long if the bomb is supposedly "likely harmless"? I'm honestly baffled at this, and if we do not expend the money to retrieve it, are there any international accords in place to make sure our enemies do not retrieve/ reverse engineer it?
It is probably not as dangerous as some people are making it out to be. Remeber the air force had arming procedures in place with those things, the bomb is most likely not armed properly.
Although it could be argued that the explosive used, whatever they are, might be unstable after such a long period of time.
Why not dig a hole and bury it? Granted, I'm not an engineer and I have little understanding of how radioactivity affects the environment, but it seems like it would be safer to dig a hole in the ocean and bury it.
We have drilling equipment capable of drilling deep in to the ocean floor to tap oil reserves. Couldn't something like this be used to bury it?
It would seem to me to be too risky to try raising it, given it's proximity to population centers.
Check my journal for gmail invites!
They made a huge fuss about this in the virginia pilot almost 2 years ago. definitely old news.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Since the radiation levels are so high - why not use it as a test field on the surrounding fish. Oh yeah - that's already been done. Hasn't it?
Realistically though, how many people's lives are going to be lost because of the government leaving it there all of this time? Radioactive fish, shellfish, and others do not really glow in the dark just because they are radioactive. (ie:You could have eaten radioactive fish and not known it.) So what this means is that a lot of the people who may have died of cancer over the years in that area have just cause to file suit with the US Government over this. And just as surely, with tides, currents, and the like the radioactive material has spread over at least a portion of the coast line. I'd hate to be someone living in that area right now and know that your property just became a wasteland.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
The funny thing is, he probably wouldn't want it shipped that far. How far is it from Georgia to Washington D.C. anyways? Probably wouldn't bother with insurance either.
Well, since Uncle Sam called for these weapons to be created, I'm sure they'll be thrilled to pay a billion dollars to all of the tax payers, then have to front the money to put this bomb away for good, and at least giving a try to find the other ten.
At this point, I'd be happy with them disposing of the radioisotopes in a safe mannor, then blowing the rest of the bomb. Hopefully not enough of the radiation has leaked into the environment to still allow this to be possible.
It should be a matter of National Security to secure the radioisotopes from this weapon. Since they practically broadcasted the location of the weapon, and the fact that a nuclear weapon on the bottom of the ocean is still viable as a dirty bomb, the question is, how long will it to be until a terrorist organization or a country with enough balls goes looking for one of these bombs? I'm not too worried, but I'm just tired of the government hiding things like this from us.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Right on. Let's keep pretending that radical christians or jews are just as likely to carry out a suicide bombing as radical islamic fundamentalists.
I totally agree with you there - we could have just nuked Iraq for much less than 10% of our current expenditures, without the loss of a single American life. I think that would be horrible, and totally wrong to do, but more effective and cheaper.
At the risk of sounding crass, I wonder if those Iraqi fighters realize the price we've paid in American lives and dollars to protect their civilian populations.
The whole thing is just so frustrating, because our businesses are getting taxed into oblivion to subsidise the military jobs program. I think some old-fashioned ingenuity and greater cost controls would benefit the productivity and effectiveness of our armed forces.
My friend is part of an armored brigade in the army, getting ready to be deployed the second time over there. They lack basic policing equipment such as battering rams for doors, but they are required to sweep houses periodically and search for people.
The US defense budget is totally messed up, lobbiests from Lockheed and other Star Wars companies sap away funding that should be spent on improved pay and equipment for the soldiers on the ground to do their job better.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I appreciate the information you have brought into the discussion. Your post not only blows away the disinformation of the grandparent post, but adds new and relevent information, as well.
What I'd like to mention, however, is that there is another concern: The bomb is sitting above a fresh-water aquifer used by the nearby town. As, according to another source I read, the barrier between this device and the aquifer is only a (thick) layer of clay, I would imagine that there has already been some level of contamination to the drinking water. As the bomb settles and slowly sinks, likely being more dense than the surrounding clay, the contamination levels will rise.
The hard part, and the most expensive aspect to the retreival situation, is that a crew would have to retrieve the bomb without collapsing the aquifer roof and using equipment that would prevent radiation poisoning of the retrieval crew. Add to that the fact that the bomb is under twenty feet of silt, and you have a very tricky situation. You can't just build a four-sided dam to keep the water out--like those used to construct bridge pylons--and it would take some very specialized and delicate equipment to remove enough silt to retrieve the bomb without spreading contaminated silt everywhere.
It's a difficult situation, to say the least. The good news is that there few sea-floor excavation vehicles capable of retrieving the bomb, even without the contamination issue, and that an excavation going on in that area, now that the (supposed) find has been publicized, will draw a huge amount of suspicion. Due to the weight of the bomb itself and the sheer volume of silt required to be removed before the bomb could even be reached, it wouldn't exactly be an overnight job. The threat of terrorists digging up a piece of the bomb is, therefore, less than the threat of terrorists getting their hands on a seperate source of radioactive materials and building an atomic bomb.
[Hopefully, I'm not spreading bad information, myself, now.]
~UP
Eat the Path.
Well, for now there are no more hurricanes, but maybe we can save this bomb up for the next big one and see if it's really true that a nuclear bomb won't affect a hurricane.
The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities (due to the reduced fallout and blast - the radiation blast as noted above falls off quickly away from ground zero).
OK, so that's what a "neutron bomb" is. That's trivial then, and not what I was thinking. The depleted uranium jacket is a dirt cheap way to increase the yield. Depleted uranium may not support a self-sustaining chain reaction but it can parasitize one, and it releases plenty of energy if neutrons shine on it.
Just a brief excerpt from John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy, FSG, 1974. He spends a lot of time with the most prolific fission bomb designer, Ted Taylor. The following occurs in lower Manhattan.
"...We had been heading for midtown but impulsively kept going, drawn irresistibly toward the tallest buildings in the world. We went down the Chambers Street ramp and parked, in a devastation of rubble, beside the Hudson River. Across the water, in New Jersey, the Colgate sign, a huge neon clock as red as the sky, said 6:15. We looked up the west wall of the nearer tower. From so close, so narrow an angle, there was nothing at the top to arrest the eye, and the building seemed to be some sort of probe touching the earth from the darkness of space. "What an artifact that is!" Taylor said, and he walked to the base and paced it off. We went inside, into a wide, uncolumned lobby. The building was standing on its glass-and-steel walls and on its elevator core. Neither of us had been there before. We got into an elevator. He pressed, at random, 40. We rode upward in a silence broken only by the muffled whoosh of air and machinery and by Taylor's describing where the most effective place for a nuclear bomb would be. The car stopped, the door sprang back, and we stepped off into the reception lounge of Toyomenka America, Inc., a Japanese conglomerate of industries. No one was behind the reception desk. The area was furnished with inviting white couches and glass coffee tables. On the walls hung Japanese watercolors. We sat down on one of the couches. "The rule of thumb for a nuclear explosion is that it can vaporize its yield in mass," he said. "This building is about thirteen hundred feet high by two hundred by two hundred. That's about fifty million cubic feet. Its average density is probably two pounds per cubic foot. That's a hundred million pounds, or fifty kilotons-give or take a factor of two. Any explosion inside with a yield of, let's say, a kiloton would vaporize everything for a few tens of feet. Everything would be destroyed out to and including the wall. If the building were solid rock and the bomb were buried in it, the crater radius would be a hundred and fifty feet. The building's radius is a hundred feet, and it is only a core and a shell. It would fall, I guess, in the direction in which the bomb was off-centered. It's a little bit like cutting a big tree." "Thermal radiation tends to flow in directions where it is unimpeded," Taylor was saying. "It actually flows. It goes around corners. It could go the length of the building before being converted in shock. It doesn't get converted into shock before it picks up mass."
We went down a stirway a flight or two and out onto an unfinished floor. Piles of construction material were here and there, but otherwise the space was empty, from the elevator core to the glass facade. "I can't think in detail about this subject, considering what would happen to people, without getting very upset and not wanting to consider it at all," Taylor said. "And there is a level of simplicity that we have not talked about, because it goes over my threshold to do so. A way to make a bomb. It is so simple that I just don't want to describe it. I will tell you this: Just to make a crude bomb with an unpredictable yield-but with a better than even chance of knocking this building down-all that is needed is abuot a dozen kilos of plutonium-oxide powder, high explosives (I don't want to say how much), and a few things that anyone could buy at a hardware store. An explosion in this building would not be completely effective unless it were placed in the core. Something exploded out here in the office area would be just like a giant shrapnel bomb. You'd get a real sheet of radiation puring out of the windows. You'd have half a fireball, and it would crater down. What would remain would probably be a stump." "Walking to a window of the eastern wall, he looked across a space of about six hundred feet at 1 Liberty Plaza. "Through free air,
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.
As someone who was trained by the US Navy to protect nuclear weapons, I'd like to chime in on this:
DAMN RIGHT! I busted my ass and busted peoples balls protecting nukes. There's this little thing called two-man control. At least two men have to be in the room (area) with the nuke at all times. Anyone tries to get past you, whether by force or being a sneaky bastard: double-tap! The deader the better!
And God forbid one of your shipmates breaks protocol. Officers and sailors could have their careers ruined by slipping up while protecting nukes. And I'm serious! Those alarms sound and the guns come out.
They'd (US authorities) better get their collective asses out there and retrieve this thing. Don't tell me I wasted my time pointing loaded guns at people while protecting nukes while some dumbass flyboy comes back one bomb too short and everyone turns a blind eye.
{{alright, I never pointed a loaded gun at someone while protecting nukes but it wasn't out of mind while doing so...}}But you get my point.
I find myself both frightened and disturbed by the incredible amounts of knowledge both had and openly displayed by numerous individuals posting to this story regarding the components and inner workings of nuclear weapons.
Perhaps more disturbing is that whenever someone gets the description of the anatomy and physiology almost right - but not quite right - (as if they're still working on it), someone else comes along to merrily correct them. I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If that is the way you really are thinking about those subjects, I can see why you are disgusted since the way you frame the subjects reduces them to absurdity.
For example, the defense budget doesn't really have a lot to do with the ability to find the lost bomb, but physics does. The bomb is under at least 12 feet of water and is probably buried under at least 5-10 feet of mud. Water and mud would act as radiation shielding on top of the bomb case which would no doubt have been enough to allow people to be in its vicinity safely. That means that there would not be a lot of apparent radiation to go on to find the bomb. (Rough calculation shows that the water and mud reduce the apparent radiation to about 1/274877906944) Even if there is a higher background radiation coming from the bomb, if it is only 7-10x you would have to get within 500 meters to have a good chance of detecting it. 500 meters at sea is not a lot. It may also be that the current radiation levels are only that high due to 45+ years of corrosion of the bomb case.
I also think that you don't want to make the mistake of believing that either Osama or WMDs should necessarily be easy to find. People often overestimate the power of our intelligence services and think that they can work miracles. Remember the problem with finding the SCUD missiles in the first Gulf war? They are the size of a semi tractor trailer. They have to be in the open to work. Iraq had a large number of them. The Iraqis managed to fire quite a few of them undetected. Shoot and scoot. Both the WMDs and Osama would be a much tougher proposition.
Any of Saddams WMDs would have been a major state secret after the 1990 Gulf War and the resulting scrutiny and sanctions of the UN. The entire apparatus of the Iraqi state would have been used to conceal and protect them. The most thorough means of protecting them would have been used, and the inspectors are finding traces of that sort of effort used to protect WMD programs, if not actual weapons. Saddam was certainly ruthless enough that he could have had them hid, killed everybody who did the hiding, and then killed the executioners. The WMDs themselves would require no more than several semitractor trailers of volume to be militarily useful. That isn't a lot to hide in a country the size of Iraq when the entire power of the state is behind the effort to hide them. Good grief, there are still caches of ammunition turning up in Europe from World War 2. Unlike the Scuds, the WMDs wouldn't move. It was the movement that made the Scuds more vulnerable.
And Osama? One man with a few bodyguards hiding in a mountainous country with a notable percentage of the population that would respect him and be willing to help a fellow Muslim against the infidels. Add to that is the fact that even if we did get close, there is the long legacy of preparations for guerilla warfare to help him. There was a fight along the Pakistani border within the last year in which the Pakistanis deployed a large number of troops and thought that they had someone important trapped. Whoever it was apparently escaped in an escape tunnel that was more than 1 mile (1600m) long, coming out behind their troops! Like I said, not an easy proposition. We are likely to get him or neutralize him in the long run, but it may be a while. Oh, and just dumping large numbers of troops into Afghanistan wouldn't necessarily help either. They need to be the right kind of troops. The Soviet Army of 150,000+ soldiers in Afghanistan was almost useless against the Afghan rebels until they started pumping in a lot of special forces and helicopters. They still had a 10 year fight on their hands.
I'm sure you really don't think that the only reason that we send an aircraft carrier from the United States to the Persian Gulf is to kill one sniper. The aircraft carrier provides a secure, mobile, self-contained airbase for the purpose of projecting air power. It can be used to patrol waters threatened by all manner of threats, such as Irani
Was someone elected on a "let's build atomic bombs platform"?
John F. Kennedy, no less. He claimed during the 1960 presidential campaign that the USSR had gotten ahead in nuclear capability and that it was Ike's fault (and by extension, the fault of his young vicepresident, one Richard M. Nixon).
JFK went on to win, while Nixon licked his wounds. Nixon came back to win eight years later, with a hawkish platform in 1968.
The neutron bomb of the 80's would have created plenty of fallout and radioactivity; the point was it created less blast damage and so didn't sound as bad (the fallout was sort-of ignored).
If "not sound as bad" was the intent, it sure failed at that. Whether it was a good idea or not, the neutron bomb was a public relations disaster, with it's apparent design to "kill people and leave buildings undamaged". Pointing out this became one of the favorite lines of those opposed to nuclear arms.
I'm suprised people here who obviously know a lot about these weapons seem totally unaware of the public perception of the neutron bomb.
Most nuclear weapons in that era were transported with there core's removed. If the weapon was to be used, it would be armed by the physical insertion of the fissile core into the high explosive trigger system.
Essentially, a plutonium based fission device operates through a Highly complicated system of focused explosions crafted to compress the plutonium core evenly from all angles to create a supercritical mass. This is a very complicated and technical explosive. Accidental detination by overheating will generally not result in a uniform explosion, so the core will not begin to fiz.
A uranium weapon works by the rapid combination of 2 sub critical masses to form a supercritical mass. If these aren't brought together rapidly enough the ensuing reaction will blow itself apart before the mass has a chance to really get going (about 70 generations of fission reactions).
So, a nuclear weapon needs a lot of high powered explosives to get going. To be extra safe, the fissile material and the explosives are kept seperate to prevent a nuclear disaster in the event of an accidental explosion. Without those high explosives AND the fissile core, there is No Way to detonate a nuclear device. Any radiation that is still present is no doubt from the radioactivity imparted to the casing when it was exposed to the nuclear core.
Yes, He-3 will happily fuse; however, because you need the fission reaction to get it to the conditions needed for it to fuse, you'll have a hard time of it.
That's not too far from my more serious fear: If this thing is left on the ocean bottom in 12 feet of water, somebody with nefarious purposes may try and recover it.
Now, I'm pretty sure that no 'friends of bin-ladin' woul probably be allowed anywhere near that thing right now, but some right-wing militia members might decide to, uhm, 'go fishin'....
If this low-budget recovery failed, worst case is that we might find out (the hard way) whether the military was hiding the truth about the bomb's "Radiation trigger" (apparently a small nuke inside the hydrogen bomb).If, on the other hand, the recovery succeeded, it'd be hard to say exactly where they might use their booty -- it could be anything from blowing up Tehran (teach them a lesson about nukes) to showing Oklahoma what a real militia can do.
Militia is such a generic term....
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Is it just me, or is this scarily like the plot of the book (didn't see the film)... I don't mind science-fiction becoming reality (for the most part :-) but I have a real problem with nuclear bombs being unaccounted for. I had thought the whole premise for the book was ridiculous, but ....
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Perhaps you should investigate the numerous nuclear accidents that the US Military has had. One good example is when the US accidentally "dirty bombed" Spain.
In Feb 2000, Bill Richardson, energy secretary under Clinton, went on a tour of all of the OPEC member states except Iraq, Iran, and Libya. He found that they are all at maximum production -- ie, while they have more oil in the ground, they can't pump it up any faster. The US will need 7.5 more million barrels of oil per day by 2020. The only excess oil we can find lies in these "unstable states" (ie, states that don't kowtow to the US). That is why we had to invade Iraq -- they have the worlds 2nd largest proven oil reserve, after Saudi Arabia (our other toady). Remember, the CIA hired and trained Saddam Hussein to assasinate the then democratically elected president of Iraq. He failed, but when the CIA did succeed, we helped put him in power. One of the many reasons why Iraqi's don't trust the US.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
the philippine verison of the cia nailed and shut down an international muslim extremist plot to blow up a number of jumbo jets at the same time flying to/ from the usa in the mid-1990s
and during their investigation, they uncovered the whole flying airplanes-into-buildings conspiracy as well, including a number of the prime movers and players of the whole 9/11 terrorist crew, and promptly notified their american counterparts about the whole thing
in other words, the intelligence service of a smaller, poorer country, with funding perhaps 1/1000th that of the cia, was doing a better job of protecting us citizens than its own government
thank you philippines
fu cia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities."
Excuse me, but there's some redundancy here:
Warsaw pact troop concentration = people;
West German towns and cities = property.
And having lived in Germany at the time, I'd say most of the demonstrators - apart from the communist minority - were very much opposed to nuclear weapons use by both sides, particularly since most Germans had relatives on the other side.
I can see how an American might view nuking places on the other side of the globe with equanimity (not that I think most do!), but Germany was the central battlefield of most WWIII projections, and having had most of its big cities flattened by conventional means in WWII, was somewhat averse to having some Pentagon asshole play with thoughts of turning any part of it into nuclear wasteland.
Germans knew that they would be instant toast one way or the other in WWIII, and either side raising the tension by stationing nukes was not welcomed. Remember the Cuban missile crisis? This was the same thing.
Look at the casualties taken by American forces as they moved across the Pacific - the Japanese at that time were happy to sacrifice pilots in Kamikaze raids. The infantry on the ground refused to surrender and had to be burned out by Flamethrowers.
There is no doubt that the invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in casualties on all sides of well in excess of a million people - the Japanese government at the time would have ensured this.
Whilst the dropping of the bombs may seem a shameful act today, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Ask the populations of America [and Australia and the UK, whose soldiers suffered terribly in Prisoner of War camps at the hands of the Japanese Military] in 1945 what they would wish to do, the answer would have been quite clear - drop the bombs, stop the war and get our loved ones home. And yes, there was a political dimension - the weapsons use was an indicator to Stalin of the power America now posessed - remember that even prior to the fall of Berlin, relations between the Western Powers and Soviet Russia were worsening all the time.
Finally to even try to compare the genocidal tactics of the Nazis with the dropping of atomic weapons is shameful, and shows a poor and blinkered understanding of history.
Ok, *you* go to the American people in 1945, after 4 years of war and tens of thousands of casualties already, and tell them to sacrifice another 10,000 soldiers to spare the lives of however many soldiers/civilians of the enemy (BTW, the estimates of casualties for invading mainland Japan exceeded 100,000 not 10,000). I know what the answer would have been. Sure, I don't agree with it, but you and I weren't alive then and didn't have to suffer through the war the way they did.
For the same reason I tell people that no one should be surprised how brutal the Israelis have become after 30+ years of terrorism waged against them, I also say no one should be surprised at the behavior of the Allies at the end of WWII. The people back then simply would not have seen the moral dilemma you and I see. They wanted the war over, with as few further casualties on their own side as possible, but after all the death and destruction of the previous years, they no longer gave a damn how many enemy casualties it took to end the war. They just wanted the war to end.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of the moral supremicists who, from a future era very different from the past one, with the perfect hindsight of history, and without the context of living through a long and painful war, cast judgement on the people from 60 years ago, as if those of us living today would have automatically done things differently. I'm not at all sure *any* of us, born in that time, with their limited knowledge, would have done *anything* differently.
The real moral of the story, is that destructive, long-term warfare (especially modern "total war") must be avoided at all costs, because no matter what the cause, *both* sides will begin to lose their humanity the longer the bloodletting goes on.
It produces mostly lead, ultimately.
The daughter element of Pu239 is U235.
The decay tree for a fission reaction is really complicated, though: there's a multitude of ways each atom in the sample can decay, and it may stop for a very long time as some long-lived low-level isotope before heading on down the chain.
The decay of the results of a fission reaction is complex because the fission process produces multiple isotopes of multiple elements. At the same time throwing neutrons around which can be captured changing the isotope mix. The fission products are very unlikely to decay to any form of lead, given that they tend to be in row 5 of the periodic table. Hence Sr90 and I131 being present. N.B. many of the isotopes produced by fission have such short half lives that they are difficult to detect.