Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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?
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.