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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?"
Put it on ebay. ;)
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Clearly someone tried to nuke the whales, and then covered it up!
Gotta nuke somethin'!
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"the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?" Is it just me or does anybody think the answer to this question would be better arrived at by the US government than the "Other" people that would be interested in the device?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
So THAT'S where I left it.
Please send it to the following address...
Err, maybe that's not such a good idea.
Who are you people? What? No, it's not mine.. It's engraved? I'm being framed. UNHAND ME YOU SCOUjsjcds,.......
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Fishing is good around that thing...
Look it's a GIANT TUNA! And it glows in the dark. And has 3 eyes.
On the one hand, a recovery would be expensive, dangerous, and probably unnecessary. On the other hand, if we leave it there... the terrorists win.
Love the Third Amendment?
Those that decided to build this bomb should be forced to dive down to it themselves in a diving suit of choice and pick it up with their bare hands and bring it to the surface. Those who make a mess should be responsible for cleaning up after themselves. They're probably dead though.
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.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
SCO Headquarters.
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?
For one thing it's a danger to the local marine environment. There's no telling how long radiation levels in the area have been higher than normal, but leaving a nuke with decaying seals on it will do nothing for the area.
And, for another thing, you want to go retrieve it before someone else does. Nuclear - or should that be "nu-cu-lar"? - material lying there just waiting to be had is a potential goldmine for a terrorist organisation, etc. The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Obviously, we need to get it back and get rid of it. If an arab group or someone else with a chip on their shoulder got their filthy hands on it, there's no telling what could happen.
Ummm, the mosque in my community is an arab group.
Let's keep the racial bigotry, subconcious or not, to a minimum.
How much is the shipping and handling?
Sincerely yours,
Osama bin Laden
AHA! THAT'S where Saddam hid it.
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?
Utah would be a good spot.
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.
I live in a country with a 300 billion dollar annual PEACETIME military budget, and they can't locate an accidentally dropped nuclear bomb in 12 feet of water to recover it?
Instead, a hobbiest treasure hunter with a civilian boat and a WalMart geiger counter has to do the job for them and send the US military a GPS point.
That makes me sick to my stomach, no wonder we can't find Osama or WMD's.
Tell me again who's the real winner when it takes a 5 billion dollar nuclear aircraft carrier to deploy a 20 million dollar plane flown by a pilot with a million dollar education, dropping a ten thousand dollar bomb just to kill some Iraqi kid hiding in a hole with a $20 russian surplus rifle?
This to me is symbolic of everything that's wrong with our bloated defense budget.
Vote libertarian!!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
But there is still the problem that most likely this thing would be difficult to recover. Its not like jumping into the deep end of the pool and retrieving a plastic toy that sunk down there.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke...
... who forever shall be known as 'Duke Nukem'
As an open-minded American, I lately find myself struggling with a wave of anti-islamic sentiment.
Please, folks, let's not judge or label a group by the loonies who attach themselves to it. That's the same sort of stupid reasoning Rob Enderle has against Linux, isn't it?
The grandparent should have used "terrorist," a behavioral label, rather than implying some ethnic group = terrorist.
I found this fascinating account of a hydrogen bomb accidently dropped in 1961 and still buried on a North Carolina farm. Although major portions were recovered, the uranium never was.
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Its non-functioning, nukes have a shelf life of ~5 years before the plutonium turns into another isotope.
Steaming pile of bullshit. I swear, if the subject has the word "nuclear" in it, Slashdot's about as reliable as the Weekly World News.
The isotope of plutonium used in nuclear weapons is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. After 5 years, almost all of the Pu-239 in a nuclear weapon will still be Pu-239.
In addition the Mark 15 Mod 0's an odd bomb.
Modern thermonuclear weapons are three-stage devices. There's a small fission trigger, whose yield is boosted by tritium injection. The radiation from the trigger ignites fusion in a second stage of lithium deuteride. Then the neutrons coming off of the fusion stage can be used to fission the bomb's tamper, made of uranium-238. U-238 won't sustain a chain reaction, but it'll fission merrily if you bombard it with fast neutrons. So, basically the boosted primary accounts for a minority of the weapon's yield, and the second stage, the fusion segment, accounts for the majority. But you can design things so that the majority of the yield comes from fission of the U-238 tamper.
The Mark 15's kind of an inversion of this. It was an early fusion bomb, back when they were still using liquid deuterium in some designs. In the Mark 15 Mod 0, the third stage is the bomb's casing, which is made of highly-enriched uranium, almost pure U-235.
Yes, the bomb's casing is almost-weapons-grade uranium. By making the case out of HEU, they didn't need to worry so much about efficient compression of the fusion stage, because the fissioning of that huge amount of HEU would send the whole thing thermonyclear. Inefficient, sure, but they hadn't quite figured everything out yet.
That's why this bomb's a concern. According to the Air Force, the primary, the 'pit,' wasn't placed in the bomb, so the primary can't detonate. Even if they're bullshitting, the twin traumas of impact and age have probably so screwed up the internals of the bomb that the only detonation possible would be low-order, a fizzle, biggest problem would be the environmental effects of scattering that much radioactive material into the river.
So that's not the concern. The concern is that whoever recovers it now has his hands on well over a ton of weapons-grade uranium, easily enough to make not one, but several crude Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs. I mean, this was a bomb that had a total yield of 1.7 megatons, and 1.3 megatons of that came from fission. That's a lot of U-235.
This was the device tested as Castle Nectar.
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
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
It should be retrieved. If this were a modern fission-fusion-fission bomb, it wouldn't be a concern. The Air Force says it doesn't have the fission trigger installed, so with a modern device that means you don't have a bomb. You need a fission bomb to ignite the lithium deuteride in the fusion stage, and you need the neutrons from the fusion stage to fission the U-238 jacket. So, again, no primary, no bomb. Leave it there, rivers already feed natural uranium into the oceans at a rate of 3.2x10^4 tons every year.
But this isn't a modern bomb, it was a transitional device between the earliest, liquid-dueterium monsters and modern three-stage designs. They weren't yet sure how to achieve efficient compression of the fusion stage, so they wrapped the bomb in highly-enriched uranium to be sure the fusion stage would light off. The bomb had a design yield of 1.7 megatons, and something like 1.3 megatons of that would be due to the fission of the U-235 jacket.
That means that this bomb contains a lot of almost-weapons-grade uranium. Again, 1.3 megatons of yield from the fission of uranium. The largest pure-fission bomb we ever detonated was the 500-kiloton Mark 18 prototype, and that used about 60 kilograms of HEU. Assuming linear scaling, that means we're looking at upwards of 156 kilograms of HEU in this bomb. Critical mass of uranium's about 16 kilograms. Double that to overengineer a bomb, and that means whoever gets their mitts on this thing could build 4 or 5 crude Hiroshima-type bombs, each with a yield of several kilotons.
That's bad. They need to retrive this thing, even if there's a risk they blow it up in situ. I'd rather have some of this stuff scattered in an unusable form offshore than have Mohammed and his band of Merry Pranksters get their hands on 4 or 5 cities' worth of U-235.
Move it please.
Thank you,
A Concerned North Carolina Resident
Jay | http://oldos.org
WEAPONS LOST/MISSING
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean - somewhere between Dover Air Force Base (Delaware) and Atlantic City, New Jersey
February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia (this story)
September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island, Washington. Since this is slashdot, I feel obligated to point out that this is about 30 miles from Redmond.
January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina
December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean (only miles from the Japanese island chain of Ryukyu)
Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean - 400-500 miles southwest of the Azores.
Any slashdotters have a geiger counter, a boat, and some free time?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The material used in this particular weapon is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. That means that this device is and will be a hot-potato for much longer than you or I will be debating this subject.
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.
I'm pretty surprised that no one has mentioned that this bomb lacked the plutonium trigger needed for a thermonuclear explosion. The plutonium trigger is the primary means of "arming" the weapon.
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.
Unfortunately, this weapon might not prove terribly effective against the kind folks at SCO.
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride, not the Pu-239 used in the surrounding triggers (which is quite salvageable from both an engineering and a financial standpoint).
A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs. (The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.)
Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero, as you would expect of a fusion device that has spent many tritium half lives on the seafloor. The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
Very informative and very frightening. Googling "Castle Nectar" returned - among others - this interesting page: Project Castle with an image of the beast.
668.5
LICK IT! LICK IT!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Since Slashdot's about as reliable as the Weekly World News, I can't trust a word you're saying. :)
And if it isn't the bomb, the question now is "WTF?!"
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).
Courtesy everyones favorite free encyclopedia:
List here
I especially like the one they dropped in a farmers field but they couldn't dig it up so they bought the field.
Also kinda scary that Rocky Flats which has had it's share of disasters is pretty much in my backyard.
-Mikey P
Give it to Saddam, to justify the war in Iraq.
Logic, macros, and more
All that information is openly available in books and science magazines. The real secret is in exact knowledge of how to do things, not in the principle how things should be working. For example, the physicists knew how to make the bomb before the Manhattan Project started; and it took years and billions of dollars to actually make it work.
I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
Probably everyone could do so. The real question would be "how close to the optimum yield you will get?" - because the easiest way to make a bomb would be to take two pieces of uranium in two hands, and to bring them together as fast as you can. This will result in -some- explosion, but not very powerful one. The secret is in how you assemble the critical mass in under microseconds, and those who know won't tell.
Don't know how accurate they are, but according to that show: the CIA already had pictures and knew where the sub was from 10 years earlier. It sank in the 1950's in the same month as an American sub the Scorpion (the accidents were unrelated). It had one missle on it (I may have missed what happened to the others, the graphic indicated it could hold 3). In the late 1950's an American sub was sent out there to locate it and photograph it and succeeded.
When Nixon was elected he was told about the sub and authorized raising it. The Glomar Explorer lifted the entire sub, but then the lifting contraption broke and 2/3 of the sub fell back to the floor. They got the front third and recovered six bodies (which they buried at sea in a russian-style ceremony), and they recoverd some code information (though I doubt codes from 1950's were much use in 1974!).
The Russians completely covered up the fact that they lost the sub, and the Americans did not say they had found it, so when the story about the Glomar Explorer leaked out, it was also the first anybody had heard about the sub sinking!
Knew there was some explanation for Zell Miller.
Hey! It DOES have those fifties tailfins! Man, I totally dig classic, er, bombs.
"The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -- David Hume
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.
"The Emperor had been told that war could not be won as early as February 1942. In 1943, the [Japanese] navy had reached the conclusion that defeat was inevitable. In 1944 Tojo had been thrown out by a navy putsch. None of this made any difference. The fear of assassination was too great. In May 1945 Russia was asked to mediate. But Stalin sat on the offer, since in January at Yalta he had been promised substantial territorial rewards to enter the Japanese war in August.
... prosecute the war to the bitter end'. The final plan for the defense of Japan itself, 'Operation Decision', provided for 10,000 suicide planes (most converted trainers), fifty-three infantry divisions and twenty-five brigades: 2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 million army and navy civil employees and a civilian militia of 28 million .
On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, 'Fundamental Policy to be Followed hensceforth in the Conduct of the War,' which asserted 'we shall
They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. The Allied commanders assumed that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese would lives would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already experienced, it would be in the range of 10-20 million.
The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion became unavoidable. On 1 August, 820 B29's unloaded 6,600 tons of explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America's one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan's eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be 'obliterated' had been dropped two days before . No notice was taken..."
-- Johnson, Paul: Modern Times
Read your history.