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40 Years Ago, the US Lost a Nuclear Bomb
Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that in 1968 the US abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below. The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been 'destroyed' and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons. Investigators found that 'something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary.' A subsequent search by a US submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was abandoned. 'There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components,' said a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. 'It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.'"
The system works.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Operation Thunderball is a success.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
If this scenario didn't occur on the TV show "24" it well could have. Life imitates art or vice versa?
Mother Russia now has your bombs.
Just send in Christian Slater to recover it. It'll only take him a few hours, with the additional bonus that movie footage of the recovery mission will make for a great action movie once the evil John Travolta tries to steal it.
Wonder if Sarah Palin can see it from her house.
Heh... this sounds just like a trailer to a monster movie of some kind... something like Godzilla is going to rise up out of a Greenland Fjord and go about ransacking... what's a town in Greenland?
From a unnamed news source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tybee_Bomb
And it's far more conveniently located (somewhere off the coast of Georgia). No need to go diving somewhere in the Arctic!
This sort of national irresponsibility needs to stop, right now.
I realise these events happened a little while ago now but nonetheless just what the hell did the USA think it was doing flying nuclear bombs around outside their own borders in the first place, this was, it can now be seen, a completely indefensible and irrepsonsible course of action and one for which the USA should now make a full apology.
The best course of action now is for the USA to hand over full documentation of the accident to a responsible and trustworthy country, France for example, and let them conduct an investigation to first of all try and find this nuclear timebomb and second of all to assign blame and set up the process for trying those who are guilty and punishing them appropriately.
Now the USA is at least out of the hands of the mad cowboy and we've good reason to hope Obamas administration will behave far more honourably we can hope their will be no repeats of this disaster but nonetheless until we in the rest of the civilised world can be sure of that the EU should impose regular nuclear inspections on the USA just to double check the same terrible mistakes are not being made today.
It's only a matter of time before Al-Qaida finds the lost bombs.
Perhaps this can somehow be used to demonstrate that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of in the ocean floor? There have been serious proposals for disposing of waste in holes drilled hundreds of feet beneath the seabed in especially deep water.
I know this is unpopular with the anti-nuclear crowd, but a "real demo" may provide useful data.
John
Ever since I left Greenland, I've been feeling like I was forgetting something. Thank you, BBC for reminding me!
I tried to walk into Target, but I missed. --Mitch Hedburg
One of the BBC articles maintains that the US did not tell Denmark about both the nuclear bombs used in Chrome Dome missions, and the fact that they lost one.
Greenland is a self-governing province of Denmark but the carrying of nuclear weapons over Danish territory was kept secret.
But the real purpose of this search was deliberately hidden from Danish officials.
One document from July reads: "Fact that this operation includes search for object or missing weapon part is to be treated as confidential NOFORN", the last word meaning not to be disclosed to any foreign country.
The other article says:
Denmark did not co-operate with the parliament's petitions committee, and is still refusing to release key environmental radiation records made of Thule at the time.
The Danish government had always denied that nuclear-armed US planes were flying over Danish-controlled Greenland - until the crash occurred.
And according to Ms Wallis, it is still trying to brush a difficult issue under the carpet.
Which at least implies that the Danish government knew but was trying to keep a lid on it.
So which is it?
This is nothing new (just because BBC finds something does not mean that it's news).
More or less everyone know that they dropped 4 bombs before the crash, and that they only found around 3 during the clean up.
Damn, Greenland is cold!
It'll only cost you ONE MILLION DOLLARS, er, ONE BILLION DOLLARS!
--Dr. Evil
Chances are the device was no longer operational after the crash. And, if they are correct that "The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated", then the device is probably in a large number of very small pieces.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
See, this is why we shouldn't allow rouge nations with little political stability and an insane president to have access to nuclear weapons.
I hope the UN considers sanctions.
Oh, wait. Sorry, were we talking about the US. Oh, that is fine then. Ignore what I said before.
You don't need, it as your technology is better then ours in the first place and your have your own bombs.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Only blue nations should be allowed.
The AntiJoey
The "If we can't find them nobody can" defense? Come on, a properly motivated industrial mogul could do it, requiring the intervention of a single MI6 operative to avert planetary destruction.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
So basically you can have a free nuclear weapon if you have the proper equipment to get it out of 40 feet of ice ? Wow! I'll have to start searching for my ice pick! Look out world!
In 1966, a nuclear armed B52 crashed over Palomares Spain, scattering radioactive material from multiple bombs, each 100 times more powerful than those which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
you had me at #!
5 February 1958: An Air Force B-47 Stratojet from Homestead AFB was on a simulated combat mission when the plane collided with an F-86 Sabre near Savannah, Georgia. The B-47 was carrying one Mk 15 hydrogen bomb without its core at the time of the accident. The plane made three unsuccessful landing attempts at Hunter Air Force Base before the weapon was jettisoned over the Atlantic Ocean to avoid the risk of a high explosive detonation at the base. The bomb was dropped several miles from the mouth of the Savannah River in Wassaw Sound off Tybee Island. Though an intensive nine-week search was launched using divers and sonar equipment, the weapon was never found. Another unsuccessful search was mounted in 2001, and reports of radiation detected less than a mile from shore led to speculation of the bomb's discovery in 2004. Further investigation concluded the radioactivity was naturally occurring and the weapon remains missing. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/weapons/q0268.shtml
"It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them."
I'll take famous last words for $1000, Alex...
Also highly amused the quote at the bottom of the page is from Stanley Kubrick, director of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb.
This sig is false.
...that the US is actually now a bleu nation not a rouge nation.
Why worry about a lost bomb which a first world nation can't get to without a major national project. First world nations don't need lost bombs to achieve nuclear capability.
You worry about nuclear material when it can be had for a case of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka by any idiot with a truck to cart it away. Though the seabed makes for a much better movie plot.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
isawthisondiggsoipostedit
In my opinion, these accidental releases of radioactive material pale in comparison
to the atmospheric tests the US used to do before it was
banned in 1963.
Here are some of the tests.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
And while we are at it, why not liberate democratically some oil ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
> "Thule" is from the Latin word with the same spelling meaning "northernmost part of the inhabitable world."
"Thule?" More like Cthulu, I'd say.
If you didn't vote for him last Tuesday, Cthulu's going nuclear. Prepare to pay the price!
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=297#more-297
Another amazing history of WWII era relics trapped under the ice (but they got them back!)
"I don't know what's scarier, losing a nuclear weapon or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it."
To this day, the USA alone have admitted losing 92 nuclear bombs.
This doesn't count those that were recovered in sometimes very expensive operations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palomares_hydrogen_bombs_incident
the remains of the primary will turn up in 50 to 100 years, just sitting on top of the ground where the ice used to be... We'll pick it up then.
These are just people who are trying to rip some money off the 'system'. If they really were poisoned, then they would have died years ago. Callous yes, but a simple truth.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
if there was no core?
We lost a family member in 1962 whose body, nor aircraft, nor the nuclear weapons on board were never recovered.
In the past few years there is some news that some pilots who went down in the Pacific were captured by Soviet patrols. That leaves it as an unknown whether our family member survived as well as unknown as to whether his plane or the weapons on board were recovered by the Soviets or other nations. Odds are that our family member perished immediately. We will never know for certain.
Gee the world map shows Greenland to be just a little out of the way, now Russia maybe. So Geography was not your strong suit in school, eh?
Yes, the Soviets were all just happy little larks after Stalin! Pin it all on Stalin!
No, they didn't support, let's say hundreds of insurrections across the third world throughout Latin America and Africa. No, not at all.
Afghanistan? Just "showing off". And a war on drugs! Let's forget about the hundreds of thousands slaughtered. It was all in good fun! Just joking around, guys! If this were sufficient provocation for war, the U.S. would own much of Central and South America at this point.
And the USSR absolutely didn't lend support to murderous dictators across the world. Nope.
Oh, I already know the response to this. "But the U.S. did it too! Waahh!" To which I say, "well, yeah we did." And I can already hear the, "but we HAD to do it to defend against your AGGRESSION towards us!" Yeah, I'm sure U.S. domination of Cuba was a big threat to the USSR. Massive. Same in Nicaragua. Chile. Bolivia. Huge swathes of Africa. Massive threats, that simply had to be met with Communist guerrilla forces who killed civilians by the truckload.
If you're looking for saints, you won't find any. But you're not looking - you're manufacturing.
Kill everyone and just take the oil.
Well, at least that part is going to be easier in Greenland ...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Now it is clear!
Ice in the poles do not melt because of global warming but because of nuclear weapon detonation.
Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore takes a whole new meaning now!
Funds our economy, really?
You mean "invests" in our economy and that means we are linked economically together, interdependently.
You may wash the dog but you dont wag his tail and if you dont like it, come to know our 2nd ammendment when you send your UN invasion forces.
In short fuck you and your motherland!
Ah, Steven Spielberg already have a script ready for this story, most of his PA's are subscribed to slashdot, hence the cool ideas :-)
By that logic and rule, U.S. has been the only real superpower since WWII. We already ruled the world, therefore any conflict did not fall in the "imperialism" bucket since it was merely territory we already ruled.
Also, I just found that up is down. Black is white. And that you're a genius!
She's like an angry rabid animal. When she's caged up we taunt and make jokes, but it wouldn't be funny if she was out and posed a real threat, would it? It would be scary.
She's going to run for President in the future. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And 63 years ago, they lost 2!
lolwut has to be my favorite tag for slashdot ever.
but really, unsurprisingly, our government has lost TONS of stuff over the years, not limited to just hardware, but essential records and documents. there's no real idea of "safe" anything really. any hardware can break. any documents can be destroyed, and even if they stand the test of time, the place in which they are stored can come down without anyone knowing about it.
considering how many renewal projects the world has had, what are the chances we're going to find another landfill with ET tapes or battlefield earth videos?
Sand isn't the issue. It's that pesky water. Which terrorists are NOT expert at.
Nuclear submarines aren't necessarily perfect. I'm not sure how good the Soviets ever got at tracking ours, but it's not inconceivable that if that was the only threat, a country could get pretty creative in tracking them, and come up with some sort of first strike to take them all out at once. Maybe with some type of undersea listening network like the U.S. had (has?) in the Atlantic.
The thinking behind the nuclear "trident" of bombers, ICBMs, and submarines -- aside from keeping all three branches of the U.S. military (and the contractors that support them) happy, which is probably a large part -- is that it keeps your enemy from concentrating their energies behind a single defensive strategy. If you have all three, then your enemy would have to build a SAM and early-warning system to shoot down the bombers, anti-missile technology to intercept the ICBMs, and ASW systems to go after the submarines. It's not practical. But if you only had one, they'd be able to focus their efforts and might be able to produce a viable defense.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Are you sure you don't mean "that evil SOB Carse"?
"For sale: One vintage 1960s nuclear bomb. Must have collectors item, great conversation piece. Slightly scratched and dented, some scorch marks. Low miles. Detonator not included. Private parties only, pickup only."
"After the death of Stalin there was no new conquests, no new territories"
(In no particular order)
Cuba
Nicaragua
Chile
Angola
Mozambique
Vietnam
Indonesia
There are others, fro sure, but these just popped up in my head as I was reading your uninformed post.
The Communist attack against the free world was a constant after Stalin's death, not an exception.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Denmark is a nuclear superpower now. Fear us!
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
At about the same time as part of Operation Plowshares the U.S. Military proposed using atomic bombs to dredge a harbor in Alaska. As is noted it was stopped over "concerns over the impact on the local population". Or rather the local native population's steadfast refusal to have atomic bombs detonated right next to their village.
Lest you think this is silly though, as noted on the Project Chariot page, when faced with the direct refusal of the population to have a bomb detonated next to their home the Atomic Energy Agency just went ahead and irradiated the place anyway without telling anyone.
Assholes.
See also here.
basing that on nothing but the similarity of your story with the fate of various japanese civilians over the years, and the fact that if they could have been caught by soviet patrols, that means they weren't in "the pacific", since that could mean easter island, but they were close by the russian mainland, which could also mean they were close to the north korean coastline
north korea likes to capture foreign nationals, and just keep them, quietly. uggh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Japanese
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Also, as reported here radiaton has been deliberately fed to children in Massachusetts. In this case it was part of a nutritional study by Quaker Oats and MIT to be able to argue that nutrition touches more of the body. As does radiation.
Part of the days of Eugenics in America. Brougt to you by the Human Betterment Foundation
let's go around that circle
you think that being from a small town means you are small minded, which is a rather small-minded view...are you from a small town?
idiotic, yes. insightful, no.
The guy is Russian and thus he is convinced that his own country did no wrong in the cold war.
At this point, he's probably coding malware for the Russian mob, so his discussion of morality is ironic.
THIS is insightful.
Polar Bears become a nuclear power.
Actually, I have it. I keep it at home. It's in my basement actually.
It's right under the marijuana plants that I'm growing in the window.
The local police came by a few years ago to take me away to prison. They weren't too clear about why they felt that they had to do this, but in the heat of the discussion the topic of the marijuana plants in the window did come up, IIRC.
But when I showed them the hydrogen bomb that I keep in the basement, they just shut up and drove off. They haven't been back and no one since then has offered any opinions on my little garden.
So if you too want to grow your own stash, then I suggest that you too get your butt down to the WalMart and pick up a few of these H-babies for your own basement.
Hell, go to CostCo and get 100 for the price of 35!!!
There are people like me that are from small towns that are not small-minded so the two are not exclusive.
You may want to check your logic there. The existence of something that is A and not B does not show whether there is anything that is both A and B.
paintball
The US Military couldn't find that lost nuke because I already salvaged it and will use the components to build something far more dangerous than a conventional nuclear bomb.
Well, if the device in question had a plutonium core, you could use it to power something far more dangerous than any atomic weapon:
A DeLorean.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Since it highlights the safety concerns of putting nuclear warheads on aircraft, this seems like a good excuse to resurrect a faded story that didn't live past the UK arms deal scandal. Whether or not the U.S. has, ahem, only a small number of serious incidents in its past, there's no doubting that we're guilty of significant negligence in our handling of nuclear weapons.
This first article was first published in July 2005, Lost Nuclear Warheads from a B-52 Now in Iran? and the second nearly a year later in April 2006, Cheney Violated International Law In Failing To Report The 1991 B-52 'Lost Nuke Incident' In Iran, According To Former Forensic Intelligence Officer. According to both, the incident involved W-69 SRAM warheads.
Here we have then Senator and later Secretary of Defense William Cohen's timely comments in 1992 regarding the W-69 warhead:
The Senator from Louisiana has pointed out--and I think very effectively, as has the Senator from New Mexico--that there are serious safety issues that have been raised... The Drell panel was the one that came to the conclusion that a substantial portion of our inventory still has major safety problems... The Senator from Louisiana started to deal with that, and he showed a photograph, which I did not see at the time, but perhaps it was that accident we had at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, in 1980 with a B-52 bomber. That bomber was loaded with SRAM-A missiles, and the W-69 warhead on that SRAM-A missile is not equipped with insensitive high explosives, or with a fire resistant pit, or with the enhanced nuclear detonation safety systems. It has none of those safety systems. We were lucky in this particular tragedy. As I recall, it was Dan Rowen who used the expression `the fickle finger of fate.' We were spared a major catastrophe by that fickle finger of fate, because the wind was blowing the wrong way that day.
So the Pentagon and perhaps the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services let a known safety problem and potential environmental disaster persist between 1980 and 1992 and more likely since the weapon's development in 1972. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I think their sudden interest in safer warheads in 1992 and the subsequent retirement of the W69 (pg 27) add credibility to the story's allegations. They may have been willing to overlook the risks until chance conspired to illustrate that it's also a proliferation risk. It'll be a few more decades before we admit that we actually lost them.
1. In Soviet Russia, bomb loses YOU!
2. I, for one, bow to our new Greenland Inuit overlords.
3. Profit!
(Okay, I realize #3 doesn't make any sense, but I try to squeeze in as many obligatories as I can)
.
- aqk
F U
So, whom is the USA borrowing money from again?
If that 'investment' ever pays off is questionable, but what is totally not questionable is that the USA would be bankrupt a few times over without such investments.
But hey, its soooo smart to tell people whom you happen to need to piss off...
At any rate, people like you are the exact reason why there are many people on this planet who despise the USA (and yeah, they should despise people like you instead of an entire country)
Oh, and your 2nd ammandment does not provide any protection against jetfighters, missiles and what not, and it is also not needed to enable a population to act against repressive government (see the French revolution, and many many many more revolutions arount the world for proof of that)
Anyway, I doubt you understand any of this, considering the brilliant argumentation you presented.
So why didn't Bush & Cheney use that as the excuse for their stupid war? Look, Saddaam Hussein is using his Navy to retrieve a 40-year old lost weapon of mass destruction.
At least it would have been sort-of true.
Do we really have to be worried about this? How much margin for error is there when they build these things in terms of content of fissile material? Wouldn't radioactive decay have brought the total content of a 40-year old bomb under critical mass already?