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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.'"
Operation Thunderball is a success.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
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.
You only say that because you think they're trying to steal your previous bodily fluids.
Wonder if Sarah Palin can see it from her house.
I think I meant precious. Previous bodily fluids are creepy.
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!
Nonsense.
But, of course, this means that Greenland possesses WMDs and must be destroyed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The capital is "nuuk", which would be pretty fitting.
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.
And AGAIN the US knows this because they left them there themselves ;).
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
Yes, life imitates art. 24 is about 35 years too young for it to be vice versa.
Actually it is vice-versa in this case, or I just came down with a bad case of dyslexia.
Only if Jack ties the suspect to a chair and forces him to watch Jack torture his wife and children.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
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?
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.
Rouge?
Yes, yes, I know I'm going to get -1 Redundant on this but...
There they stand, redfaced.
It's its. They're their, there. You're your. Who's whose? A looser loser, though those two too threw through the trough.
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 #!
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room!
Of Code And Men
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.
Gjordzilla??
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
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
That's Fjordzilla, you insensitive clod!
And while we are at it, why not liberate democratically some oil ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I don't like how dark Jack has become. He shouldn't even by a U.S. employee anymore with the tactics he uses.
I prefer the early seasons when Jack was still a decent human being.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
> "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!)
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!
Unless the nuclear warheads went off (what someone would have most likely noticed) the radioactive material is uranium from the tamper and plutonium from the primary. Both are "harmless" from a radioactivity point of view, so plutonium is extremely toxic. Standard chemical protection measures would have been sufficient.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Link The one under the wetlands in NC is probably the most recoverable. All you have to do is move 5-600 tons of sand and silt while keeping the groundwater under control, and hope that the safety shielding hasn't been compromised from impact and exposure. A separate article I can't dig up right now tells the story of the guy that found it (recently, within the last 10 years). He was able to deduce the location by taking and graphing hundreds (thousands?) of radiation measurements. He wrote the air force and they said "No, it's fine where it is."
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.
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 ]
All you have to do is move 5-600 tons of sand and silt while keeping the groundwater under control, and hope that the safety shielding hasn't been compromised from impact and exposure.
My god... the terrorists could get it! They're already experts in sand!
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.
With this device I will have leaders the world over cower in abject terror as I take command of the world throgh them.
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
She's going to run for President in the future. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Oh, stop the fear-mongering, someone who is that stupid would never be able to win 270 electoral vot..... oh, fuck.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
All you have to do is move 5-600 tons of sand and silt while keeping the groundwater under control, and hope that the safety shielding hasn't been compromised from impact and exposure.
That would seem to be fairly simple to do now - modern mining techniques will freeze surrounding soft soil with liquid CO2 or N2, then they can dig a tunnel through the now solid soil.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Hey, if you had to work all those 24-hour shifts, you'd be pretty cranky too.