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Uranium-Filled 'Lost Nuke' Missing Since 1950 May Have Been Found (bbc.com)
Although the U.S. government "does not believe the bomb contains active nuclear material," schwit1 shares this report from the BBC:
A commercial diver may have discovered a lost decommissioned U.S. nuclear bomb off the coast of Canada. Sean Smyrichinsky was diving for sea cucumbers near British Columbia when he discovered a large metal device that looked a bit like a flying saucer. The Canadian Department of National Defence believes it could be a "lost nuke" from a US B-36 bomber that crashed in the area in 1950.... The plane was on a secret mission to simulate a nuclear strike and had a real Mark IV nuclear bomb on board to see if it could carry the payload required...
The American military says the bomb was filled with lead, uranium and TNT but no plutonium, so it wasn't capable of a nuclear explosion... Several hours into its flight, its engines caught fire and the crew had to parachute to safety... The crew put the plane on autopilot and set it to crash in the middle of the ocean, but three years later, its wreckage was found hundreds of kilometers inland.
The crew says they dumped their bomb-like cargo into the ocean first to avoid a detonation on land.
The American military says the bomb was filled with lead, uranium and TNT but no plutonium, so it wasn't capable of a nuclear explosion... Several hours into its flight, its engines caught fire and the crew had to parachute to safety... The crew put the plane on autopilot and set it to crash in the middle of the ocean, but three years later, its wreckage was found hundreds of kilometers inland.
The crew says they dumped their bomb-like cargo into the ocean first to avoid a detonation on land.
Lost nuclear bombs are also called "Broken Arrow".
>the US Department of Defense has officially recognized 32 "Broken Arrow" incidents, including but not limited to
1950 British Columbia B-36 crash
1956 B-47 disappearance
1958 Mars Bluff B-47 nuclear weapon loss incident
1958 Tybee Island mid-air collision
1961 Yuba City B-52 crash
1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash
1964 Savage Mountain B-52 crash
1965 Philippine Sea A-4 incident
1966 Palomares B-52 crash[6]
1968 Thule Air Base B-52 crash
1980 Damascus, Arkansas incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Uranium is nearly twice as dense as lead. The test run was apparently to "see if it could carry the payload required" which means you'd want the right weight/size/shape. They took the most dangerous bit out, at least.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
When you get to the point of heavy metals (such as the uranium in this instance), you start running into problems with simulating stuff made from them - you cant have a precise physical replica because the weight will be off, and quite often you cant add more mass because then you have something that is physically larger than the original.
In aircraft, weight and balance issues can affect performance considerably - so when you need to run simulation flights to test performance you couldnt really get a truly accurate result if you used a replica as it would either be too light or it would put weight in the wrong place on the aircraft due to the increase in size. You cant add ballast outside the weapon for the same reasons.
So the only way to run these tests back then was to use a proper weapon. Of course the core was removed, but on these aircraft they were always removed for take off, landing and cruise - a crew member literally had to insert the core into the weapon en route because the safety systems were still not trusted at that point, so keeping the core on board but separate would still result in an accurate test flight.
Read the summary again. It wasn't a "dummy" bomb, it was a real Mark IV nuclear bomb.
What it didn't have was the fissile core loaded. Which is exactly what would be expected; the Mark IV was designed to have the core loaded into the bomb by the aircrew during the flight.
So, it certainly wasn't a dummy bomb; it was a real Mark IV, with the normal uranium and TNT in the casing. But it almost certainly wasn't a live nuclear bomb, because there would have been no reason at all for the plutonium core to have been loaded on the plane, and even if the plutonium was on the plane, no reason at all for the aircrew to load the plutonium into the bomb.
Real bomb and no plutonium core.