Missing Nuke from...1958

Found this on accident today...tried to search ATS as usual and found no results.

Turns out that in 1958 the USA had some aerial war games going on in which a plane carrying a nuclear bomb was damaged to the point that it would risk exposing nuclear material if the landng failed. The idea was then to drop the nuke off the coast of Georgia.

It is either still sitting their today or moved around somewhere else naturally, but it has not been recovered they say.

Wiki Entry

Secondary Article from io9.com

Has anyone else ever heard of this? I can't believe I missed this.

Could be a nice false flag weapon if it was found!

a reply to: rockpaperhammock

I have heard of this or was it a film I saw? Broken arrow?.
I don't think it would work after 50 odd years in the sea but I dunno.
Good find S&F.

a reply to: rockpaperhammock

Broken arrows are broken arrows. My grandfather actually went to the UK for another incident when a plane out of Dover was forced to drop two nukes into the Atlantic. In that case, those two missing nukes were never recovered either. There is actually a whole listing of declassified broken arrow events where the weapons in question were never recovered. How much threat they would actually pose, especially after decades in the water is debatable and would probably require a rocket scientists. The materials within them, on the other hand, would remain an issue. I don't know if the military just writes them off as lost but I do know that they do make a great deal of effort in attempting to recover them. My grandfather, according to my mother, was in the UK for over a year attempting to do that with the missing Dover nukes.

a reply to: boymonkey74

Ya when I was looking it this up someone claimed that the term broken arrow came from this incident and that it wasn't just made up for the movies. Great movie by the way...Hans Zimmer writes one hell of a soundtrack there.

a reply to: WhiteAlice

Amazing...so I wonder how many have happened that we possibly don't know about. This one got me thinking that it can't be that deep...it could be recovered.

There are more secret ditched arrows than are made public.
For good reasons.
Although if the people who are involved in looking after the badass missiles lose them from time to time-that does not inspire confidence.

If you will look up Tybee Island and nuke, you will find more info on this icident, the locals imply that it is out there still.a reply to: rockpaperhammock

originally posted by: rockpaperhammock
a reply to: WhiteAlice

Amazing...so I wonder how many have happened that we possibly don't know about. This one got me thinking that it can't be that deep...it could be recovered.

Wiki actually maintains a pretty good list of nuclear incidents that have been declassified. My grandfather was in SAC (obviously) and told me about three of these incidents (Sandia, Kirtland, and Dover) before they were declassified. I believe it was the Sandia incident that my grandfather described as being the scariest but am not 100% sure (I was a kid). I know that there was an incident that put Albuquerque, NM in jeopardy that was eventually declassified in the late 80's. If they declassified that one, I'm guessing most are declassified bar those that might be more easily retrieved. The wiki list basically covers those that were recovered and unrecovered, including accidental detonations. As scary as it sounds, it was a new technology. My grandfather talked about the training to even take off with one of these bombs because they were immensely heavy (why they are called "very heavy") and how there was basically a concrete block wall to force the pilots to learn to take off with them at a limited distance. He said that a lot of bombers hit those walls.

Losing an a-bomb or nuke was taken extremely seriously as the technology was sought after by foreign countries. You can imagine that if they didn't find it, odds are nobody else would outside of dumb luck.

Wiki list: en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: WhiteAlice

Your assertion that the casing of the bomb, and probably the firing mechanisms as well, would be beyond use, is likely accurate. However, I believe that of the possible fates of a nuclear weapon, it would be BETTER for some nefarious type to pull them out of the ocean and then sell them on, than allow the casings to continue to errode, until the casing is compromised, exposing the nuclear material within.

Dropping those things in the ocean, is easily the stupidest possible idea. The ocean remaining as clean as possible, as free of dangerous substances as can be, is vital to the survival of every living thing on the face of the planet. Dropping nuclear weapons into the sea therefore, is even worse than detonating them, in the long term.

I can understand why no one would want to drop those things on land, because of how damned awful the consequences would be for those within the drop zone if the casings cracked, but if it happens on land, at least the oceans, which are an absolutely vital structure within the Hydrological cycle, and the food chain on which our species relies, would remain unmolested by radioactivity.

I know they used to test nuclear weapons out near remote desert islands, and I always knew that was a bad plan as well, and I know we already pollute the oceans with other, very harmful things as well, like oil and petrochemical waste, human biological waste, and all manner of terrible chemical compounds that have no business being introduced into such a vital ecosystem.

But the fewer nukes that wind up in the ocean, the better, no matter the short term cost to those on land. To be brutally honest, a nuke on land might be bad, but casings cracking open after decades under the sea, and suddenly corrupting the hell out of both the water which eventually falls as rain, and of course the organisms within it is a MUCH bigger problem, with much more far reaching consequences!

Not much makes my hackles rise, but the idea that at some point, probably soon, we are going to have to deal with the results of the stupidity of previous generations, such catastrophic stupidity, that creeps me the hell out.

a reply to: rockpaperhammock
I did hear about this less than one year ago. There is a 3 min video here

Greetings,

There was one broken arrow near Richmond VA when a special weapon fell out of a B-36 I think and hit a rock on the ground after the fall. All of the magnetic switches except one tripped simultaneously and that shocked some weapons engineers as it was supposed to be impossible. Had the last one tripped with the others it would have been good by Richmond.

Impossible reminds me of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukashima as we may not know with which power we play. My best,

a reply to: TrueBrit

Well, I guess you have to recollect that much of the bomb dropping in the ocean was more a lesser evil thing than risking a detonation on land where the loss of human life might occur in an accidental critical. Back the in 40's, 50's, and even the 60's, there wasn't much thought given, as far as I can tell, towards the health of the oceans. Not to mention that, at least according to my grandfather, they were doing some rather crazy stupid stuff anyways with human life in regards to these things. So keeping the oceans contaminate free probably was not on their "to-do" list.

I remember when my grandfather talked about the Bikini Atoll tests, he always opened it with "I bombed the hell out of beautiful islands in the South Pacific." He always sounded rather sad about that and his repetitiveness of that fact was an indicator of his own sense of guilt in having destroyed what was once a beautiful place on earth. Really, I don't think they thought much about it until it was done. Today, there are a few treaties that ban or limit nuclear oceanic testing. I guess it's a lesson learned.

I know the feelings you're expressing. I felt that way, too, as I listened to my grandfather talk about these things. I sometimes think his overriding theme for all those stories of when he was in SAC was just how far, how stupid and how dangerous things could get under the guise of national security. Crazy dangerous things were done and a lot of atomic vets paid the price for it.

a reply to: WhiteAlice

I understand why these things were ever allowed to happen, that understanding of the fundamental importance of the oceans was not what it was, and of course the fact that things get seriously crazy dangerous when national security is used to argue the case for an illogical course of action. Hell, there has been enough in the news over the last week to illustrate that particular point, leave alone all the historical references which bare such a standpoint out!

What I find it difficult to accept however, is that now, with all the information you could hope to have, the various governments of the world still have not put enough resources into finding those still missing broken arrows, such as they are, and removing them from our oceans, or indeed putting more research money in the hands of people working on ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste, the storage of which is a massive problem, and one which is only getting worse as the years wear on, not better. This is of course, mostly down to the fact that the underground containment vessels used to store it can become corroded over time, and may begin to leak. Metal and concrete both behave very differently on a material level, if exposed to high volumes of radiation after all.

The thing is, there are scientists out there who have the know how to change radioactive substances into more inert forms, albeit in a limited capacity at the moment. However, without more research time, money, and access to other resources, these vital efforts will never come to anything. Personally, I think there should be a ten year agreement. By all the nuclear nations, to spend half their defence budget for those years, on research and development into, and enacting of methodologies which will see all the broken arrows cleaned up from the ocean floor, and all nuclear waste rendered radioactively inert. That is the sort of thing that I would have hoped (before I quit that toxic habit) to have seen in my life time.

a reply to: TrueBrit

I totally agree; however, looking for these lost weapons is quite literally--especially after decades of sediment deposition, decay and more--looking for a needle in a haystack. Technically, not that many were lost so that is one comfort. The other issue--storage--is a huge one. Hanford would be an example of such a site contamination like you're talking about and it's been a superfund site under the jurisdiction of the EPA and Dept. of Energy here. They have been actively trying to remediate the area since 1989 including groundwater contamination. They even have a twitter giving updates of what they're doing:

twitter.com...

Apparently, every entity really DOES have a twitter these days. So things are being done to try to tackle the grandiose messes that were made during this period but there are still a whole lot of areas for concern. Are they doing enough to correct it? I don't know. I wish they were doing as much as possible, too. It really wasn't until they started declassifying a lot of this stuff in the late 80's, though, that they actually started doing things about those identifiable locations.

I'd love to see it all cleaned up, rendered inert and done with. Then again, I'm pretty anti-nuke in general but that's also because of my grandfather. He died "anti-nuke".