Dedication
This work is dedicated to my wife, Pat, who has been the light
of my life. Through all of these almost 40 years she has been the Champion of
our God, our Country, and our Family. Her strength has never faltered. Simply
said, she is a terrific person who does Right.
Author’s Note
This is a work of non-fiction. However, since loose nukes fall
into the category of Weapons of Mass Destruction, I occasionally found it
necessary to alter and/or omit certain aspects of their design so as not to
provide a blueprint for their construction. Nobody wants these Doomsday Devices
to get into the wrong hands. Nitpicking critics are advised to get over it and
move on.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Appendix alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta
Bibliography
Introduction
Interstate 95 is the East Coast’s main artery. I never counted
them, but there must be hundreds of thousands of vacationing families that pass
by Savannah on their way from Yankee Land up north, to the Magic Kingdom down
south. If they knew what I and many of the other locals know, they wouldn’t be
so quick to come back. Maybe that’s why we’ve mostly kept the secret to
ourselves all these years.
Truth is that there is a 3 megaton monster that puts the Loch
Ness monster to shame lurking somewhere out there in the shallow coastal waters.
Not only is this monster very much real; it is fully capable of destroying
families, vehicles, I-95, and anything else that gets in its path. That it
hasn’t done so already does not mean that it will not do so sometime in the
future—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,
but sooner or later it may, so help me Hannah, do what the mad scientists who
created it 50 years ago intended it to do. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there
are at least 10 more like it hiding somewhere in the waters along I-95, two of
which are biding their time, waiting for the right moment to devour New York and
New Jersey. Fifty more of their species lurk along the continental shelves of
Britain, France, Greenland, Japan, Russia and China.
Don’t believe me? I’ve seen them up close; so close that, if I
didn’t have more sense, I might have been lulled into forgetting what these
monsters can do. I have reached out and touched them. In fact, I used to work
for the megalomaniacs who put the mad scientists up to letting these monsters
loose on us. In a way, it’s ironic that the megalomaniacs and mad scientists
lost their sway at the end of the Cold War, but their monster minions—loose nukes—have proved harder to find.
My name is Derek Duke and I chase loose nukes. It’s a job fit
for a super hero, but it doesn’t pay much—most expenses are out-of-pocket—so I’ll
just have to do until a super hero comes along. As it stands, I’m spread pretty
thin.
For many years, mine was a lone voice lost in the political
universe. The Air Force figured that the least the public knew about lost nukes,
the better. After having screwed up, they elected to cover up. They said the
abandoned thermonuclear weapons weren’t armed (technically true, more about that
later), that they didn’t pose a risk to anybody (an outright lie), and that—for the most part—they didn’t know where they had lost them.
Of course, that didn’t sit well with anyone who lived anywhere
near an abandoned nuke. After hurdling numerous obstacles such as the Official
Secrets Act and threats of being prosecuted for violating national security, I
and a few others managed to get the ball rolling. The Tybee Island, Georgia,
City Council passed a resolution calling on the Air Force to conduct a search to
locate the missing hydrogen bomb that at one time was thought to be located
somewhere just beyond the pier. Congressman Kingston, who represents the region,
asked a lot of pertinent questions to which the Air Force would have rather not
have had to answer. Finally, out of desperation, they agreed to conduct with me
a one day search of an area about as big as a football field and to lend me the
services of NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team [The name tended to scare
the dickens out of people. It was nowhere near being politically correct.
Consequently, these fine young men, right after 9-11, were rechristened DTRA
(pronounced Dee-Tra), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Team].
On September 30, 2004, the 20 man strong DTRA team—experts in nuclear weapons, gamma spectroscopy,
and underwater salvage—showed up with
enough weapons to fight a small war. Ostensibly, the weapons were needed to
defend the secret equipment they possessed. This is the elite unit tasked with
defending America from weapons of mass destruction. They placed sensors in the
water and attached wires to mysterious black boxes. The Zodiac boats sped off
into Wassaw Sound, the divers suited up, and the scuba teams went in. I, being
the acknowledged leader of the ASSURE team that found the radiation, dutifully
followed in our flagship,
a decidedly unmilitary, king-sized cabin cruiser. The hunt was on.
Imagine a band of heavily armed commandos in wetsuits thrashing
in the water, scooping muck from the ocean bottom—desperately searching for a hydrogen bomb that
had been lost at the height of the Cold War, nearly 50 years earlier, a Doomsday
Device of such enormous magnitude that if it were to detonate full force,
Savannah, Hilton Head, and Tybee Island would instantly disappear and would
remain uninhabitable for generations. What a picture we must have made for the
good citizens of Savannah, Georgia—the
first official United States government search for a loose nuke in decades, and
it was happening here, right under their noses.
Chapter 1
Nuke ‘em
“The fact that no limits exist as to the destructiveness of this weapon [the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”—General Advisory Committee Report to the Atomic Energy Commission (1949)
While it is often said that the Cold War was won without a shot
being fired, the nuclear weapons program nevertheless inflicted casualties,
often on the very people the government sought to protect. A combination of
secrecy, lax enforcement, neglect, and an overriding emphasis on production at
all costs created an unprecedented legacy of toxic and radioactive pollution at
dozens of locations around the country. It may take decades and cost millions of
dollars to clean up the mess.
Situation based ethics and a very real sense of urgency led to
American citizens being exposed to high levels of radiation. Those most at risk
were uranium miners and workers at reactors and processing buildings and
facilities where uranium and plutonium components were fabricated, especially
from the 1940’s through the early 1960’s. Also exposed were a quarter of a
million military personnel who took part in “atomic battlefield” exercises in
the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site.
From 1951 to 1963, 100 nuclear bombs were detonated on or above
the desert floor in Nevada. Fallout clouds drifted mostly eastward, depositing
radioactive particles as far away as Canada and the East Coast. Among the
hardest hit were inhabitants of northern Nevada and Utah. Although the Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC) knew that fallout was dangerous, the agency consistently
deceived the public assuring them that they were safe, even as it undertook
secret studies of fallout in milk, water, and foodstuffs to better track the
path of the clouds. The people just east of the nuke blasts in Utah and adjacent states are now called “Downwinders” and have been doomed to cancer deaths at a high rate. Proving it in court while fighting the deep pockets of the Federal Government paid lawyers has been very difficult. Claims have been restricted to only certain precise, small areas.
Also affected were thousands of Marshall Islanders, whose atolls
the United States used to test 67 nuclear bombs from 1946 until 1958 (these were
nukes that were too big to blow in the continental United States—really big, HUGE). In the process, their way of life was destroyed and
several islands, including Bikini, were left uninhabitable. Japanese fishermen
at sea many miles beyond the restricted zone were similarly affected.
On March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the
United States detonated the first in a series of practical hydrogen bombs
capable of being delivered by an airplane. This thermonuclear weapon, the first
in a series of tests designated Castle Bravo, succeeded beyond anyone’s
expectations. What was supposed to be an 8 megaton device yielded more than 15
megatons, 1,000 times more powerful (the mushroom cloud extended beyond the
earth’s atmosphere) than the fission bomb that the United States dropped on
Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. Consequently, the damage from
fallout extended well beyond the area that had been evacuated.
Farther out in the South Pacific, the 23 member crew of the
Japanese long-line fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) watched in
awe as the sun arose in the wrong location—on the western horizon. “The sky in the west suddenly lit up and the sea became
brighter than day,” Lucky Dragon crew member Yoshio Misaki recalled years later.
“We watched the dazzling light, which felt heavy. Seven or eight minutes later
there was a terrific sound—like an avalanche. Then a visible multi-colored
ball of fire appeared on the horizon.”
Fine gray ash began to fall from the sky, blanketing the boat,
gently snowing down for three hours as the crew went about their business. No
safety measures were taken, as they had no idea what the white ash was and
ionizing radiation cannot be sensed. Curious as to what the strange substance
could be, they scooped bagfuls of it from the deck with their bare hands. The
“death ash” (shin no hai) stuck tenaciously to things, remaining on hair,
fingernails, skin, clothes, and all the surfaces on the boat for their two week
journey home. Breathing, drinking, and eating brought the radioactivity inside
of their bodies. One man slept with a sample of the novel substance under his
pillow.
On March 14th upon their return to port in
Yaizu, Japan, everyone aboard had to be hospitalized for more than a year for
radiation sickness. Seven months after having been exposed, despite extensive
treatment, the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, age 40, died of
kidney failure and blood damage. His dying wish was to be the last victim of an
atomic bomb. It was estimated that the crews of more than 100 boats were
affected to some degree by the blast.
Several hundred native Marshall Islanders who resided downwind
became ill from the nuclear fallout, along with 30 U.S. government employees who
unwittingly ended up as the guinea pigs in an ill-conceived, poorly executed,
out-of-control nuclear fusion experiment which left several islands
uninhabitable. Sixteen crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Bairoko received
beta burns and as a result experienced a greatly increased cancer rate.
Tons of contaminated tuna and shark brought back by the Lucky
Dragon were buried at the Tokyo Central Wholesale Market when a panic ensued and
sales of imported fish dropped severely. Decades later, what remained of the
radioactive fish was removed to make way for a subway. Matashichi Oishi, who
served aboard the Lucky Dragon, delivers lectures worldwide and collects
donations for a proposed memorial to the victims that he intends to erect on the
site of the former market.
Unlike the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the crew of the
Lucky Dragon are not entitled to medical and financial support from the Japanese
government because the United States agreed to pay crew members between 1.91
million yen and 2.29 million yen each, an average of two million yen ($18,350),
as “sympathy money” in a political settlement.
Today, the Lucky Dragon bears mute testimony to the continuing
inability of men to safely harness nuclear energy. In 1956, the ship’s
radioactive levels were deemed to have subsided sufficiently for it to be sold
to the Tokyo University of Fisheries as a training ship. Ten years later it was
sold for scrap and lay abandoned at its moorings on Dream Island in Tokyo Bay. A
1968 letter to the editor of a newspaper prompted renewed interest and a
donation drive was launched to save the boat. In 1976 the Lucky Dragon museum
was built near Tokyo Bay to house the restored vessel. Each year approximately
300,000 people visit the museum. The exhibits demonstrate how a miscalculation
in the strength of a hydrogen bomb disfigured, maimed, and killed people 100
miles from the blast.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the nuclear disaster
on March 1, 2004, 2000 peace activists marched through the streets of the Lucky
Dragon’s home port, Yaizu, Japan. “The tragedy 50 years ago must not be repeated
in the 21st century,” survivor Yoshio Misaki, 78, told an assembly in the city.
Twelve of Yoshio Misaki’s shipmates have died, many having perished in their
40’s or 50’s from cancer, liver disease, kidney disease, and/or hepatitis.
John Anjain, the community leader of Rongelap Atoll at the
time, also visited Yaizu for the anniversary. “On the day of the hydrogen bomb
blast, white powder fell on us like snow,” he told reporters. “We soon began to
feel sick and our hair started falling off.” [Editor's Note: The white powder was primarily calcium precipitated from vaporized coral. The U.S. refused to reveal the composition of the radioactive isotopes for fear that the Soviets would learn that the bomb had been fueled with lithium deuteride. Lewis Strauss, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had told Eisenhower's press secretary dismissively that the Lucky Dragon was most likely “a Red spy ship.”]
The fallout from the Castle Bravo tests spread traces of
radioactive material as far away as Australia, India, and Japan. Castle Bravo
quickly became an international incident, prompting calls for a ban on the
atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices. Anxious to maintain the secrecy of
nuclear testing, the United States government issued an official apology to
Japan and paid more than $2 million in compensation.
The radioactive cloud formed by the blast covered a 7,000
square mile area—roughly the size of New
Jersey. Approximately 100 miles downwind, the 232 inhabitants of Rongelap and
Utrik atolls suffered a near-lethal dose of radiation from the powder that fell
from the sky like snow. Arriving the next day, U.S. soldiers with Geiger
counters found them weak and vomiting. The islanders were exposed for more than
50 hours before being evacuated to the military clinic at Kwajalein where they
were scrubbed with detergent. Within a decade of the Castle Bravo tests, 90
percent of the children who were under 12 years when the testing occurred,
developed thyroid tumors. Almira Ainri of Rongelap atoll gave birth to what she
described as “a bunch of grapes, that had to be pulled from me.” There was an
epidemic of birth defects. Ainri and other islanders were allowed to return to
their contaminated homeland in 1957, but were ultimately forced to leave because
radiation continued to plague the 388 square mile lagoon and the 61 islets which
comprise Rongelap Atoll.
Six days after detonation, on March 7, 1954, Project 4.1,
Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma
Radiation due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons, established a secret U.S.
medical program to monitor, analyze, and evaluate the victims without their
consent. Contrary to recommendations by U.S. medical officers that the islanders
should not receive any more exposure to radiation during their lifetimes, they
were given radioactive tracers as part of their treatment.
For medical conditions resulting from its nuclear testing, the
U.S. government pays compensation. Islanders diagnosed with cancer of the
esophagus, stomach, pancreas, small intestine, or bone are awarded $125,000.
Those with severe impediments to growth resulting from thyroid conditions
receive $100,000.
By 2003, a U.S. trust fund had paid 1,808 islanders a total of
$79 million. However, 46 percent of affected islanders died prior to being fully
paid. The five southernmost, least contaminated islets are slated for
resettlement. When or if this will occur is still being debated.
Tibon Bejiko, a 72-year-old islander, who left Bikini in 1946,
says his compensation was inadequate: “I'm an old man now...I haven't been able
to go back and live on my homeland Bikini, my gift from God.... Now I'm getting
ready to die and I know I'm not going to see Bikini…before I'm gone.”
A 2004 study by the US government’s National Cancer Institute
estimated 530 cancers had already been caused by the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb
tests. It said another 500 cancers were likely to develop among Marshall
Islanders who had been exposed to fallout. “We estimate that the nuclear testing
program in the Marshall Islands will cause about 500 additional cancer cases
among Marshall islanders exposed during the years 1946-1958, about a nine
percent increase over the number of cancers expected in the absence of exposure
to regional fallout,” the NCI study said. The study said because of the
young age of the population when exposed in the 1950s, more than 55 percent of
cancers have yet to develop or be diagnosed. Although the National Cancer
Institute completed the study in September 2004, it was only publicly released
in April 2005 after officials from the Marshall Islands noticed a reference to
it in a US Congressional report and requested a copy. The report was prepared
for the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which is scheduled
to launch hearings to review a petition from the Marshall Islands seeking more
than three billion dollars in additional compensation for nuclear test damages
and health care.
At the time of the Bravo test at Bikini Atoll, US officials
played down the health implications for islanders. Although many
islanders developed severe radiation burns and had their hair fall out as their
land was engulfed in fallout, US Atomic Energy Commission authorities issued a
statement following the Bravo test which stated that “there were no burns” and
the islanders were in good health.
Testing in the Marshall Islands required an extensive logistic effort and an inordinate amount of time. It soon became apparent that weapons development lead times would be reduced and considerably less expense incurred if nuclear weapons, especially the lower yield weapons, could be tested safely within the continental boundaries of the United States. In addition security of the test operation could be ensured, a considerable concern at a time when the Korean War was raging in Asia, and the possibility of direct conflict with China and the Soviet Union was feared. Consequently, on January 11, 1951, President Truman established the Nevada Test Site in southern Nevada on 1,350 square miles of desert and mountainous terrain.
The United States conducted 216 atmospheric tests between 1946 and 1962, 106 of which were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. During the 1950's, the mushroom clouds from these tests could be seen for almost 100 miles in either direction, including the city of Las Vegas, where the tests became tourist attractions. Americans headed for Las Vegas to witness the distant mushroom clouds that could be seen from the downtown hotels.
Soon after the tests began, rural residents began to notice that birds and deer dusted with fallout from the upwind Nevada Test Site were dying off. Cattle and sheep received radiation burns. Millions of people downwind of Ground Zero received substantial doses of radiation.
For much of her childhood Sheri Garman drank poisoned milk. Like other children in eastern Idaho in the 1950‘s, she regularly consumed locally produced raw milk. But the cows on Garman's family dairy and other regional dairies were ingesting radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing in Nevada, and passing on the radiation to humans through their milk. “Radiation fallout was like dew on the grass,” Garman told researchers with National Academies Board on Radiation Effects Research. Several years ago, Sheri was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. All too soon, it spread to her breasts.
On August 1, 1997, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) revealed that as a result of U.S. nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site, American children were actually exposed to 15 to 70 times as much radiation as had been previously reported to Congress. As a result, many thousands of today's adults are at risk of developing thyroid cancer. The data comes from a congressionally mandated study, 14 years in the making. The NCI report details estimated radiation doses to the thyroid gland due to releases of radioactive iodine 131. Most of the releases occurred from 1951 to 1958. Although areas near the Nevada test site were most often contaminated, the newly released data show that virtually the entire continental U.S. was affected, and “hot spots” also occurred in unpredictable places far from the site. These hot spots occurred because rainstorms sometimes caused locally heavy deposits of fallout. As a result, some children in large portions of the Midwest, parts of New England, and areas east and northeast of the test site (Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas), received doses of iodine 131 as high as 112 rad. Estimates of thyroid doses, first reported in testimony to Congress in 1959 and still cited in 1997, range from 0.2 to 0.4 rad. According to the NCI, 0.4 rad is roughly the radiation dose delivered by one mammogram. However, American children on average actually received an estimated cumulative dose to the thyroid of 6 to 14 rad, and in the 24 most heavily contaminated counties, between 27 and 112 rad. The exposure of millions of children is especially troubling because much of it could have been avoided. The Atomic Energy Commission had learned of the risks of fallout and the prevalence of hot spots with the first atomic test, and the AEC was aware of the danger of consuming contaminated milk but did nothing to stop it.
Nor did radioactive pollution terminate with the end of atmospheric testing. When the bombs went underground, the pollution went with it. On December 10, 1967, a 29 kiloton nuclear bomb exploded less than sixty miles from Farmington New Mexico. Today, all that remains at the site is a plaque warning against excavation and perhaps a trace of tritium in your milk. The explosion was part of Operation Plowshare, a program conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission to explore peaceful uses of atomic bombs. AEC scientists proposed using nuclear weapons as high-powered dynamite in a variety of large scale excavation projects. The goal of the Farmington blast, code-named Gasbuggy, was to see if a smaller underground nuclear explosion would stimulate the release of natural gas trapped in dense shale deposits. Gasbuggy called for a 29 kiloton warhead to be set off four thousand feet underground in an existing, low-productivity gas well. Participants in Project Gasbuggy included the AEC, the Bureau of Mines and the El Paso Natural Gas Company. Ground zero was seven and a quarter miles south on Forest Road 537, south off State Highway 64, in the Carson National Forest.
As predicted, the well subsequently produced more gas in a year than it had produced in a 5 year period. There was only one small problem: nobody wanted to buy radioactive natural gas. Eventually, the contaminated gas was vented and flared which, according to a 1973 article in the New York Times Magazine, released radioactive Krypton-85 into the air. In addition, the groundwater was contaminated and dairy cows purportedly tested positive for Strontium-90.
Did bureaucratic bungling and the need for secrecy result in
needless harm? The fact is that hydrogen bombs were intentionally designed to
kill human beings. That they do so has been amply proven. Their hellfire cannot
be harnessed. These doomsday devices have the potential to put an end to
civilization. That they have been and continue to be treated carelessly—and occasionally abandoned—is why the author, after having observed and
been part of it, feels morally and ethically obligated to write this book.
Chapter 2
Savannah, Georgia
From: Philip Reiss
To: fdungan@fdungan.com
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 11:07 AM
Subject: Nuke off coast of Georgia
Hello Fred Dungan,
My name is Philip Reiss and I was in the Air Force fifty years ago. My Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) was 46150—that meant “munitions handling and loading specialist.” My last assignment was Westover AFB in Massachusetts. While there, from May of 1958 until my discharge on July 24th, 1959, I was a member of a crew whose function was to load “nukes” on the SAC B-52s assigned to that base.
As for the plutonium core device, I recall that we always installed them into the cylindrical sleeve chamber. Once in the air, upon receiving orders to do so, the aircraft captain activated a mechanism which moved the plutonium device further into the chamber where it made an armed position contact. Thus when the weapon was dropped it was active as a nuclear weapon.
For the Air Force and the Department of Defense to now say that the plutonium devices were not on board SAC bombers in the late 1950s is just not true. Who are they kidding? Lies and fabrications are the stock in trade of how the military, politically inspired, operates.
How about all those RB-47s (the “R” stood for reconnaissance) that flew spy missions into Soviet air space and were shot down a few years before Gary Powers U-2 was downed? The Air Force told the loved ones of those lost crew members their aircraft was lost due to mechanical failure on a routine training mission.
I hope the people who live along the coast of Georgia, in the vicinity of that beautiful city of Savannah, keep after their politicians to pressure the Department of Defense and the Air Force to recover that weapon which, to my mind, is like a ticking time bomb.
If this statement of my experience in any way helps to facilitates the removal of that most dangerous weapon so that the people of that region will be safer, please feel free to quote me. —Philip J. Reiss, Professor Emeritus - S.U.N.Y. (History) - Honorable Discharge (USAF service from July 25, 1955 to July 24, 1959) and now residing in Coopersburg, PA
Founded in the colonial era, Savannah
is a stately city with a warm heart—aptly
termed the Hostess of the South. Designated by Conde’ Nast Traveler
as one of the top ten U.S. cities to visit, Savannah is a stroll back in
time with hidden charms that could not help but entice the most jaded
sophisticate. Porticoed mansions, moss-draped oaks, and churches nearly as
stern as they are inviting, give Savannah a unique flavor found nowhere else in
the world. One mile south of the Savannah Hilton Head International Airport on
Interstate 95 just west of downtown Savannah, set’s the 8th Air Force
Museum. This magnificent tribute to the courageous men of America’s finest unit,
has exhibits from the Great War, World War II, and other era’s where the
8th Army Air Force's bombers led the way.
Situated next to Interstate 95 for tourists to see is a
beautifully restored B-47 jet bomber, America’s first. If you ask, you can
arrange to see the airplane up close, including the bomb bay where the markings
for hanging nuclear bombs are still visible. It was a jet like this that had a
horrible midnight in Savannah on February 5th 1958.
Twelve miles east of Savannah, beneath
shallow layers of sand and water, an abandoned 7,600 pound nuclear bomb is
biding its time, waiting to rain death and destruction on the southern Atlantic
coastline. If not disarmed, perhaps some sleepy Sunday morning an atomic
fireball will erupt on picturesque Wassaw Sound, shooting along nearby heavily
traveled Interstate 95 with the force of a hundred hurricanes, instantly
vaporizing tidal wetlands, and brutally destroying a vibrant, thriving
metropolis—women, children, more than
200,000 people instantly incinerated—into a
crumbling, deserted heap of radioactive rubble.
A cold, calculated act of
terrorism? Not quite. It's simply that the United States Air Force
is not in the habit of picking up after itself. In February 1958, a B-47
Stratojet bomber from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida had a midair collision
with an F-86 Saberjet fighter northwest of Savannah and had to jettison an
H-bomb in order to land safely. It was dumped from 7.200 feet in the dead
of night in shallow water somewhere along the southern shore of uninhabited
Little Tybee Island. Although the parachute didn't deploy, we are pretty sure that
it came down intact. If the bomb had exploded, someone would have heard or seen
it. And if the casing had cracked or broken, there would have been tell-tale
signs of radiation contamination such as three-eyed gulls and flipper-less
dolphins.
Colonel Howard Richardson, the bomber’s pilot, brought his B-47
with the #6 engine dangling at a 45 degree angle from a partially demolished
wing in for a safe landing at Hunter Air Field and was awarded the Distinguished
Flying Cross for his daring feat. It took tremendous effort during the approach
to maintain alignment with the runway. If the dangling engine dipped too low and
scraped the tarmac, the bomber would go nose over tail and disintegrate.
Richardson eased back on the throttle, maintaining just enough airspeed to keep
control. The wheels touched the runway and the jet bounced back into the air.
When the B-47 came down again, Richardson ordered the Co-pilot, Lieutenant
Robert Lagerstrom, to pull the brake chute. Braking with a vengeance, the
enormous tires dug into the runway. This time they managed to remain on the
pavement and were able to bring the 125,000 pound aircraft to a full and
complete stop. After shutting the engines down, all three crew members clambered
down the ladder and kissed the tarmac. They had good reason to do so. Their B-47
was beyond repair and would never fly again. There was a wide gash on the right
wing, the aileron had been shoved back 20 inches, the main wing spar was broken.
Remnants of the F-86 were scattered over the vertical and horizontal stabilizer
and the rear fuselage. Holes were torn in the tail turret and the empty fuel
tank.
Meanwhile, both wings having been torn from the F-86 jet
fighter, Lieutenant Clarence Stewart has ejected from 35,000 feet. The ejection
system is designed to open his parachute at about 12,000 feet, but Stewart’s
automatically opens right away and suffers a 22 mile long, very cold ride east
across the Savannah River where he comes down in a small clearing in the largest
swamp in South Carolina. Amazingly, his sole injury was a severe case of
frostbitten fingers suffered during the six mile parachute descent to earth
under sub-zero atmospheric conditions.
According to the Air Force accident report, the temperature is
35 degrees, just barely above freezing. Stewart wraps himself in the parachute,
inflates his life raft, turns it upside down and lays down beneath it. Several
hours later, he hears an aircraft and fires the flare gun in his survival kit.
His frozen fingers fumble and the flare barely misses his toes before tearing
into the parachute. Evidently, the pilot of the plane failed to spot this
interesting fiasco, but it does set a dog to barking. In due course forest
ranger Andy Walker comes along, convinced he's caught a poacher. By sunrise
Stewart is wrapped in a blanket next to a wood stove, drinking some fine,
untaxed South Carolina whiskey.
Because long-distance calls are expensive and because he
considers the matter official government business, Stewart calls Charleston Air
Force Base collect to report his survival. Citing regulations, the base operator
refuses to accept the charges. Walker graciously foots the bill for the phone
call and drives Stewart to the Walterboro hospital, where his hands are soaked
in ice water—standard operating procedure
for frostbite. From there an Air Force helicopter fetches him and returns him to
his base. Stewart remains in the hospital for a month while doctors work to save
his badly swollen and discolored fingers. At one point they recommend amputating
all or parts of five of them, a prospect that so horrifies Stewart that he
threatens to desert from the hospital.
In addition to saving his fingers, Stewart must face an
accident board, a proceeding designed to prevent future accidents rather than
affix individual responsibility. Stewart is not convinced of the board's benign
purpose. “What they really wanted to do was [to] fry my young [posterior],” he
declares. That probably would have been the outcome had not the device that
recorded his plane's radar images been found five weeks later and several miles
away. It was part of the canopy assembly and had been blown out of the aircraft
during ejection. The black box type device showed that the F-86's radar had
mistakenly focused on the wrong B-47, having somehow failed to detect
Richardson's looming aircraft. Normally, an abandoned fighter without wings goes
into a nosedive, crashes, and burns. Amazingly, Stewart's F-86 did not. The tail
surfaces apparently provided some gliding capability and, bizarrely, the
aircraft descended gradually, coming in for a belly landing four miles from
Sylvania, near Whitehill, Georgia [Editor’s Note: Stewart subsequently
flew 130½ missions in Southeast Asia, became
a Flight Commander, and ejected from a F-105 fighter after being hit by
small-arms fire. He was awarded the Silver Star].
Dozens of boats assisted by military divers took part in the
search for the missing hydrogen bomb. Exhausted soldiers in full packs slogged
through the marshlands in water up to their necks. Grappling hooks were dragged
along the bottom of the sound in an attempt to snag the bomb. Navy Lieutenant
Commander Art Arseneault who headed the unsuccessful search thinks it failed
because it concentrated on the south side of the sound. Newly gathered
information indicates that the bomb lies in shallow water on the north side of
the sound, approximately three miles from Tybee Island.
After 90 days of fruitless searching, the Air Force, having
bigger fish to fry, packed up and left, leaving the locals to their fate. The
Air Force brass had a ready-made alibi in that if the massive hydrogen bomb ever
did explode, they could blame it on the Communists. It seems that our military
weren’t the only ones interested in finding the missing H-bomb. According to
C.W. Jenkins, a retired Coast Guard captain who was in charge of the Port of
Savannah in 1958, he had received reports from US Naval Intelligence that a
Russian submarine had arrived on the scene shortly after we gave up the search.
No doubt the Russians could have gained valuable intelligence from a US
thermonuclear weapon of the latest design. Did they succeed where we failed? We
definitely didn't find it and, if the Russians really did show up, there is no
evidence in the archives that they found it either.
According to the Air Force, this
submerged, rusting relic of the Cold War, designated No. 47782 Mark 15 Mod 0,
contains 3 tons of enriched radioactive uranium and a detonator packing the
wallop of 400 pounds of high explosive. The Deputy Director of the Air
Force Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation Center, Major Don Robbins, thinks the
Tybee bomb lies at least 5 miles from shore beneath 20 feet of water and 15 feet
of sand and silt. If the bomb exploded, it “would create maybe a 10 foot
diameter hole and shock waves through the water of approximately 100 yards . . .
boats going over it would not even notice. They might see some bubbles
coming out around them.” According to the Air Force, there is no chance of a
nuclear explosion because the Tybee bomb lacks a key plutonium capsule.
From the first time I heard it, I said
that the Robbins statement was ridiculous. It's a nuclear bomb...it's like if I take the battery out of
your car, then I try to convince you it's not a car. In fact, the plutonium
capsule they are talking about is about the size of a grapefruit, somewhat
shaped like it, and weighs about 7 kilograms, that’s about 14 pounds or so for
those of use who didn‘t graduate from MIT. That, as they say, is heavy
metal.
In an April 1966 letter to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy
General W.J. (Jack) Howard, who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense
[Editor’s Note: he served in this capacity while on active duty and in
uniform], wrote that four nuclear weapons had been lost and never
recovered. Two of these four were “weapons-less capsules,” assumed to be
incapable of a nuclear blast, but the Savannah bomb and a device lost in the
western Pacific Ocean in 1965 are listed as “complete” with
capsule. And the term “letter” from Howard does not really state the facts correctly. His
written letter was a sworn secret statement. It was hand delivered by special courier to the
investigating committee apparently to clarify his earlier personal appearance
and sworn testimony to them. And guess what, all such testimony always remains
secret. In this case, Howard’s letter of testimony became public from the copy
he kept in his office files. Those were military files that were declassified
“by mistake” in the late 1990’s. What I wanted to know was how a federal witness
can change sworn testimony 34 years later with ‘Since I cannot recall, I must have been wrong.’ [Editor‘s Note: the preceding statement is
necessarily paraphrased because the actual quote remains classified.] I was
really upset that our government got a ruling from the Department of Justice
that allowed such legal contortions. I mean, really...sworn testimony can put
people to death.
Let’s not overlook the ominous statement in that letter
about the other complete nuclear weapons that were lost. General Howard states
simply (as if this is standard operating procedure) that we will not tell the
Japanese about the nuclear weapon we lost in the Sea of Japan, 200 miles from
Okinawa. Does such a sinister admission mean that our government will do
whatever it takes when it comes to “protecting the “nuclear weapons program” diplomacy and ethical considerations be
damned?
But the Air Force
now says that General Howard got it wrong. Speaking in an
official capacity, Major Cheryl Law reiterated the Air Force's stock statement
concerning abandoned nuclear devices, “the bomb off the coast of Savannah is not
capable of a nuclear explosion.” What about the 3 tons of enriched uranium
encased in the bomb? “To have that hurt you, you would have to ingest it.”
That means that Howard was either a “complete” idiot
(no pun intended) or he intentionally lied in writing to Congress and signed his
name at the bottom. I wonder if General Jack Howard, analyzing the
incident eight years after it happened, from the offices of the almighty
Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara, might have had access to information not
available today. Although he now says that he may have made a mistake, it
seems likely that the Department of Defense coerced him into changing his
story.
Colonel Richardson has a copy of the receipt he signed
for the bomb before embarking on the mission—a receipt that purports that his nuclear bomb
had a “simulated” capsule (see Appendix b). Also, the
Air Force claims that none of the H-bombs at Homestead Air Force Base had
capsules in February 1958.
That’s ridiculous. Howard H. Dixon, a former crew chief
who loaded nuclear weapons onto planes at Hunter Field, Georgia, from 1957 to
1959, claims that nuclear bombs like the bomb jettisoned near Savannah were
always armed. “Never in my Air Force career did I install a Mark 15 weapon
without installing the plutonium capsule,” he insists.
There is no doubt in my mind that this man knows what he is
talking about. After retiring from the Air Force in the 1980’s, Dixon went on to
become an acknowledged expert in nuclear armament technology and design. In
2001, when Howard Dixon made that statement at the Tybee City Council Special
Meeting investigating the bomb’s risk, Dixon was the Director of the United
States Air Force B-1 Bomber Nuclear Armament Program. It stands to reason that
Dixon couldn’t go from NCO to Director without knowing what’s really up.
Believe me, there is a world of difference between what people are told is
happening and what actually happens in real life. Keep in mind that the Air
Force operates on a need-to-know basis. Having worked his way up from the
bottom, Howard Dixon is one man who has pretty much seen it all.
Why have a bunch of B-47 nuclear bombers with nuclear
bombs at a base way down in Florida without the nuclear capsule to make them
complete? Remember, this is the Red hot Cold War of 1958. In fact, in November
1957 less than 90 days before this “training mission” launched in February 1958,
General Thomas Powers, the Commander of SAC and therefore the War Lord of all
B-47 and B-52’s with nukes, while attending a media event, made a public, thinly
veiled threat to the Soviets, “Day and night, I have a certain percentage of my
command in the air” and the “planes are bombed up and they don’t carry bows and
arrows.” SAC wasn’t bluffing. Those “bombed up” planes were America’s
ace-in-the-hole. We couldn’t prevent the Russian nuclear missiles from
destroying planes on the ground. Russian ICBM’s could deliver hydrogen bombs to
America in 30 minutes. And America had NOTHING BUT JET BOMBERS that took many
hours to reach Russia…or, in the case of those bombers that were not on alert,
many hours to just get off the ground. But the bombers in the air, upon
receiving a Presidential Order, would proceed to Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, and a
hundred other Russian cities where they would even the score. You bet there was
a plutonium capsule inserted in every nuke that went airborne. The “simulated
capsule” subterfuge was meant to ensure plausible deniability.
To fully understand what General Powers is saying you
have to consider the time and conditions when he spoke. General Powers while
chief of SAC was directly under the thunderous Chief of Staff of the Air Force
General Curtis LeMay. These men were charged to save America from International
Communism (the so-called Evil Empire). Soviet missiles were very real and
America was at risk. And 1958 was full of escalating tensions leading toward the
nuclear showdown in 1962 over Cuba that almost ended the world. And let’s face
that fact right now—a massive nuclear exchange between the super powers
(Armageddon) would have ended the world as we know it, not just for a lifetime,
but forever.
Armed or unarmed, six thousand pounds of 90 percent
enriched uranium and various other radioactive elements aren’t anything to
sneeze at. Despite five decades of immersion in salt water, the forged aluminum
case itself may be in relatively good condition. That doesn’t mean the hydrogen
bomb won’t eventually leak at the bolts and/or the rear aperture that contains the parachute deployment mechanism (the Russians evidently foresaw this and
made the casings for their stolen plans version of the Mark 15 hydrogen bomb
from corrosion resistant stainless steel). Because isotopes have an extremely
long half life—713,000,000 years for
uranium-235 and 4,510,000,000 years for uranium-238—the danger isn’t going away anytime soon.
Hazardous radiation is being emitted 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just
because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Even a small dose can
cause irreparable harm to your health.
A local
resident, Donald Ernst, runs a website about the bomb called Tybeebomb.com.
Ernst says that &Idquo;if all accounts of the bomb are correct, as far as the make and
model, it is 20 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima . . . . I
believe, using common sense, that if the bomb were to detonate, it would crack
the Floridian aquifer. This aquifer is the source of drinking water for
four-plus states. Why not take something that is inherently dangerous and
remove it? Sometimes the government really amazes me.”
At a special hearing called by
Mayor Walter Parker on February 15, 2001, the City Council of Tybee Island
approved a resolution which urged the Department of Energy and the Air Force to
locate the bomb and give residents a “realistic assessment of potential dangers”
to address local concerns “about the safety, health and peace of mind and
economic livelihood of residents of the city and its visitors.” Clerk of
Council, Jacquelyn R. Brown, recorded the resolution in the minutes:
R E S O L U T I O N
Whereas, The Mayor and Council of the City of Tybee
Island are concerned about the safety, health and peace of mind and economics
livelihood of the residents of the City and visitors to the island; and
Whereas, an undetonated bomb was dropped into the ocean
waters near Tybee Island in 1958; and
Whereas, the Mayor and Council are uncertain as to
whether there is Any danger from the lost bomb and wish to be provided with
accurate information relating to the bomb and nay risk associated
therewith;
NOW THEREFORE, be it resolved by the Mayor and Council
duly assembled, that the United Sates Government and in particular, the United
States Air Force and the Department of Energy, are urged to locate the bomb in
question and to make a realistic assessment of potential dangers associated
therewith, if any, including the risk of radiation leakage, and following such
assessments, provide a report to the City of Tybee Island and to Chatham County
as to any action needed or appropriate to insure the safety of the citizens, or
to confirm that no remedial action is necessary or appropriate.
Resolved this 15th day of February 2001.
Mayor Walter W. Parker
I read a letter from Mr. Howard Dixon, a retired Air
Force Command Sergeant Major who was stationed at Hunter Air Force Base at the
time the bomb was lost. Mr. Howard Dixon was then introduced to Council and
answered questions concerning the Savannah nuke. One long time resident, Aaron
Charles Leverett, remarked that he would not have settled in the area had he
known there was a loose nuke.
Council member Pam O’Brien urged Washington to devote more resources to digging up the bomb. “I'm pleased to see the attention this is getting. There are too many questions and inconsistencies that still need to be addressed,” O’Brien said. “When others in government say they would prefer to put their heads in the sand and forget about it, they should remember that it is the same sand that the bomb is buried in.”
Close to 200 people were in attendance. My wife, Pat,
along with Harris and Pepper Parker were there to support me. CNN broadcast the
proceedings live. The Savannah bomb was headline news until the next morning
when an American nuclear submarine rammed and sank a Japanese student training
vessel near Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the first time nor would it be the last that
a breaking news story shoved our ongoing loose nuke recovery efforts onto a back
burner.
Could it be that the Air Force weighed the
cost of conducting another search ($22 million or more) against the risk and
Tybee Island/Savannah came out the loser? Even with 20/15 hindsight into
the survival-of-the-fittest mindset of the Air Force in that era, it boggles the
imagination to envision a nameless, faceless staff functionary cavalierly
mumbling “So long, Savannah!,” as he stamps the report “TOP SECRET” and returns
to business as usual. The real reason behind the cover-up may not be the cost.
If that weapon is out there with a capsule, the implications on domestic and
foreign nuclear policy are extreme. Indeed, it could have a substantial effect
on the policy of the United States in regards to strategic weapons. We've got a
very important ballistic missile defense system in development. In other words,
if the public ever found out how much havoc this hydrogen bomb could render and
how careless the Air Force was with public safety, they might put an end to this
madness once and for all by cutting the budget for developing nuclear-related
weaponry.
Chapter 3
Florence, South Carolina
At precisely 4:19 PM on March
11, 1958, a month after the Savannah incident, a similar bomb, but purportedly
without a nuclear payload, was inadvertently dropped from a B-47 when the
aircraft experienced electrical problems while flying over Mars Bluff, near
Florence, South Carolina. Exploding over ground zero, it injured six
people and left an enormous 70 feet wide, 30 feet deep crater. The high
explosives used to trigger an atomic bomb are by themselves a significant
threat. The detonator (all by itself) destroyed local farmer Walter Gregg’s
house and wounded five members of his family while damaging cars, houses, and churches
as far away as five miles. Obviously, when Air Force spokesmen say that unarmed
bombs aren’t dangerous, they are talking through their hats. Hundreds of bomb
fragments were recovered and the area was monitored for radiation. Even now,
nearly six decades later, traces of radiation can still be detected with a
Geiger counter.
The nuclear weapon that injured the Gregg family,
rendered their Chevrolet a burnt-out wreck, killed at least six of their
chickens, and did damage to pillars and benches at the Mizpah Baptist Church a
quarter-mile away, was a Mark 6 30-kiloton fission bomb, that weighed 7,600
pounds, was 10 feet 8 inches long, and had a maximum diameter of 61 inches. “We
thought it was a plane breaking the sound barrier,” Clyde Gregg who was 6 years
old at the time would later tell reporters. “My daddy said a few choice words.
It felt like the house lifted up and came back down.”
Starting at eight o’clock on the morning of March 11, a
specialized two-man loading crew took one hour and seven minutes to load the
bomb aboard the B-47. When the loading team experienced difficulty engaging the
steel locking pin, they called the weapons release systems supervisor for
assistance. He took the weight of the weapon off the plane’s bomb-shackle
mechanism, put it onto a sling, and then jiggled the pin with a hammer until it
seated. The bomb was put back on the shackle, and preflight checks continued.
But neither the bomb-loading crew nor the aircrew ran the locking pin through
its engage/disengage cycle with the bomb’s weight on the shackle. For the crew
to receive maximum points for its unit under the ground rules, all preflight
checks had to be finished by 10:30. It is difficult not to suspect that
institutional pressure to gain points led to skipping this step.
After the bomb had been loaded and the preflight checks
completed, the crew went to briefings on weather and operations, had lunch, and
returned to the plane about 2:40. At 3:42 Captain Koehler started his engines.
At 3:51, as required by regulations, copilot Woodruff rotated his seat to face
aft and pulled the lever to disengage the locking pin from the nuclear weapon.
It could now be dropped instantly in case of an emergency. At 3:53 the plane
took off to join three other B-47s for a formation flight to Europe. When the
B-47 reached an altitude of 5,000 feet, Woodruff again swiveled in his seat,
this time to re-engage the locking pin. He worked the locking lever
unsuccessfully for five minutes as the B-47 climbed to 15,000 feet to join the
three other aircraft. At this point, the crew knew it had a problem. The pilot
told the bombardier, Captain Kulka, to go into the bomb bay to try to seat the
locking pin by hand. This was not a spur of the moment decision; the bomb bay
was not pressurized, so the entire plane had to be depressurized. Because the
plane was at 15,000 feet, the crew had to don oxygen masks. Further complicating
matters, the entrance to the bomb bay was so narrow that a parachute could not
be worn into it. The task was doomed from the start; later testimony indicated
Kulka had no idea where to find the locking pin in the large and complicated
bomb-release mechanism. After a tense 12 minutes of searching for the pin, the
bombardier decided, correctly, that it must be high up in the bomb bay and
invisible due to the curvature of the bomb. A short man, he jumped to pull
himself up to get a look at where he thought the locking pin should be.
Unfortunately, his handhold was the emergency release mechanism. The weapon
dropped from its shackle and rested momentarily on the closed bomb-bay doors
with Captain Kulka splayed across it in the manner of Slim Pickens in Dr.
Strangelove. Kulka grabbed at a bag that had providentially been stored in
the bomb bay, while the more-than-three-ton bomb broke open the bomb-bay doors
and fell earthward. The bag Kulka was holding came loose, and he found himself
sliding after the bomb without his parachute. He managed to grab something—he
wasn’t sure what—and haul himself to safety. Moments later the plane was rocked
by the shock wave of the blast when the bomb hit the ground.
In case of an unscheduled bomb drop, Air Force
regulations required the crew to immediately notify its base by a special coded
message. Because the procedure had never been used before, the operations center
at Hunter Air Force Base did not recognize the strange incoming message. As a
final indignity, the pilot was reduced to radioing an open, unencryted message
to the air traffic controllers in the civilian tower at the Florence airport
asking them to advise Hunter by telephone that aircraft 53-1876A had lost a
“device.” The plane then turned back to photograph ground zero with its aerial
camera. This was not difficult, because the plume of smoke was easily visible
from nearly three miles up. Because B-47’s had no way of dumping fuel, they
descended to the denser air at 6,000 feet, where they circled for 2 hours and 26
minutes before landing uneventfully.
Emory Prosser, Fire Chief of Hunter AFB Emergency
Response in 1958, led a siren screaming procession of nuclear accident capable
emergency equipment on the almost 200 mile race to Walter Gregg's farm. What the
rescue team found was an unprecedented catastrophe. The Gregg
sisters—Helen, six, and Frances, nine—and their cousin Ella Davies, nine,
suffered lacerations. One had a ruptured spleen. Ella had to have 31 stitches
and stayed overnight at the hospital in Florence. Knocked unconscious by the
concussion from the blast while working in the tool shed, Walter Gregg awoke to
find his wife, who had been sewing in the front parlor, on the cypress plank
floor covered with glass shards and plaster. It wasn’t until later that evening
that they were told that they had been hit by a loose nuke. [Editor’s
Note: Years later, the Gregg family gave some pieces of the bomb, recovered in
the weeks after it fell, to the Florence Museum. Today the pieces sit in a
display case that includes a piece of the chandelier from Walter Gregg’s home
and a copy of the Florence Morning News telling readers with a banner headline
about the bomb.]
Chapter 4
The Nukes Keep Falling
Three years later, on January 24, 1961,
two bombs fell from a Strategic Air Command B-52G bomber when a fuel tank in the
right wing developed a leak, lost 37,000 pounds of fuel in two minutes, caught
fire, and exploded, causing the aircraft to break up over Goldsboro, North
Carolina. Five of the eight crew members survived. The explosion
caused structural failure of the right wing at 8,000 feet after the crew had
bailed out. This in turn resulted in two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs separating from
the B-52G during airframe breakup. The force of the breakup activated all but
one of the arming safety devices on one bomb, including arming wires pulled out,
pulse generator actuated, the explosive actuator fired, a timer run down, all
contacts of the differential pressure switch closed, and the low and high
voltage thermal batteries actuated. The arm-safe, however, remained in a “safe”
position which meant that the X-unit did not charge and the warhead did not
complete the arming sequence. A parachute provided this bomb with a soft landing
in an upright position, but the other buried itself beneath soggy farmland,
leaving a crater eight feet in diameter and six feet deep. Although no
explosion occurred, this weapon was also partially armed upon release from the
aircraft and further by closure of the arming switch upon impact. Because a high
voltage switch didn’t close, this bomb also failed to complete the arming
sequence. The nose crystals in both weapons, used for salvage fusing, were
crushed.
After excavating to a depth of 50 feet and recovering a
parachute pack, some high explosives, a tritium bottle, and a portion of the
nose, the Air Force paid $1,000 for an easement on the site (much cheaper than
the $500,000 estimated cost of recovery) and left the business end of the
hydrogen bomb where it lay (they later filled in the hole so that today it is
indistinguishable from the rest of the bean field where it is situated). What could the commanding officer have been thinking when he cavalierly
dismissed responsibility for a nuclear device capable of slaughtering the
inhabitants of an unsuspecting American city. “So long Savannah, goodbye
Goldsboro?” Most of the fail-safe mechanisms were disabled by the force of
the impact. It is entirely possible that nothing stands between the people
of North Carolina and the detonation of an unstable Mark 39 2.5 megaton
thermonuclear weapon other than a single hair trigger.
Has the water table been contaminated with radiation? Are local
crops being affected? Nobody seems to know.
Speaking at a press conference in September 1983, Robert
McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, had
this to say: “The bomb's arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go through
to detonate, and it went through all but one, we discovered later.” Given
the possible consequences, it is unconscionable for the Air Force to continue to
stonewall the media about the danger—
however remote— that this maverick H-bomb
poses to the public.
Shouldn't a bomb— not just any bomb, but a thermonuclear
weapon— be as deserving of proper disposal
as other forms of biohazardous wastes? A local reporter, Mike Rouse, who
covered the story for a Wayne County newspaper at the time of the incident says
it is his understanding that the bomb broke apart when it slammed into the earth
and now lies in pieces. The Air Force claims that no radiation was
detected, but that is not surprising since it is insulated by more than 150 feet
of soil.
If the casing did in fact shatter, it is all the more reason to
clean up the resulting nuclear contamination. Since fusionable radioactive
elements have an extremely long half-life, the problem is not going away anytime
soon. Unlike the Chernobyl disaster, no concrete buffer has been
poured. Because the soil which surrounds the abandoned H-bomb is saturated
and unstable, it is imperative that the Air Force admit to its mistake without
further delay in order that steps can be taken to protect the public.
Isn't it ironic that billions are being spent to develop an anti-missile missile
capable of shooting down a nuclear device before it reaches our borders, but we
can't spare a half million to make one that is already here safe?
Sometime in late July, 1957,
records aren't quite clear if it was the night of the 28th or 29th, an Air Force
C-124 cargo plane experiencing mechanical difficulties was forced to dump two
nukes off the coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, one 50 miles out, the other 75
miles. The bombs, called Mark 5’s, did not explode when they landed in the
Atlantic. Once again, the Air Force says that the bombs lacked crucial
plutonium capsules. However, they admit that the detonators—a ton of
high explosives each—pack enough punch to level a city block. Needless
to say, they are still out there—presumably at the mercy of the tides and
currents with 43 years worth of corrosion eating away at them.
“If you thought syringes on the beach
were bad...imagine if a nuclear bomb were to wash up. Lots of heavy things
wash ashore,” warns Stephen Schwartz, a researcher at the Brookings Institution
who recently edited “Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S.
Nuclear Weapons Since 1940.”
Arrivederci Atlantic City? Or is
it possible that one of the bombs might have made it to Manhattan by now?
This simply isn’t the Air Force’s
strongest area of expertise and it wouldn't surprise me if the Air Force knew
less about what goes on beneath the waves than huskies know about the Tropics.
The Atlantic sea floor is anything but static. Flowing to depths of 3,000
feet or more, the Gulf Stream steadily washes the entire eastern seaboard.
Differences in temperature and salinity result in changes in the density of
seawater, producing both up and down welling. And large surface storms can
scour continental shelves.
Probably the greatest danger stems from
the enormous pressure to which a submerged bomb can be subjected. At sea
level average pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch, but it quickly increases
with descent, expanding to 1,338 psi at 3,000 feet, sufficient to implode
watertight metal casings. Add corrosion from forty years of continual
immersion in seawater and you have a time bomb waiting to go off.
How much truth there is in the Air
Force's assertion that the bombs pose little or no danger is illustrated by a
“Broken Arrow” incident that occurred on January 17, 1966. A B-52 collided
with a K-135 refueling plane over Palomares, Spain, with four hydrogen bombs
aboard. One bomb floated gently down suspended between two parachutes,
another bomb sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean, and it is rumored that the
high explosives in the other two bombs detonated upon impact, spewing
radioactive material into the sea.
On January 21, 1968, another B-52
crashed approximately seven miles southeast of Thule Air Force Base in
Greenland. Four bombs were alleged to have burned with the plane,
spreading radioactive contamination over icy seas. However, a group of
ex-employees of the Arctic facility have obtained classified documents
suggesting that one of the thermonuclear hydrogen weapons sank to the seabed and
still lies there today. According to an article published in the daily
Jyllands-Posten, a prominent Danish newspaper, the lost bomb, serial number
78252, was never reported to Denmark, despite the fact that Denmark is a NATO
ally and Greenland is an integral part of the kingdom of Denmark. Needless
to say, this is not the way to treat a friend.
The Danish Ritzau news agency released a
story reporting that a U.S. submarine filmed images of something resembling a
hydrogen bomb in April 1968 while conducting a search for remains from the B-52
wreckage.
Because Denmark had banned nuclear
weapons from its soil, the crash soured relations between the United States and
Denmark. With State Department officials scheduled to visit Greenland on
August 21 to 24, 2001, for talks with Danish officials on whether or not Thule
would play a role in the planned National Missile Defense program, the
disclosures could not have come at a more inopportune moment. Home to a
ballistic missile early-warning radar station, Thule is ideally situated to
detect incoming missiles from what the United States labels “states of concern”—countries such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. Greenland’s native
people have repeatedly expressed strong opposition to having anything to do with
the NMD proposal.
Consequences still reverberate from what
happened on December 5, 1965, when an A-4e Skyhawk rolled off the deck of the
aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga and sank to the bottom, along with a live
hydrogen bomb, 80 miles from Okinawa. In 1989, the United States informed
Japan that the bomb was leaking radioactive material, no doubt providing
ammunition for local protestors who would like nothing better than an excuse to
kick United States troops off of their island.
It’s not like we are the only nation
that ever lost a nuclear bomb. Cold War nuclear policy expert Stephen
Schwartz admonishes that the “Russians had many...accidents, but...they have not
been forthcoming about them.” How about the other nuclear powers? “I
wouldn’t be surprised if the British, the French, and the Chinese had their
share as well.”
Nobody knows for sure exactly how many
derelict nuclear bombs are rolling about on ocean floors worldwide. In
1989, Greenpeace estimated the number to be 50. At least 11 of them belong
to the United States. Of those, four definitely have live payloads.
We know from the Bikini tests that 40 kilotons detonated in a lagoon can render
an atoll uninhabitable for decades. When you consider that a single
hydrogen bomb packs 10 to 1,000 times as much punch as a fission bomb, it is
tantamount to criminal negligence to let such a device endanger an unsuspecting
populace. A megaton blast (equivalent to a million tons of TNT) results in
severe damage to buildings 10 miles away. The power of the explosion
increases in direct proportion to the size of the bomb. Detonate a good
sized bomb in shallow water near a major city’s shoreline and it’s
sayonara for the inhabitants.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
The U.S. Navy has submarines capable of finding and retrieving nuclear weapons
regardless of the depth at which they are lost. When President Johnson
learned about the lost Palomares hydrogen bomb, he abruptly demanded that the
Navy find it before the Soviets did. Two submersibles, Alvin and
Aluminaut were loaded on cargo planes and flown to Spain. On its
tenth dive, Alvin sighted the tattered remains of a parachute wrapped around the
missing H-bomb. It was 2,500 feet underwater, wedged into a 70-degree
slope. Alvin first attempted to hook it, but the bomb fell back into the
water and was lost for three more weeks. Then a robot cable-controlled
underwater recovery vehicle (CURV) guided by a surface ship got tangled up in
the parachute's suspension lines. In desperation, the Navy decided to
hoist both the CURV and the bomb together, hoping that the tangle would hold
long enough to get them to the surface. Luck was with the rescue team that
day (April 7, 1966) and three months’ worth of tenacity finally paid off big
time.
Motivated by the less-than-graceful
recovery of the Palomares bomb, the Navy went on to develop an array of manned
and unmanned advanced technology submersibles capable of accomplishing “Broken
Arrow” missions with minimal risk to personnel. NR-1, the Navy’s first
submarine designed specifically for deep submergence search and recovery, was
the brainchild of Admiral Rickover. Unlike Alvin, the much larger NR-1 was
nuclear powered and not dependent upon the support of a surface ship. Its
heavy-duty grappling arm gave it deep sea capabilities that outpaced Jules
Verne’s visions in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Two nuclear submarines
that had been facing retirement, USS Halibut and USS Seawolf, were
rebuilt and pressed into service as deep sea search vehicles. USS
Parche was also overhauled and refitted with state-of-the-art electronic
gadgetry qualifying her as a “special projects” sub.
But perhaps the most grandiose and
costly salvage ship of any era, the Glomar Explorer, constructed jointly
by the Navy and the CIA (Note: the CIA's cover story had Howard Hughes' Summa
Corporation using the Glomar Explorer to mine magnesium nodules from the
ocean floor) in the early 1970's as part of Project Jennifer, provided the best
proof that any object at any depth can be located and lifted from anywhere
beneath the sea. After Halibut discovered a sunken rogue Soviet submarine containing at least one intact ballistic missile complete with nuclear warhead, Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense under President Nixon, approved Jennifer. Six years later, 350 miles north of the Hawaiian Leeward Islands, a mighty mechanical claw descended 17,000 feet to the bottom of the Pacific and, guided by computers on board the Glomar Explorer, clamped onto 5,000 tons of twisted, rusting steel and began slowly raising it to the surface. Actually, the K-129, a Soviet Golf class diesel submarine, which had been destroyed when a nuclear missile exploded during an attempted launch against Pearl Harbor, was brought up in five or six pieces along with the bodies of an undisclosed number of Russian sailors (the Pentagon says six but the real number is probably closer to 90). A second mission was scuttled by the resignation of President Nixon and the subsequent revelation that the CIA had illegally compiled files on more than 10,000 American citizens. Nonetheless, it can be presumed that few, if any, lost nuclear devices lie at a depth greater than 17,000 feet and that none outweigh the 5,000 tons that the Navy managed to bring up. Now, with the end of the Cold War, instead of mothballing nuclear submarines, we could be using them to locate and dispose of lost and all-but-forgotten thermonuclear Cold War relics instead of leaving them lying around, waiting for God-only-knows-what terrorist group to salvage.
It would only take a fraction of the $1
billion dollars which the Air Force wasted on an atomic aircraft that never got
off the ground to do the job. It’s morbidly ironic that at the same time
the Air Force was saying it couldn’t afford to continue searching for the
missing nuclear bombs, it was throwing money into Project Halitosis for
development of CAMAL (continuously airborne missile launcher and low level)
technologies in a vain attempt to attach gossamer wings to heavyweight nuclear
reactors.
Nations at war have a responsibility to
dispose of unexploded ordnance posing a danger to civilians as soon as the war
is over. During the 1990-91 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, occupying military
forces scattered landmines over 97.8 percent of Kuwait. As soon as the
Gulf War ended, the cleanup effort began. By April 1999, a total of
1,646,916 landmines had been recovered, more than one mine per every man, woman,
and child. The costs in terms of humanity have been enormous. Sixty
people have been killed and 131 injured, 12 of whom were Americans, while
attempting to disarm these devices. Because H-bombs are potentially more
hazardous than landmines, it makes no sense that a similar effort to find and
defuse hazardous abandoned weapons was not part of the victorious aftermath of
the Cold War.
The root of the problem appears to have
been that certain Air Force leaders, General Curtis LeMay among them, advocated
adopting a first strike policy against the former Soviet Union. Expediency
dictated that they downplay the lethality of nuclear weapons or run the risk of
being labeled madmen. The impossibly ridiculous notion that honor and duty
necessitated that real men, as the Air Force’s official song dictates, “live in
fame or go down in flames” was at least in part to blame.
This Dr. Strangelove insanity will not
be put to rest until we get a full and complete accounting of all missing
nuclear weapons together with assurances of their safe disposal. In the
parlance of Cold Warrior LeMay, we need to get rid of them before they get rid
of us.
Chapter 5
The Red-Hot Cold War
“No one knows better...the need to protect our military and technological secrets for the security of the nation. But archiving old secrets long after the crisis has passed deprives us of knowledge that free people need to make enlightened choices. Burying our history beneath layers of cover stories, security classifications, and deliberate deceit for the purpose of protecting mistakes or reputations of bygone leaders is a violation of a free people's rights. In the military, the highest restriction placed on a document is called a ‘need to know’ classification. But at some point, after a crisis has passed, there is a higher authorization that we Americans must be granted—and that is the ‘right to know.’” –Kenneth Sewell, Red Star Rogue
Is the Savannah H-bomb a danger to the region? I find it
hard to imagine that a thermonuclear weapon could be anything else. Nonetheless,
Air Force spokespersons (public relations people whose mission is to inform the
public with the Air Force’s best interests in mind, but not necessarily the
public’s best interests—ostensibly for the
sake of national security) have made it sound like the Savannah bomb is a
harmless dud. One actually went so far as to state that you would have to
swallow a radioactive isotope in order to have it hurt you. Evidently, she never
heard of Madame Curie, the French scientist who initially isolated radioactive
matter and paid the ultimate price for her discovery.
The Mark 15 Mod 0 nuke was huge and barely fit in the bomb bay
of the B-47. This close fit meant the weapon, which took careful, lengthy
loading procedures in order to fit in place with all the technical components
connected, had to have the plutonium ball INSIDE prior to being loaded into the
bomb bay. Otherwise, the B-47 would have had to return to its base where the
nuke would have had to be tediously unhooked, lowered, opened, armed, raised,
tediously hooked up, and all the safety checks run before the aircraft could be
launched on an actual bombing mission. In a time when the Russians had nuclear
tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles that worked and our ICBM’s fizzled
and blew up on the launch pad, such avoidable delays were unthinkable.
The procedure for inserting the nuclear capsule never varied.
The mark 15 weapon was delivered to the B-47 and then, when it was under the
plane ready to be winched up into the bomb bay (with a curtain around the whole
bottom of the plane and bomb), a nuclear technician would come in with a dolly
and, once inside the screen of the curtain, he would pull the nuclear capsule
out of the dolly and place it inside the AIFI device of the weapon...this
AUTOMATIC INFLIGHT INSERTION device was inside the rear lip and cover of the
weapon just behind the pit...separated from the pit...and safe until
automatically put into the pit by the pilot throwing a number of switches after
having received a Presidential order. And there is a “rub” here after almost 50
years...it may have moved into firing position thanks to time and seawater.
It is difficult to set the earth back to Feb 4, 1958 to really
taste and touch what the world was like that Tuesday evening near Miami Florida
when the Strategic Nuclear Bomb Wing launched this 15 bomber mission. Although
the official destination of these formations was Europe, anyone who could read
between the lines knew that they got as close as they could to the border of the
Soviet Union before turning back. We did everything possible to maintain
plausible deniability by our government. It was by definition a training mission
as we were not at war. What about the Cold War? We were toe to toe with the
Russians on every front, particularly Europe in East and West Germany. Shades of
the Berlin blockade and the dangerous airlift to survive in West Berlin. And the
border incidents, aircraft shoot downs, and other provocative statements by both
sides...all leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when the world came the
closest it has ever came to total destruction.
In fact, the MOST startling leap into the Cold War arms
race occurred just a few months before in the Fall of 1957 when Russia launched
Sputnik, the world's first satellite. That blinking Red Light passed right over
America every evening for all Americans to peer up and have in their face the
proof that Russia had missiles that could reach us in 30 minutes— hydrogen bombs— and we had NONE! So in February 1958. even
though the political climate was to downplay the Russian Nuclear ICBM advantage,
the US War Chiefs (our military Generals) would DEFINITELY KEEP THE POWDER DRY
AND READY—especially the cigar chomping “Nuke 'em” General Curtis Le May, Chief
of Strategic Air Command and the Air Force. Who could ever forget the Barry
Goldwater Presidential campaign of 1964 when Curtis LeMay, who was Goldwater’s
Vice Presidential candidate, responded to a question about how to win in Vietnam
with the above quote? LBJ won the election. So, you’re darn right the nukes went
armed that night of February 4, 1958. We would have sent LeMay to the gallows if
the Russians had attacked and we had 15 nuclear bombers in the air with sterile
loads. And that was what W.J. HOWARD swore and testified before the secret
session of the Congress of the US in April 1966 when he said the Savannah Mark
15 had a capsule...the whole nuclear package. And his boss, Secretary of Defense
Robert MacNamara, a notorious micro-manager, would have fired him on the spot
had he not said EXACTLY what MacNamara told him to say.
For all those who express doubts that the airborne B-47‘s
carried h-bombs with nuclear capsules, please consider the following: sure we
had crews on nuclear alert back at the base—
but 15 bombers in the air was a sizeable deterrent against Russian missiles that
could be sneaking in with no launch detection system back in 1958. They would
just show up on a radar screen inbound with minutes to spare...or announced
their presence with a mushroom cloud. The alert bombers would never get off the
ground.
Yes, I know Strategic Air Command published doctrine that is
now available on the internet from 1958 which states that such nuclear loads
were not authorized until summer of that year...that in itself is a BIG
admission and establishes that real fear was growing. COLD WAR tension was yet
to peak. HOWEVER, WHAT ABOUT THE 1960 ADMISSION BY PRESIDENT EISENHOWER THAT HE
SECRETLY AUTHORIZED THE GARY POWERS SPY MISSION WHEN WE HAD ALREADY TOLD THE
MEDIA THAT THERE HAD NOT BEEN ANY OVERFLIGHTS? And had we not found out about it
when the Russians flaunted him live at the May 1960 summit, we would never have
known. [Editor's Note: The Soviet Union shot down 20 or more aircraft during overflights by various US aircraft—high-flying bombers as well as U-2's—with the loss of approximately 150 US airmen, some of whom no doubt perished in a gulag.]
ALL OF THIS PLAUSABLE DENIABILITY GARBAGE IS A CON GAME THAT
SHOULD HAVE ENDED WHEN IT FAILED TO DECEIVE THE ENEMY. IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE
USED AGAINST OUR OWN PEOPLE.
Chapter 6
Only the Right Stuff
I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to come away with the
impression that these pilots in this accident were bunglers. The exact opposite
was true. 99.9% of the time they flew straight and true. When something bad
happened, it was usually due to equipment failure or unforeseen conditions.
Nor is the job an easy one. Refueling in midair is akin to
throwing a dart at a moving dart board and having to hit the bull’s eye. And
once it’s there, you’ve got to keep it there. Thousand of gallons of highly
flammable aviation fuel are being transferred in midair. And please don’t forget
that there is a 7,600 pound thermonuclear weapon hanging from a bracket in the
belly of the plane.
Thirty-six hour flights were not uncommon. Given the cramped
conditions aboard a B-47 and the need to maintain radio silence, it took a
Charles A. Lindbergh— someone with the
“right stuff”— to fly in formation across
the Atlantic and back. It’s a miracle that more bombs weren’t lost. Perhaps the
greatest tribute to these intrepid fliers is that even under the worst
imaginable conditions— midair collisions,
leaking fuel tanks, loss of power— they
managed to avoid a nuclear holocaust. Thirty years of constant shuttling between
the United States and the Soviet Union, to the brink and back again, one has to
wonder how they managed to do it. Mission accomplished. They won the Cold War.
They kept us safe.
I’m proud to have been associated with such fine, upstanding
individuals. They really were the cream of the crop. For the most part, they
were family men who worked hard (and played even harder) to make the American
Dream a reality. Making the world safe for democracy got more than lip service;
these patriots put their lives on the line for it. Captaining a thermonuclear
weapon halfway around the world and back demanded more than most men had to
give. Personal problems were never allowed to get in the way of duty. There was
no such thing as an excuse. Responsibilities were taken seriously.
After graduation in September, 1967, I was commissioned a 2nd
Lieutenant and assigned to Flight School at Valdosta, Georgia, to Moody Air
Force Base. That was one grueling year.
We had approximately 55 start our class of 69-04
(George W. Bush went through Moody in 70-04)... about 45 graduated... I was #3
behind 2 Captains who had been combat navigators and had gone back to school to
gets pilot wings. I may not have been top gun, but at least I was the #1
Lieutenant. Since then, we have lost about half that class to air crashes and
life in general.
We trained first in the C-172 military version
T-41, an old fashioned prop job. Then we went to the T-37 twin
jet where the pilots sat side by side in the subsonic trainer. We
nicknamed it &ldquoThe Tweet” because of the loud whine it made. Then came the
glory of the T-38 Northrop white rocket jet...from 0 to 170 in 12 seconds of
afterburner, on to 600 mph in 18 more seconds, and then nose up at 45 degrees to
climb to 40,000 plus feet in just under a minute...YES.…
The T-38 was an unforgiving trainer that washed out many a
cadet or killed them outright (it got 4 Thunderbirds at once in a formation
crash in the Nevada desert during a Thunderbird air show practice loop where
they “almost made it.”)
Anyway, as good as I was I knew the killer instinct was not
something I had or wanted...no guns, no bombs... I elected transports for post
graduation assignment and got my first choice, the C141 at Charleston Air Force
Base, South Carolina.
The hot shots went to fighters and bombers. Being classmates,
we got together from time to time, swapping stories and catching up on each
other’s lives.
Over the years, I delivered bombs to Israel, flew personnel to
Pakistan, and transported a good share of what went to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia,
Africa, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Spain, England, Azores, Iceland, and Greenland. I
couldn’t help but admire the nuke jockeys who responded to danger on a daily
basis with quiet fortitude and cool determination.
These guys won the war of nerves— the Cold War— and preserved freedom. I don’t think it’s asking
too much of me or anybody else to put on the finishing touches. I want to bring
closure to nuclear insanity. That’s why I’m devoting my time, effort, and
out-of-pocket expenses to chasing loose nukes.
While the cost has been high to those affected by the
development and/or use of nuclear weapons, there is a positive acclamation due
the US nuclear forces that, for more than five decades, have served as the
ultimate deterrent to would-be aggressors. The continued stability, standard of
living, and security of the developed world is dependent on dependent on them.
We cannot turn back the clock. Nor can we put the nuclear genie back in the
bottle.
Given that nuclear weapons are here to stay, we must be
responsible and take care not to abuse them. Abandoning a nuke to the torment of
the elements— or recovery by terrorists— is an obvious no-no. Denying that loose nukes
exist or (in the case of the US Air Force) saying that they aren’t harmful only
heightens the danger. While we do not want to be alarmists, we cannot afford to
downplay the danger (especially when it happens to be our families that are at
risk).
Chasing a loose nuke, that is hunting an abandoned nuclear
weapon, carries with it an awesome responsibility. God forbid that the ASSURE
team would ever initiate an action that could result in triggering what we were
trying to prevent.
Regardless of the circumstances under which it is found, a
loose nuke remains the property of the government that lost it and rightly so.
Individuals and organizations cannot legally buy or sell nuclear weapons.
Although they cost millions to build, they are essentially worthless. This is
part of the irony that surrounds nuclear weapons. There is a seemingly endless
circle of military and political ambiguity concerning nuclear weapons, not the
least of which is what the public can or cannot do to get rid of a loose nuke
when the government doesn’t think our lives are worth the time and effort it
takes to do so. When, as in the case of the Savannah nuke, they make a mess and
won’t acknowledge it, I see no choice other than to rub their noses in it.
Chapter 7
A Loose Nuke in your Neighborhood?
I logged over 5,000 hours flying C-141’s while in the
Air Force. Since then, I’ve been employed as an Airline Captain and now pilot
instructor for a major US airline. I don’t get upset easily. The one thing that
does upset me is when someone or something threatens my family. When I retired
from the military and settled in Statesboro, Georgia, I had no idea that I had a
loose nuke for a neighbor. For a family man like myself, it’s a bit like finding
out that there is a registered sex offender down the street from where you live.
I hope that I haven’t given you the mistaken impression
that this is somebody else’s problem. The fact is that when it comes to
abandoned nukes, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. There’s a chance that
you, too, may have a Doomsday Device in your own backyard. So, before we go any
farther, I’m going to give you a chance to see just how closely you are
affected. Please keep in mind that just because you can’t find it in the
following table, doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. I have only begun to scratch
the surface of what was kept from us by our own government. Remember, the Soviet
Union had it’s own stockpile. No doubt a few of these Russian nukes were
inadvertently dropped near our shores. Britain, France, and China have also lost
their fair share of hydrogen bombs. And, just because there isn’t one in your
neighborhood doesn’t make you safe. The crew of the Lucky Dragon were 100 miles
downwind of ground zero and look what happened to them.
LOOSE NUKES
|
Arizona |
Georgia |
New Jersey |
South Carolina |
|
Atlantic Ocean |
Greenland |
New York |
St. Lawrence R. |
|
Azores |
Indiana |
North Carolina |
Texas |
|
British Colombia |
Italy |
Ohio |
Utah |
|
California |
Louisiana |
Pacific Ocean |
Washington |
|
Delaware |
Maryland |
Quebec |
NW Territories
|
|
England |
Morocco |
Sea of Japan |
Barents Sea
|
I sincerely hope there are no loose nukes lurking in
your neighborhood. However, if your luck didn’t hold any better than mine did,
please read on and I will tell you all that I know of about it (minus anything
that could put me in Leavenworth for life). The loose nukes are given in
chronological order, from 1950 to 1989. I know it’s old, but it’s the latest
information I can dispense without compromising national security. Keep in mind
that I only included loose nukes that could be verified by two or more
independent sources. Please take this information with a grain of salt because
some of the details are sketchy and, like I said, there are a few that I dare
not divulge.
February 17, 1950
Six hours out, a B-36 bomber traveling from Alaska to Texas
lost power to three of its engines. The aircraft had been flying at 12,000 feet.
Icing conditions complicated the emergency. Since level flight could not be
maintained, the pilot flew out to sea with the intention of lessening the load.
He dropped the Mk-4 “Fat Man” nuke from 8,000 feet into the waters of Hecate
Strait in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. A
bright flash was seen upon impact, followed by the sound of the explosion and a
shock wave. Only the high explosives in the hydrogen bomb detonated. Twelve
crewmen parachuted to safety on Princess Royal Island and were rescued. In 1954,
the wreckage of the plane was found on the slopes of Mount Kolaget, northeast of
Prince Rupert, British Columbia.
April 11, 1950
A B-29 bomber carrying a nuclear weapon, four spare detonators, and a crew of thirteen crashed into a mountain near Manzano Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, three minutes after departure from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. [Author’s Note: The south side of that airport and east of there where this plane crashed is all government property...SANDIA NATIONAL WEAPONS LAB...this is the holy of holies for nuke weapon work. The runway complex is a joint civilian use runway...imagine that...and the huge complex on the south side of the base has a BIG hole in the ground...quite a distance out...with a ramp leading to a pedestal in the center of this BIG HOLE IN THE GROUND...so that you can taxi a B-52 very carefully onto this teepee dirt pedestal that is hundreds of feet above the floor of the pit, similating an aircraft in flight, if you will... and then you can FIRE EMP'S AT IT....and see what melts!!! EMP's are electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions and they fry people and/or electronics as in melt your watch casing...right before it melts your arm.…] The crash resulted in a major fire which was reported by the New York Times as being visible from “fifteen miles.” The bomb's casing was completely demolished and its high explosives ignited upon contact with the plane's burning fuel. However, according to the Department of Defense, the four spare detonators and all nuclear components were recovered. A nuclear detonation was not possible because the weapon's core, while being carried on-board, was not placed in the weapon for safety reasons. All thirteen crew members were killed
July 13,1950
A B-50 from Biggs Air Force Base (El Paso, Texas) with a nuke
aboard was flying at 7,000 feet on a clear day. Suddenly the aircraft nosed down
and flew into the ground near Lebanon, Ohio, killing the crew, which consisted
of four officers and 12 airmen. The high explosive part of the nuke detonated on
impact leaving a 25 feet deep by 200 feet long crater. The blast could be heard
25 miles away. I could find nothing in the records about the recovery effort. It
was not unusual under such circumstances for the entire weapon or parts thereof
to be written off as unrecoverable.
August 5, 1950
A B-29 carrying a nuke experienced two runaway propellers and
landing gear retraction difficulties on taking off from Fairfield-Suisun Air
Force Base (Fairfield, California). When the aircraft came in for an emergency
landing, it crashed and burned. Air Force firemen fought the blaze for
approximately 15 minutes before the nuke’s high explosive materials detonated,
leaving a crater 6 feet deep by 60 feet long. Nineteen crew members and rescue
personnel were killed as a result of the crash and the subsequent detonation.
Among the dead was General Travis, for whom the base was later renamed. The
crash took place near a trailer camp occupied by the families of 200 enlisted
servicemen. More than half of the 50 automobiles and trailers were shattered by
the blast, which was felt 30 miles away. The fire could be seen for 65 miles.
Sixty people were injured. How much, if any, of the hydrogen bomb was recovered
is not clear. Often these weapons buried themselves two or three times deeper
than the crater, rendering them difficult to salvage. Considering the shallow
depth of this particular crater and the extent of the tragedy, it would stand to
reason that a great amount of time and effort was expended in searching for the
weapon.
November 10, 1950
A B-50 en route to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (Tucson,
Arizona) experienced an in-flight emergency and was forced to jettison a
hydrogen bomb from an altitude of 10,500 feet into the Saint Lawrence River near
Saint Alexandre-de-Kamouraska, Canada. A high explosive detonation was observed.
There is no record of recovery.
March 10, 1956
A B-47 from MacDill Air Force Base (Tampa, Florida), one of
four en route to an overseas staging base, was approaching its second refueling
point somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea. In order to prepare for the
maneuver, the flight penetrated solid cloud formation to descend to the
prearranged refueling level of 14,000 feet. Since the base of the clouds was at
14,000 feet, visibility was poor. The B-47, carrying two nuclear capsules in
carrying cases, never made contact with the tanker. An extensive search failed
to locate any trace of the aircraft or its crew.
May 22, 1957
A B-36 was ferrying a 10 megaton hydrogen bomb from Biggs Air
Force Base, Texas, to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. At 11:50 AM Mountain
Standard Time, while approaching the runway at an altitude of 1700 feet, the
weapon dropped from the bomb bay taking the bomb bay doors with it. Parachutes
deployed, but, due to the low altitude, did not significantly retard the descent
of the weapon. The high explosives detonated upon impact, making a crater 25
feet in diameter and 12 feet deep in an uninhabited area 4.5 miles south of the
control tower on property owned by the University of New Mexico. Fragments and
debris were scattered as far as a mile from the impact point. The release
mechanism locking pin was being removed at the time of the bomb’s release.
Removing the pin was standard procedure at takeoff and landing to allow for
emergency jettison of the nuke should it prove necessary to do so. Recovery and
cleanup operations were conducted by Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons
Project. Some radiation was detected in the crater, but it did not extend beyond
the lip. The New York Times reported a similar incident in which a bomb
was dropped near Kirtland as having occurred in 1956.
July 28, 1957
Two hydrogen bombs were jettisoned from a C-124 Globemaster en
route from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, with three of these weapons aboard,
when a loss of power from number one and two engines was experienced. Maximum
power was applied to the remaining two engines, but level flight could not be
maintained. At this point, the pilot made the decision to jettison cargo to
ensure the safety of aircraft and crew. The first weapon was dropped from 2,500
feet into the Atlantic Ocean. No detonation occurred with either weapon and both
weapons were presumed to have submerged almost instantly. The ocean varies in
depth in the area where they were jettisoned, approximately 100 miles southeast
of the Naval Air Station, Pomona, New Jersey, where the aircraft safely landed
with the remaining weapon and a nuclear capsule aboard. A cursory search for the
weapons had negative results. It is a fair assumption that they still lie at the
bottom of the ocean somewhere east of Rehobeth Beach, Cape May, Delaware, and
Wildwood, New Jersey.
January 31, 1958
A B-47 with a fully armed nuclear weapon aboard crashes during
takeoff on alert training at an American air base in north Africa. The base is
probably Sidi Silmane, 90 miles northeast of Rabat, Morocco or a similar base in
Libya. Many aircraft and ground vehicles are contaminated. The Air Force
evacuates everyone within 1 mile of the base. However, the host country is kept
in the dark about the incident.
February 5, 1958
Two B-47’s on a simulated combat mission [Editor’s Note:
the term “simulated” was used due to the fact that we were not officially at war
with the Soviet Union— keep in mind that
they had developed ICBM‘s and Sputnik while our missiles sputtered and/or blew
up on the launch pad; the Air Force had little choice other than to keep as many
B-47‘s armed with high yield weapons as it could in the air] that
originated at Homestead Air Force Base (Tampa, Florida). Both aircraft had
earlier refueled from a tanker while flying over the Gulf of Mexico. In the
early morning darkness, the B-47 being flown by Colonel Richardson collided in
midair northeast of Savannah, Georgia, with an F-86 being flown by Lieutenant Stewart. Following the collision,
the B-47 attempted three times to land at Hunter Air Force Base, Georgia, with
its Mark 15 Mod 0 hydrogen bomb still aboard. Due to the deteriorating condition
of the aircraft, its airspeed could not be reduced enough to ensure a safe
landing. Consequently, in an effort to lighten the load, the weapon was dropped
from the aircraft several miles from the mouth of the Savannah River (Georgia)
in Wassaw Sound off Tybee Island while flying at 220 knots. No detonation
occurred. The B-47 was able to land safely after jettisoning the hydrogen bomb.
A three square mile area was searched using Galvanic drag and handheld sonar
devices. Troops searched the marshes in vain while divers versed in underwater
demolition techniques scoured the nearby shallow waters. The search was
terminated April 16, 1958. A contemporary Department of Defense narrative stated
that “the best estimate” of the Doomsday Device’s location “was determined to be
31 degrees xx yy North, 80 degrees xx yy West” [Editor’s Note: these
coordinates were censored at the request of the author]. The weapon— which lies closer to a major metropolitan area
and in shallower waters than any other loose nuke of which the author is
aware— was officially declared by the Air
Force to be irretrievably lost. Although the Air Force promised to monitor the
area for activity that might affect the loose nuke, they neglected to do so. The
yachting events of the 1996 Olympics took place in Wassaw Sound with no regard
whatsoever having been paid to disturbing the loose nuke.
February 28, 1958
At 4:25 PM at Greenham Common Air Base near Newbury, England, a
U.S. Air Force B-47 experienced engine problems on takeoff and jettisoned two
full 1,700-gallon wingtip fuel tanks from an altitude of 8,000 feet. One or both
of the falling tanks missed a designated safe impact area and exploded 65 feet
behind a parked B-47 loaded with nuclear weapons. The resulting fire burned for
16 hours, detonating the high explosives in at least one weapon. The parked
bomber was destroyed, two people died, and eight others were injured. The
explosion resulted in the release of radioactive material, including finely
powdered uranium and plutonium oxides, at least 10 to 20 grams of which were
found off base. An adjacent hangar was also severely damaged, and other planes
had to be hosed down to prevent their ignition by the intense heat of the nearby
fire, which was fed by jet fuel and magnesium. The fire was allowed to burn
itself out and was still smoldering several days later. [Editor’s Note: The
population of the town of Newbury, the closest downwind village, later suffered
a cluster of leukemia cases.]
The Air Force has never officially admitted that nuclear
weapons were involved in this accident. The U.S. Air Force and the British
Ministry of Defence had agreed in 1956—two years earlier—to deny that nuclear
weapons were involved in any accident with an American nuclear bomber stationed
in England. In 1985, the British government stated that the accident merely
involved a parked B-47 that was struck by a taxiing B-47 on a training exercise,
omitting any mention of the ensuing fire.
March 11, 1958
A B-47E on its way from Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia to an
overseas base accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb from 15,000 feet into the
vegetable garden of Walter Gregg and his family near Florence, South Carolina.
Upon impact, the high explosives detonated destroying Gregg’s house and injuring
6 family members— one child suffered a
ruptured spleen. Knocked unconscious by the concussion from the blast while
working in the tool shed, Walter Gregg awoke to find his wife, who had been
sewing in the front parlor, on the cypress plank floor covered with glass shards
and plaster. It wasn’t until later that evening that they were told that they
had been hit by a loose nuke. The nuclear weapon that injured the Greggs,
rendered their Chevrolet a burnt-out wreck, and killed at least six of their
chickens was a Mark 6 thirty kiloton fission bomb, that weighed 7,600 pounds,
was 10 feet 8 inches long, and had a maximum diameter of 61 inches. A 70 feet
wide, 30 feet deep crater was left by the blast. Air Force personnel confiscated
hundreds of pieces of bomb fragments that were carried off as souvenirs by local
residents. Nothing is mentioned about the radioactive core having been
recovered. Most likely much of it remains buried deep beneath the crater.
November 4, 1958
A B-47 with a hydrogen bomb aboard caught fire shortly after
taking off from Dyess Air Force Base (Abilene, Texas). Three crew members
successfully ejected and one was killed when the aircraft crashed from an
altitude of 1,500 feet. Upon impact, the high explosives detonated, creating a
crater 35 feet in diameter and six feet deep. Some of the bomb was recovered.
How much, if any, radioactive material remains is not clear.
November 26, 1958
A B-47 caught fire on the ground at Chennault Air Force Base in
Lake Charles, Louisiana, destroying a nuclear weapon onboard, resulting in
nuclear contamination of the immediate vicinity.
September 25, 1959
A P-5M Marlin patrol aircraft (the last of the jumbo “flying boats”) of the US Navy was conducting a
patrol off Whidbey Island, Washington, while carrying a supposedly unarmed
nuclear depth charge. For undisclosed reasons, the aircraft was ditched into Puget
Sound. The crew was rescued, but the nuclear weapon was never recovered.
June 7, 1960
A nuclear tipped BOMARC air defense surface-to-air (SAM)
missile burst into flames after its fuel tank was ruptured by the explosion of a
high pressure helium tank at McGuire Air Force Base near New Egypt, New Jersey.
Although firefighters were able (at great risk) to keep the high explosives from
detonating, the 47 foot missile melted, resulting in plutonium contamination at
the facility and in the groundwater below when, according to the New York
Times, “the…magnesium metal which forms part of the weapon” caught fire.
January 21, 1961
A B-52 bomber carrying one or more nuclear weapons
disintegrated in midair following an engine fire and explosion approximately 10
miles north of Monticello, Utah, killing all 5 crew members. Although I could
find no record of what became of the nuke(s), full recovery seems unlikely.
January 24, 1961
A B-52 bomber carrying two Mark 39 (the third generation of the
Mark 15 Mod 0) hydrogen bombs suffered structural failure of the right wing, and
disintegrated over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five crewmen parachuted to safety,
while three others died when the aircraft exploded in midair. Both of the nukes
jettisoned as the bomber descended, one parachuting to earth with only minor
damage, the other breaking apart upon impact and plunging deep into waterlogged
farmland. The radioactive uranium core was not recovered despite excavation to a
depth of 50 feet. To this day, parts of this massive nuke remain embedded deep
in the muck. Consequently, the Air Force purchased an easement, making the area
off-limits. It is tested from time to time for radiation releases. More
information can be found at the Broken Arrow: Goldsboro, North Carolina, website
at http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/.
June 4, 1962
The United States attempted its first high-altitude nuclear
test by placing a nuclear device atop a Thor missile. The missile was launched
from Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean but failed during flight and had to be
destroyed. The missile’s nuclear payload fell into the ocean and was not
recovered.
June 20, 1962
A second attempt to detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude
also went amiss and the Thor missile had to be destroyed above Johnston Atoll.
The nuclear device being tested fell into the Pacific Ocean and was not
recovered.
December 8, 1964
A B-58 Hustler experiencing icy conditions, slid off the runway
at Bunker Hill (later renamed Grissom) Air Force Base (Peru, Indiana), resulting
in a fire which melted portions of five onboard nuclear weapons. All of the crew
made it to safety except for the navigator. Radioactive contamination of the
surrounding area occurred (which may or may not have extended down to the
groundwater table).
December 5, 1965
An A-4E aircraft accidentally rolled off the USS Ticonderoga
with a B-43 nuclear weapon aboard. The pilot, Lieutenant D.M. Webster went down
with the plane in the Sea of Japan, 200 miles east of Okinawa. The thermonuclear
weapon later leaked and had to be reported to the Japanese government at
considerable embarrassment to the US State Department which had agreed not to
bring nuclear weapons into the region.
January 17, 1966
A B-52 carrying 4 hydrogen bombs collided with a K-135 jet
tanker while refueling at 30,000 feet over the coast of Spain. The tanker’s
40,000 gallons of jet fuel caught fire, killing 8 of the 11 crew members. Upon
impact, the high explosives in two of the bombs detonated, scattering
radioactive material over tomato fields in Palomares, Spain. The third nuke
parachuted to a soft landing near the village of Palomares and was recovered
intact, while the fourth nuke fell into the sea approximately 12 miles off the
Spanish coast. More than 1,500 tons of radioactive soil and tomato plants were
removed and sent to a nuclear waste dump in Aiken, South Carolina, for burial.
In protest, the Spanish government closed all U.S. bases in Spain and formally
forbid all future penetration of Spanish airspace by the United States Air
Force. The fourth nuke was recovered years later as a result of a massive search
by a naval task force, composed of a small armada of miniature research
submarines, Seabees, Navy Seals, sonar specialists, nuclear weapons experts,
photographers, and hundreds of sailors aboard ships of the Sixth Fleet.
Alvin, a miniature deepwater research and salvage submarine, spent two
weeks chasing the loose nuke before finding it entangled in its parachute on a
70 degree slope at a depth of 2,500 feet. On April 5, 1966, a horrifying
situation emerged when Alvin became tangled in the nuke’s fully extended
heavy duty nylon parachute while attempting to navigate underwater near the
bomb. The parachute covered the portholes of the submarine, forcing the two
pilots to sail her blind. Due to the intense sea pressure at that depth, if the
Alvin got trapped under the parachute the two crewmen could not be
rescued. For fifteen minutes, naval officers on the surface could do nothing but
curse until they received word that the pilots had found their way out. An
embarrassing series of unsuccessful attempts by Alvin resulted in
the bomb falling to an even greater depth. Eventually, however, the loose nuke
was recovered dented but intact by an unmanned CURV (Cable Controlled Underwater
Research Vehicle), and deposited on the deck of the USS Kiowa
[Editor‘s Note: the Kiowa was commanded by Captain Walt
Strickland, USN, who went on to serve as the ASSURE team’s chief naval observer
during the September 2004 search for the Savannah nuke]. The Palomares
affair is an example of the outstanding salvage and clean up work the military
can and does do when it has to. Eventually, the United States settled claims by
522 Palomares residents at a cost of $600,000, and gave Palomares the gift of a
$200,000 desalinizing plant. That our leaders when pressured would do more for a
foreign country than they would do for their own citizens makes me angry. It’s
one more slap in the face for the American taxpayer.
January 21, 1968
A B-52 from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York, flying the
Arctic Circle route as of a continuous airborne alert operation, crashed 7 miles
south of Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, scattering the radioactive fragments
of 3 nukes over the terrain and dropping one hydrogen bomb into the sea after a
fire broke out in the navigator’s department. Both United States and Danish
officials at the time insisted that the aircraft had approached the area because
of an emergency and was not on a routine flight over Greenland. A recently
declassified document reveals that the ill-fated B-52 had been loitering right
above Thule Air Base as part of a top-secret mission to monitor the important
Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar, a vital element in the
U.S. defense against a Soviet nuclear strike. Contaminated ice, gravel, nuke
fragments, and airplane debris were sent back to the United States. Denmark
(which owns Greenland) protested the incident as a violation of an agreement
with the United States that prohibits nuclear weapons in Danish airspace. Recent
information supplied by personnel who had worked at Thule indicates that one
warhead remains at the bottom of the ocean. An internal investigation by the
Danish government discovered that nuclear weapons had also been deployed on the
ground with the tacit approval of the late Danish Prime Minister H. C. Hansen.
April 11, 1968
The Soviet Golf-class diesel-powered ballistic missile
submarine K-129 sank in over 16,000 ft (4,875 m) of water in the Pacific Ocean
several hundred miles northwest of Hawaii near the Leeward Islands. The entire crew of 98 was lost and
the vessel sank with three ballistic nuclear missiles plus two nuclear
torpedoes. Kenneth Sewell in Red Star Rogue claims that the submarine had surfaced and was in the process of launching a one megaton SERB nuclear missile from the #1 missile tube that would have vaporized Honolulu and rendered Oahu uninhabitable when a miscalculation triggered a fail-safe device that destroyed the missile and sank the submarine. The CIA secretly funded the construction of a massive ship called the
Glomar Explorer that carried an enormous crane designed to grapple the
Soviet submarine and lift it to the surface for study. It is unknown for sure
how successful the effort was, but the United States has admitted to recovering
at least a portion of K-129, which purportedly included the bodies of numer