Forgotten History: Lost U.S. Nukes

 

Although some of you may recall the occasional news story about a nuclear mishap (known as a "Broken Arrow"), most folks do not realize that the United States has lost 60 nuclear bombs since the first accident, which occurred on February 13, 1950 and involed a "Fat Man" type device carried by the mighty, but tempermental, Convair B-36.

 

The good news is that all but 11 of the lost nukes have been recovered. Um, yeah, you read that correctly. Eleven nukes have not been recovered. Sometimes the locations were known, but the bombs were simply left where they were. (The Russians lost some too, but I'll save that for a possible future post)

 

The one incident I wish to focus on is the Tybee Island incident of 1958:

 

From sciscoop: 

 

"It was Feb. 5, 1958, and Richardson was a major at the controls of a B-47 bomber, one of a dozen from the 19th Bombardment Wing taking off on a training mission from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida.

At the time, crews in training routinely carried transportation-configured nuclear bombs, with the detonation capsules removed to prevent a nuclear explosion, the Air Force said. It gave the crews the opportunity to practice, said Billy Mullins, associate director of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency.

The mission was to simulate dropping a bomb on a city in the Soviet Union and to evade Air Force fighters sent up to simulate Russian interceptors.

Over Reston, Va., which unknowingly was playing the role of the Soviet city, Richardson’s navigator lined up the target on the radar screen and punched the launch button. The button activated a transmitter that recorded how close the crew came to hitting the target.

Richardson then turned south toward home through a screen of “enemy” fighters. When he and his two-man crew crossed into North Carolina at more than 37,000 feet, they were back in friendly skies.

But that’s when the B-47 collided in midair with one of the “enemy” fighters.

Struggling to keep the bomber under control, Richardson headed for Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. But the tower operator told the crew the runway was under construction.

“I thought that if we landed short, the plane would catch the front of the runway and the bomb would shoot through the plane like a bullet through a gun barrel,” Richardson said.

So, on that clear, moonlit night, Richardson turned the B-47 toward sea and dropped the bomb in the ocean before landing.

Navy divers searched the waters near Tybee Island for nearly 10 weeks. The weather was bad, the water cold, the visibility poor. On April 16, 1958, the military declared the bomb “irretrievably lost.” No. 47782 became one of 11 “Broken Arrows,” nuclear bombs lost during air or sea mishaps, according to U.S. military records."

 

The interesting thing about this is that the Plutonium detonation capsules were supposed to have been removed from the H-Bombs.  However, according to a 1966 letter written to the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, four COMPLETE H-Bombs were lost, including the one off Savannah, Georgia. Oops.

 

The military eventually gave up the search and concluded the bomb posed no immediate danger to the surrounding area, unless removal was attempted and the conventional explosives detonated, possibly contaminating the Savannah aquafer with uranium radiation.

 

Your tax dollars at work.