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| - Only one (or possibly two) of the missing bombs was fully assembled at the time it was lost. The total number of confirmed missing weapons is somewhere between five and nine, depending on what qualifies as a "lost" or "misplaced" weapon.
Not far off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, buried in the mud and silt of the Wassaw Sound, lies an unexploded Mark 15 nuclear bomb. It was jettisoned from a B-47 bomber during a 1958 nighttime training mission conducted by the U.S. Air Force that went horribly wrong. Despite searching the area for about 10 weeks, the military could not recover the bomb and declared it lost.
It is not the only nuclear weapon the U.S. has misplaced.
Any accident involving nuclear weapons that the U.S. military deems unlikely to cause nuclear war is called a "Broken Arrow" incident. According to unclassified Department of Defense filings, the U.S. military had 32 Broken Arrow incidents between 1950 and 1980.
Not all Broken Arrow incidents involve lost nuclear weapons — for instance, several of the incidents happened in silos holding intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Others described fires at nuclear storage facilities or on planes carrying nuclear weapons.
But there are absolutely some Broken Arrow incidents in which the U.S. simply lost a nuclear weapon — from torpedoes that could decimate a town to warheads that likely could have leveled half of Manahattan. Even with such a small sample size, debate remains over what "losing a nuclear bomb" actually means.
Nuclear weapons are incredibly complex, but, very roughly, they can be divided into two parts: a "nuclear" part and a "bomb" part. The "nuclear" part is the chunk of uranium or plutonium that undergoes a nuclear chain reaction when the bomb is detonated. It's this chain reaction that makes nuclear weapons so devastatingly powerful.
However, the energy is useful only if you can control when the chain reaction occurs. This is what the "bomb" part is for. An atomic bomb is designed so that triggering a smaller, conventional explosion within the bomb starts a chain reaction. A thermonuclear weapon expands upon that "primary" bomb to start a nuclear fusion reaction in a "secondary" component, producing even more energy and explosive power.
Because both parts are necessary to create a nuclear explosion, some (but not all) nuclear bombs were designed so that nuclear material can be stored separately in a "nuclear capsule" for safety reasons and inserted only if the bomb needs to be used. (Other bombs prevent accidental detonations using a litany of fail-safe switches, fuses and sensors.) That brings us back to why there's ambiguity over what it means to "lose" a nuclear bomb. More specifically, does it count if a bomb is lost in transit without its nuclear part inserted?
July 17, 1957 — Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey coast
A C-124 cargo plane took off from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware carrying three nuclear weapons and one nuclear capsule. Two of its four engines failed in flight, and after unsuccessfully trying to resolve the issue, "the decision was made to jettison cargo in the interest of safety of the aircraft and crew."
The crew jettisoned
Feb. 8, 1958 — Tybee Island, Georgia
A B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb was heading back to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida after a training mission when it crashed into an F-86 fighter plane at 3:30 a.m.
The F-86 pilot safely ejected before his plane crashed. The bomber attempted to land at nearby Hunter Air Force Base three times, but the damage prevented the plane from being able to land safely without risking the bomb going off. So, the bomber's captain decided to jettison the bomb over the Wassaw Sound, just south of Savannah, Georgia. The bomb did not explode upon impact with the water, and the plane landed safely at Hunter Air Force Base.
It's unclear whether the bomb's nuclear capsule was installed. According to the list of Broken Arrow incidents published by the Department of Defense in 1980, "a nuclear detonation was not possible since the nuclear capsule was not aboard the aircraft." However, in 1966, Assistant Defense Secretary W.J. Howard testified before a joint congressional committee on atomic energy and listed the Tybee Island collision as one of two incidents in which the military lost a "complete bomb."
Howard later recanted his statement, saying he was mistaken and the bomb was not complete. The captain of the B-47, Col. Howard Richardson, published an opinion piece in the Savannah Morning News in 2008 saying he had signed a receipt before the training mission began that read as follows:
During this maneuver I will allow no assembly or disassembly of this item while in my custody, nor will I allow any active capsule to be inserted into it at any time.
The bomb, capsule or otherwise, was never recovered. The Navy scoured a 3-square-mile area for 10 weeks with divers, an underwater demolition team and sonar, but came up empty. In 2004, a private team led by a retired Air Force colonel discovered high readings of radiation in one particular area of Tybee Sound. The Air Force investigated, but concluded that the discrepancy was due to a naturally occurring mineral called monazite.
Sept. 25, 1959 — 100 miles off the coast of the Oregon-Washington border
A Navy P5M seaplane that took off from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington crashed in the Pacific Ocean 100 miles off the coast of the Oregon-Washington border. The plane was carrying an "unarmed nuclear anti-submarine weapon which contained no nuclear material."
Based on the description of the weapon, it was likely carrying a nuclear depth charge, or a type of bomb designed to explode underwater in order to target submarines.
Jan. 24, 1961 — Goldsboro, North Carolina
From 1960 to 1968, the U.S. Air Force began flying a series of missions, called "Operation Chrome Dome," aimed at keeping planes carrying nuclear bombs in the air at all times in case the Soviet Union attacked. During one of those missions, a B-52 bomber flying out of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, began leaking fuel from its right wing during an aerial refueling.
The refueling was called off and the bomber was ordered into a holding pattern in order to get rid of the remainder of its fuel. However, the bomber's pilot reported that the leak had gotten significantly worse, and the plane was ordered to land. Upon descending, the pilots lost control of the plane, causing it to begin breaking up midair. The crew ejected (five of the eight crew members survived).
Sometime before the plane completely broke up in the air, however, the two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs on board detached from the bomb bay, and some of the safety mechanisms on the bombs failed. The "safe/arm" switches on both bombs were set to safe, which prevented their detonation.
While the first bomb was quickly defused and recovered, the second bomb hit the ground so hard that it buried itself in mud. Despite digging a hole more than 70 feet deep to recover the whole bomb, crews recovered only the "primary" fission section. The "secondary" fusion section was left in the ground, and the U.S. military purchased a circle of land around the impact site to prevent anyone from digging there.
Dec. 5, 1965 — Somewhere in the eastern Pacific Ocean
An A-4 Skyhawk jet on the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga fell off an aircraft elevator and into the ocean. The jet, its pilot and the thermonuclear bomb it carried were never recovered.
According to Howard's 1966 testimony, this incident and Tybee Island are the only two incidents in which the U.S. lost a fully functional nuclear bomb.
Jan. 21, 1968 — Thule, Greenland
During another "Operation Chrome Dome" mission, a B-52 bomber flying over northwestern Greenland near Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Force Base) experienced a fire in its cabin (reportedly started because a crew member stuffed several foam cushions over a heating vent). After using up the plane's fire extinguishers, the pilot and crew decided to abandon the plane. Six of the seven men safely ejected and survived the harsh conditions while waiting for rescue.
When the plane crashed, the conventional explosives in the four thermonuclear bombs on board detonated, releasing radiation into the surrounding area. The American and Danish governments launched "Operation Crested Ice" to clean up the remains, and over the next four months, American airmen and local Greenlanders removed "237,000 cubic feet of contaminated ice, snow, and water, with crash debris." Operation Chrome Dome ended shortly after the crash.
The official Broken Arrow report says all four bombs were "destroyed by fire." However, redacted military documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the BBC suggest that the U.S. Air Force could only account for three of the bombs. Like the incident in Goldsboro, each of the thermonuclear bombs on board contained a
May 1968 — Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean
The submarine USS Scorpion sent its last message on May 21, 1968, somewhere around the Azores islands, reporting that it was heading back to Norfolk, Virginia. The sub, which carried two Mark 45 ASTOR torpedoes with nuclear warheads, according to the Broken Arrow list, never made it back to port. What happened to the sub remains an open question.
Using the most advanced technology it had at the time, the Navy was able to locate the wreckage of Scorpion on the ocean floor in October 1968. However, the Navy wasn't able to recover anything — the wreckage was too deep. The Broken Arrow report says the seawater and immense pressure at those depths effectively "compromised" the torpedoes.
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