The locations of three nuclear bombs lost by the US military
On July 16, 1945, the US detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb. Weeks later, it dropped two more, the bomb’s terrible power destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since those dark days, it has not dropped any more.
But it has lost three – maybe even six.
There have been so many incidents involving nuclear weapons in fact, they have their own name – ‘broken arrow’ events.
Broken arrow incidents are often described as the unexpected launching, firing, theft or loss of a nuclear weapon, but so far there are no recorded cases of bombs having actually been stolen – although nuclear material has been.
That is little comfort though in a world where at least three bombs have been lost and never recovered.
All three have happened at sea, meaning they lie somewhere beneath the waves, undisturbed but very disturbing.
The mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945 (Picture: Getty)
The first incident took place on February 5, 1958. Two planes collided during a training mission off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia. One of the planes, a B-47 bomber, carried a 3.8 megaton hydrogen thermonuclear bomb, 190 times more powerful than the ‘Fat Man’ explosive that destroyed Nagasaki.
The plane’s pilot, Colonel Howard Richardson, feared the bomb could break loose and drop over land, so jettisoned it over the waters around Wassaw Sound. For two months a team of 100 Navy personnel tried to find the bomb, but it could not be located.
Rumours circulated that a Russian submarine had retrieved it, but a 2001 survey of the waters suggested it was buried in up to 15 feet of silt. An Air Force report stated that the bomb would pose no hazard if still intact.
A Mark 15 thermonuclear device, similar to the bomb lost off the coast of Georgia (Picture: US Department of Energy)
However, if it is a fully-functioning bomb with a plutonium trigger – something disputed by the government – an above-water explosion would create a fireball more than two miles wide.
In 1965, on the other side of the world in the middle of the Vietnam War, the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga was deployed in the Philippine sea, around 80 miles off the coast of Japan’s Okinawa island.
On December 5, Lieutenant Douglas Webster was coming into land, flying an A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft. The plane was carrying a one megaton thermonuclear bomb.
A Navy A-4E Skyhawk (Picture: National Archives and Records Administration)
All seemed well, until the plane manoeuvered onto the ship’s aircraft elevator and could not be stopped. Despite those on board trying to block its tyres, the plane, Lt Webster and the bomb rolled over the side of the deck, quickly sinking out of sight.
None were ever seen again.
Just three years later, the USS Scorpion, a nuclear attack submarine, was lost to the depths of the Atlantic ocean, around 400 miles southwest of the Azores.
All 99 of the sub’s crew perished.
A pair of nuclear-tipped torpedoes …read more
Source:: Metro
