The Case of the Missing H-Bomb: The Pentagon Has Lost the Mother of All Weapons

[dreamdancer 0]

wow, eleven nuclear weapons have been 'lost' since 1945

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Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Warsaw Sound, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Warsaw Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb's 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn't detonate.

The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/140060/the_case_of_the_missing_h-bomb%3A_the_pentagon_has_lost_the_mother_of_all_weapons/?page=entire

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[GeorgiaDon 380]

The story of the missing H-bomb is very well known, I've seen several articles in local papers or on the TV news since I moved to Georgia nearly 13 years ago. There is no big cover-up. The military apparently still looks for it fairly regularly. A couple of years ago a team of University of Georgia oceanographers tried to find it by sampling sediment from the sea floor and analyzing it for chemicals that would be released as the bomb rusted and exposed the detonation device. No such chemicals, and no radioactivity above background, were found. Also some private "treasure hunters" try regularly to locate it, so they can collect a reward from the military. How could the bomb just disappear? The exact location of the drop isn't known, so the search area is I recall over 100 square miles. Remember this was an emergency drop from a critically damaged aircraft where the pilots were busy just staying in the air, plus the technology of the day would have been a lot less precise about the exact position of the plane (which was moving at a significant speed). Also the bomb may have been carried with water currents for a distance after impacting he water (although probably not miles). Most significant, the sea floor in that area has large regions of very fine silt, and a heavy compact object like a bomb would penetrate several feet below the surface. It's likely that it would never have been findable by a visual search. In the time since, water currents could move silt around and bury it even more, or uncover it, there's no way to tell. The article you pasted is sensationalistic BS IMHO.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[DJL 235]

That isn't exactly new info. Maybe Spectre has it and they're going to ransom the world for 1 Million Dollars.

"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

[rushmc 23]

As far as I can tell this is the ONLY site he posts from. The next thing we need to learn is it a site one reads from, or do you plug in directly.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[lawrocket 3]

In other newly discovered but well-known news that is phrased in the present perfect simple tense in order to make it sound more current:

The USSR has detonated a hydrogen bomb of its own!!!!!!

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[metalslug 36]

...

[mr2mk1g 10]

Of more interest... how in the heck to you loose a whole destroyer?

(Assuming 'lost' doesn't include 'sunk').

[pirana 0]

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That isn't exactly new info. Maybe Spectre has it and they're going to ransom the world for 1 Million Dollars.

Wrong evil organization. I believe it is held by CHAOS. I know this because Napolean Solo and Illya Kuriakin are on the case. Off to the Batcave.

" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

[DJL 235]

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Of more interest... how in the heck to you loose a whole destroyer?

Usually you start by releasing the lines and then use a tug to back it down. Or did you mean "lose"?

The article is full of gaping holes but if they really did think that we just forgot where a destroyer got parked then they didn't look into it. You have to remember that there have been over 1000 destroyers built and when one is decommissioned there's a pretty long inactive/mothballed period before it gets turned into scrap. The "lost" they're talking about is purely book keeping. It would have been towed somewhere else or sent for salvage and the books not updated. Basically, there was never a lost active duty warship. I think one of the 100 some-odd crew members may have remembered where it got parked.

"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

[dreamdancer 0]

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That isn't exactly new info. Maybe Spectre has it and they're going to ransom the world for 1 Million Dollars.

or maybe SMERSH have got it (and the destroyer)

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[DJL 235]

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That isn't exactly new info. Maybe Spectre has it and they're going to ransom the world for 1 Million Dollars.

or maybe SMERSH have got it (and the destroyer)

Using the ship from The Spy Who Loved Me.

"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

[billvon 3,118]

>wow, eleven nuclear weapons have been 'lost' since 1945 . . .

True. However, many people think the risk of that happening is that a terrorist will get his hands on the bomb and blow up Manhattan with it. That's not really a risk. Most modern bombs (plutonium based fission bombs and thermonuclear bombs) have limited shelf lives, and are VERY hard to detonate without the correct procedures and codes. The system/codes called PALs (permissive action links) work both to prevent accidental detonation and intentional tampering.

The bigger risks are:

-loss of the device _without_ the explosives and/or the core. If recovered by a determined organization, a significant amount of reverse engineering could be done. This has happened half a dozen times over the years.

-loss of an enriched-uranium core. An enriched core allows a simple (gun type) nuclear weapon to be constructed, given sufficient expendable labor. This has happened a few times, and there is currently a core in a North Carolina farm.