A sub hunting for sea cucumbers in the Banks Island waters, off the British Columbia (Canada), may instead have found a nuclear weapon, perhaps lost in 1950 by a US military plane.
The Royal Canadian Navy has now sent a ship to investigate the story of Sean Smyrichinsky who is involved in a dive, he says he had stumbled on a bizarre large object as a double bed and like a donut cut in half.
THE INCIDENT MYSTERIOUS. Some subsequent research of Smyrichinsky as did resurface the story of a Convair B-36, a bomber named "Peacemaker" in the Air Force force between 1949 and 1959. One aircraft took off from Elison Air Base in Alaska 3 February 1950 he was flying over the British Columbia when its engines caught fire. The plane was testing the transport of an atomic bomb of 4,900 kg, a nuclear bomb Fat Man Mark IV, similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945. The crew had time to parachute safely, but dell'ordigno not heard from again.
NO OUTBREAK. The wreckage of the plane was found a few years later in the mountains, in the interior of Canada, three hours from the supposed site of the disaster, a fact that only served to fuel the questions about the end of the bomb. The United States had to admit that he had lost the bomb, which did not detonate or left radioactive traces.
The reason for the lack of any trace dell'ordigno is not entirely clear. One possibility is that the device was "disarmed" in time, but the most consistent hypothesis is that that transported the plane was actually a puppet capsule, no radioactive material. A fake bomb to actual size, developed during the Cold War to test its portability.
Searching the net pictures of Mark IV Fat Man, Smyrichinsky recognized the wreck found in the sea: if he really lost the weapon be on that flight, probably not dangerous.
MI ran off a nuke. The stories of accidents involving nuclear weapons are far more numerous and strange than you might think.
The March 11, 1958, Walter Gregg and his son Walter Jr. are in the tool shed of their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The other two daughters are out playing with a cousin, and his wife is at home to sew when swooping from the sky in their garden by none other than an atomic bomb: he lost a B-47 bomber took off from a military base in Georgia. The history of this dropped nuclear weapon on US soil has the traits of the farce instead of tragedy, just because the "atomic nucleus" is not inserted in the bomb. But there are, and explode, conventional fillers that are used to trigger the nuclear reaction: the bomb causes a crater, but just minor injuries to the Gregg family, which will simply mourn the disappearance of some hens.
KOREAN THREAT. It's just one of the surprisingly numerous incidents that the US armed forces have had with nuclear weapons, as told by Eric Schlosser in Command and Control (Mondadori). Use the investigative journalist has collected episodes of lost, aircraft bombs crashed while transporting the explosives, rocket explosions with nuclear warheads. It is true that about 70 thousand of nuclear weapons built by the US since 1945 none has ever detonated accidentally, but the stories of the accidents are impressive. Also because of nuclear weapons there remain many (v. Following pages). There have recently mentioned the presence Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said he hoped that they never needed against Isis. And North Korea, which said it had detonated its first hydrogen bomb in a test of the January 6 (the first analysis of the questioned: the detected seismic waves indicate the explosion of a much less powerful fission bomb).
To understand the dynamics of the incidents recounted by Schlosser - and because they have not had the extreme - we have to mention how they are made ordnance. The atomic bomb "classical" exploits the enormous energy given by fission: the division of the core elements such as uranium or plutonium. In the even more powerful hydrogen bomb, the fission triggers another reaction. But the weapon also contain conventional explosives. "Plutonium, for example, must be compressed by the explosion of conventional homogeneous charge that must detonate at the same time", explains Nicola Cufaro Petroni, University of Bari, the Scientific Council of the Union scientists for disarmament. This explains the explosion "non-nuclear" Mars Bluff: for safety reasons, at the time the bombs were armed with "atomic" nuclei only on planes and out of American territory and the bomb fell (on the aircraft a member of 'crew had clung to the manual release lever) it was just lacking.
For the same reason, he had not had consequences an accident such as occurred July 27, 1956 in the British base at Lakenheath. A B-47 American who was performing training maneuvers crashed into a deposit of atomic bombs on the track and caught fire. I, however, nuclei containing plutonium were housed in another igloo, and not risked to release radioactive material in the English countryside. From late 50's, though, is the era of the stone fruit sealed weapons - that is, with built-core - and therefore were essential tests on their safety in all conditions: storage, transport, fire, impact with splinters. So over the years, and learning from accidents, more and more security systems were added to prevent an atomic explosion accidental. The facts say that worked, although Schlosser believes was also there a dose of good luck ... Why ordnance is really everything happened.
crashes. The weak links in the security feature was an US aircraft carrying nuclear weapons or had on board, ready to attack, in the Cold War. Involved in the loss of weapons, explosions and contamination. As it happened in 1958, the military base of Sidi Slimane, Morocco. Here, a B-47 engaged in an exercise and equipped with an H-bomb - and with a core ready in over mechanism - caught fire from the explosion of a tire. Explosives of burned bomb without detonating, but once off the fire was a big slab with aircraft and weapon together so tightly. Radioactive, was divided into parts: the largest was buried beside the track.
The most serious accident occurred 10 years later, in January 1968, in Greenland. On board a B-52 reconnaissance missions above the base of Thule (one of the places where they were hosted systems to intercept Russian missile attacks) a fire broke out. The crew parachuted out of the aircraft, which crashed on the ice with its load of four hydrogen bombs. Conventional explosives exploded and fuel caught fire, the ice was broken by dropping scrap and weapon parts into the sea. Thanks to the safety devices, no core had exploded, but plutonium and radioactive fragments were scattered: between the ice, a massive operation decontamination had to be started.
BUT WHERE? Moreover, a similar incident had occurred two years earlier, January 17, 1966, that time over the Spanish territory. The cause was a clash between a flying B-52 bomber and a tanker plane. The pieces of the two planes were scattered around the small village of Palomares and find the four hydrogen bombs lost was far from easy: the first was discovered, unexploded, on the same day; twenty-four hours were found the second and the third, which instead were partially exploded and plutonium were scattered around them. It was the fourth to become a case, while a fleet of ships, aircraft and submarines began to look for her ... she was found (either damaged or exploded) only on March 15, 800 m deep in the sea, and then recovered.
Even more disturbing was the fall of two hydrogen bombs near Goldsboro, North Carolina, January 23, 1961, for an accident in flight of a B-52. He reacted as if a bomb had been dropped on a target, but it did not detonate because only one of the safety mechanisms functioned: a switch was and remained in the "disengagement". This was confirmed by the report of Parker F. Jones, Sandia National Laboratories, declassified and examined by Eric Schlosser: Jones wrote that only a simple switch was interposed between the US and the catastrophe. The second bomb had not threatened to explode, but its secondary uranium bomb sank in soggy earth and was never found.
And a devastating accident involving a thermonuclear warhead W-53, the most powerful ever mounted on a missile Use: arming a Titan II near Damascus, Arkansas. It all started at 18:30 of September 18, 1980 during a job in the missile silo: an airman of the maintenance team lost a 4-kg socket wrench, which fell and bounced off a platform hitting the missile. A moment later, a tank started to exit a vaporized fuel spray. Evacuated the site, it was called an emergency team. At 3 am, the silo exploded: one person died, others were injured, the head was thrown 30 meters from the entrance of the complex. No, thanks to security measures or explosions or leaks of radioactive material.
And some accident continues to occur: in 2008, in Wyoming, a silo with unmanned Minuteman III missiles caught fire, but no sensor and signaled the maintainers became aware of just coming in off a fire. We have to trust the safety systems? Moves the problem (making it perhaps more disturbing) Francesco Lenci, physical, of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. The biggest danger is that something goes wrong in the chain of command and control of a country: "A nuclear weapon launch by mistake after a false alarm (many documented cases) would trigger retaliation. And of course there is the other possibility: that terrorists create in a city a bomb, though not transportable, simply "firing" against one another mass of uranium-235. "
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