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FAIL-SAFE! Air Force B-52 With Nukes Mistake! Worse Has Happened: America's 2 Lost 1.5 Megaton H-Bombs: 1958 Georgia (250 Mile Radius Blast) + Lost 4 Near Spain & Found Only 3 in 1966 - RI10
FAIL-SAFE! Air Force
B-52 With Nukes
Mistake! Worse Has
Happened:
America’s 2 Lost
1.5 Megaton
H-Bombs: 1958
Georgia (250 Mile
Radius Blast) +
Lost 4 Near Spain &
Found Only 3 in
1966 - RI10
Henry Fonda
Plot summary for
Fail-Safe (1964)
A technical malfunction in the Pentagon's strategic control system causes an erroneous order to be sent to a B-58 squadron on a routine training mission instructing the bombers to fly beyond their fail safe distance. At this point the flight crew are trained to cease communications and prepare to fulfill their objective by bombing Moscow. As the planes near their target, the crisis deepens and together the Americans and Soviets decide on a final, desperate solution. Written by Dave Jenkins {david.jenkins@smallworld.co.uk}
A series of human and computer errors sends a squadron of American B-58 bombers to nuke Moscow. The President, in order to convince the Soviets that this is a mistake, orders the Strategic Air Command to help the Soviets stop them. This movie pulls no punches. The ending will make you thank God the Cold War is over! Written by KC Hunt {khunt@eng.morgan.edu}
Warren Black is a brigadier general in the US Air Force who is troubled by a nightmare about a matador. Walter Groeteschele is a professor with some audacious theories about nuclear warfare. Carl Cascio is an Air Force Colonel ashamed of his low-class upbringing and is XO of Strategic Air Command's commanding general Frank Bogan. Jack Grady is an old-school Air Force Colonel who leads a squadron of Vindicator nuclear bombers. Gordon Knapp is head of a defense electronics contractor. Hubert Raskob is a visiting Congressman. Peter Buck is translator to the President of the United States. And all of these men become enveloped in the ultimate accident; when a malfunction damages SAC's fault indicator, the system is changed routinely, but it causes a malfunction in the mainframe that launches Jack Grady's squadron on an attack mission to obliterate Moscow. When the full horror of the accidental attack order becomes clear, SAC and the President must work to recall or stop the bombers, but all efforts are frustrated by the skill and working orders of the pilots involved as well as the power of their planes, and when they penetrate Soviet airspace a running sky battle erupts. But the bombers press on, and through negotiations with the Soviet premier, the President is left with but one hope of averting Armageddon, an order so audacious it even shocks the Soviet premier and leaves the President's subalterns speechless. Written by Michael Daly
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058083/plotsummary
Tabacco: If you have NOT SEEN “Fail Safe” and wish to rent it without knowing the ending, skip over the next paragraph and go straight to Democracy Now! logo & article. I recommend “Fail Safe” highly; I have seen it many times including once in 2007.
For those of you, who either have seen the film or don’t mind my ruining the experience for you, President (Henry Fonda) sends a US military officer to drop a nuke on New York City as proof to the Russians that the nuke bombing of Moscow was an accident. That’s how Fonda prevents all-out Holocaust. The film ends there, but I don’t think Fonda got reelected!
Air Force Flies B-52 Bomber Loaded With Nukes Across U.S.
Military officials have revealed the Air Force mistakenly flew a B-52 bomber loaded with five nuclear warheads across part of the country last week. Each of the five nuclear warheads has about 10 times the destructive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The B-52 took off from the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and landed at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana. It took the military hours to realize the nuclear weapons were missing. The incident was first reported in the Navy Times.
* Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell: "Well, I think as you all know it's longstanding policy of this department not to talk about nuclear weapons, so I can't confirm or deny that indeed nuclear weapons were involved in the incident which you rely to me. I can however tell you that the Air Force is currently investigating an error made last Thursday in the transfer of munitions, as you mentioned, from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base aboard a B-52 Stratofortress."
Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) said the incident was absolutely inexcusable. Markey said: "Nothing like this has ever been reported before, and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible". Since the 1960s, the U.S. military has transferred nuclear weapons aboard cargo planes, not on the wings of bombers.
Tabacco: That’s light stuff. America has done worse. Read on!
Published on Tuesday, August 21, 2001 in The Times of London
There's an H-bomb in Our Swamp
by Edward Welsh
In 1958, a US warplane jettisoned a device in a marsh in Georgia. Was it a nuclear weapon? No, says the Pentagon. But new evidence has raised doubts.
Ken Wade is nudging his fishing boat through the narrow creeks that cut into the steamy coastal swamps of Georgia. Twenty yards away pelicans preen, but they are not his concern. Wade is here to point out the site that he believes to be the final resting place of a nuclear bomb, jettisoned 43 years ago somewhere off the mouth of the Savannah River by a disabled B47 airplane.
“In the middle of the grass, I once floated into a circle of clear water,” he recalls, pointing towards the dense, red-tipped reeds stretching south of the river mouth. “If you step on the marsh, you would sink up to your waist. I believe the bomb landed in that spot and sank deep into the mud, creating a crater which over the years is being reclaimed by the grass.”
Wade lives on nearby Tybee Island, where many of the 3,500 inhabitants believe that there is a fully primed nuclear weapon, 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, stuck somewhere in their muddy backyard. Even though Tybee welcomes three million visitors each year to its beach, the mayor and city officers continue to draw attention to the bomb by demanding that the Government digs it up.
In 1958 the US Air Force insisted that the bomber had jettisoned nothing more than a simulated weapon, used for training purposes — little more than a metal shell stuffed with TNT. But to the intense annoyance of the Pentagon, four decades later the issue is again tormenting it.
In the past year, enthusiasts with a passion for uncovering Cold War secrets have stumbled upon an official document, apparently inadvertently declassified, which states that the Tybee bomb was a “complete weapon”. Furthermore, a former serviceman who loaded bombs on to B47s has emerged to contradict the Air Force’s position.
Despite the Pentagon’s firm denials that there is anything amiss, this new evidence has forced it to look into the possibility of searching for the missing bomb under the eyes of Georgia congressmen and the American media.
What is not in dispute is that on the night of February 4-5, 1958, a B47 bomber set out from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida with a Mark 15 Mod 0 on board. This was one of America’s earliest thermonuclear bombs, containing 400lb of conventional explosives and uranium. The 7,600lb weapon was designed with a removable nuclear capsule, or plutonium trigger. The Pentagon insists that this key piece of equipment was not on board.
At 3.30am on February 5, the bomber collided with an F86 fighter jet in midair. The jet crashed after the pilot baled out, and the bomber crew made three unsuccessful attempts to land at Hunter army airfield outside Savannah.
The Pentagon says that because of damage to the aircraft, “its airspeed could not be reduced enough to ensure a safe landing”, so permission was given to jettison the weapon to prevent a conventional explosion caused by a crash landing at Hunter.
At 7,200ft, the device was released “into the water several miles from the mouth of the Savannah River in Wassaw Sound, off Tybee Beach”.
In the first few days after the collision, the Air Force did not mention that anything had been jettisoned. But some days later it was announced that “a portion of a nuclear weapon” had been released in the area. The Air Force added that there was no danger of a radioactive explosion, presenting one local newspaper with the chance to publish the headline “Jettison of Nuclear Weapon Here Disclosed”.
It is easy to understand the Pentagon’s embarrassment. The accident happened in the middle of the Cold War. In the previous October, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, beating the Americans in putting the first man-made object into space. This added to fears in Washington that Moscow had stolen a march in the development of intercontinental ballistic missile technology.
After refueling, B47 bombers were capable of reaching the Soviet Union. Although the Pentagon insists that the bomber involved in the collision was on only a training mission, it accepts that in early 1958 other B47s were taking off from America with armed Mark 15s on board.
Off the Savannah River, an intensive search took place using ships with divers and underwater demolition teams. Local newspapers reported that the Air Force was anxious to recover the “portion” of the weapon it had admitted losing, for security reasons and because it was an “expensive part”.
But after three square miles had been examined over more than two months, the search was called off and the bomb was officially declared “irretrievably lost”. Major Harold Richardson, the bomber pilot, received the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving the aircraft and its crew, and the island returned to its insouciant ways. As the years passed, the Tybee bomb became just another of the martial tales recounted by locals during sleepy afternoons spent in hammocks.
This stretch of coast, where the American continent peters out in a series of steamy creeks, swamps and wooded sandbanks, was strategically important for a long time because the Savannah River was the gateway to the cotton fields of Georgia and South Carolina.
Pirates used Tybee as a haven for decades, and General James Oglethorpe, the Englishman who founded Savannah, built a small fort there in 1733. Forty-six years later, in one of the bloodiest battles of the War of Independence, American and French troops used Tybee as a base for their unsuccessful attempt to capture the city.
During the Civil War, Union forces, having stormed Tybee, forced Confederate forces on a nearby island to surrender. Only last year, a civil war mine was discovered at the river entrance. But with the demise of cotton after the civil war, the area became a backwater. Tybee has wooden houses reminiscent of the West Indies, and its inhabitants tend to rise early for church — and drink late. Butterflies the size of a hand fly between palm trees and live on oaks decorated with Spanish moss. Cranes, blue herons and marsh hens colonize the marshes, and bottlenose dolphins greet passing skiffs.
The backwoods calm was punctured this year by the arrival of Lt-Col Derek Duke, who claimed to have fresh evidence that a hydrogen bomb with the power to wipe out Tybee and Savannah and to send tidal waves up and down the East Coast of America did indeed exist in their midst.
The retired USAF pilot, who says that he ran a National Security Agency operation in Vietnam, agrees to meet me in the parlor of a fine mansion in one of Savannah’s squares.
On first impressions it would be easy to dismiss Duke as an eccentric. A short man, nearer 60 than 50, he has an unnatural-looking head of black hair and seems to be obsessed with the Tybee bomb as an example of how the federal Government is bent on conspiring against Americans.
Originally from Savannah but now living and working as a flying instructor in nearby Statesboro, Duke also has a financial interest in the bomb. He has formed a consortium, which has offered to find the device for the Pentagon at a cost of £600,000.
And last year, Duke, acting as a “clearing house” for information from other like-minded people, received the best piece of evidence to date to contradict the Pentagon’s case that the Tybee bomb was unarmed.
In 1966 Chet Holifield, the chairman of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was angered by adverse publicity from that year’s Palomares incident in Spain, in which another midair collision caused the temporary loss — for 80 days — of a nuclear bomb by the US Air Force.
To investigate, he held a hearing behind closed doors and asked Jack Howard, then assistant to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, to provide the committee with a list of accidents in which nuclear weapons had been lost and never recovered. Howard’s response referred to four accidents divided into two categories, one involving “complete weapons”, the other “weapon-less capsules”.
The Tybee bomb was included in the first category.
Howard’s note, on paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and stamped “Secret”, was declassified in 1994 and remained unnoticed until it was passed to Duke.
The amateur sleuth has also produced a witness. Howard Nixon worked as a crew chief loading nuclear weapons on to planes at Hunter airfield from 1957 to 1959. He says: “Never in my air force career did I load a nuclear weapon without installing a nuclear capsule in it first”.
Duke’s evidence reached Jack Kingston, the congressman for the Savannah area, who demanded that the Air Force should look again into whether there was a live nuclear bomb in his home district. The politician’s intervention encouraged the Pentagon to reopen the case, commissioning the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency to carry out an inquiry into the possibility of making a new search for the bomb.
The Pentagon says that it went back and cross-checked receipts for delivery of the Tybee bomb to Major Richardson, and other documents, which confirmed that the device was unarmed.
Lt-Col Steve Campbell, a Pentagon spokesman, says that Howard, who now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, made a mistake by listing the Tybee bomb as a “complete weapon”. “We have discussed this letter with Mr. Howard and he agrees that the accident should have been categorized as one involving a ‘weapon-less capsule’”, the official says.
Duke remains unconvinced. “Are you telling me that the right-hand man to the Secretary of Defense, with all the resources of the Department of Defense, gets a detail like that wrong to a congressional investigation that is taking the issue of lost bombs very seriously?” he asks.
“McNamara would have eaten Howard alive if he had been that sloppy.”
The Pentagon’s newly commissioned inquiry concluded that there should be no attempt to find the device, and that it was best left wherever it was. As it was unarmed, it followed that there was no danger of a nuclear explosion off Tybee.
The spread of heavy metals leaching from the bomb was also a low risk, the inquiry said, and the conventional explosives, if left undisturbed, posed no hazard. However, if there were an attempt made to move the bomb, believed to be up to 15ft under the seabed, there could be an accidental detonation of the TNT, which could seriously damage the regional aquifer and local drinking water supplies.
Lt-Col Donald Robbins, the deputy director of the Air Force’s nuclear weapons agency, adds that loaders did not know what they were putting on to the B47 — this was known only to the crew. He also insists the bomb jettisoned that night was a simulated weapon. “There was no plutonium, no nuclear capsule, on board”, he says.
Congressman Kingston accepted the findings of the latest inquiry but Tom Cannon, Tybee’s city manager, remains unhappy. Sitting in Fannie’s, a beachside eatery which attracts customers with an image of three female bottoms about to be nipped by a crab, he explains that his 21-year career in the Army, where he was involved in intelligence, has made him wary of taking the Pentagon at its word.
“One thing you learn is to use weasel words with the best”, he says. “You tell me this: 40 years ago, why did they spend two months looking for a bomb if it was a fake?”
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0821-05.htm
Interagency Team Checking for H-Bomb Lost in 1958
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4, 2004 – A team of experts is looking into whether a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel may have located a hydrogen bomb missing off the coast of Georgia since 1958.
A hydrogen bomb was believed to have been lost after being jettisoned from a B-47 Stratojet such as the one pictured here. The weapon was reported dropped in the waters of Wassaw Sound near Tybee Island, Ga., in 1958.
The 20-man team came from the Air Force, Navy, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, national laboratories and Department of Energy. The team took water and soil samples at the site where retired Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Duke believes the bomb may have landed.
The Air Force lost the bomb following a mid-air collision between a B-47 Stratojet and an F-86 Sabre off the coast of Georgia. The bomber was severely damaged and the pilot was worried that if he tried to land with the bomb aboard, the 400 pounds of conventional explosives aboard might detonate. He requested permission to jettison the bomb. Controllers gave the pilot permission and he dropped the weapon in the waters of Wassaw Sound near Tybee Island.
The water of the sound is shallow and the 7,500-pound weapon may have burrowed as much as 15-feet into the mud. After 10 weeks of searching, the Air Force listed the bomb as "irretrievable".
For the last five years, Duke has been searching the sound for the weapon. He detected unusual radiation readings in an area and notified authorities. On Sept. 29, the interagency team journeyed to Savannah, Ga., and met with Duke and his team.
Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Frank Smolinski said the talks were constructive and that the Duke team shared all the information and the way it had gathered the information with the interagency team.
On Sept. 30, the team took four boats out to the area that Duke believes the weapon may lie and took water and soil samples. The sample will go to the national laboratories for testing. Smolinski said he could not hazard a guess when the testing will end, "but it will be several weeks at a minimum".
If the tests determine that the bomb may be in the area, then the Air Force, in consultation with local, state and federal officials will decide what to do next. There is no danger of a nuclear detonation, but the conventional explosives that are a part of the bomb may be unstable.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=25148
washingtonpost.com
Lost: One H-Bomb. Call Owner
After 47 Years, a WMD Remains AWOL
By Clark Rumrill
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 17, 2005; Page D01
Just after midnight on Feb. 5, 1958, two U.S. Air Force jets, each traveling 500 mph, collided 35,000 feet over the Georgia countryside. Improbably, all four crewmembers survived and the accident might have passed into dim memory if not for the thermonuclear weapon jettisoned off Tybee Island, Ga.
The bomb is still there.
After a weeks-long search, it was "declared irretrievably lost on 16 April 1958," the Air Force reported four years ago in an assessment of whether to conduct a new search and recovery mission. It concluded that "it is in the best interest of the public and the environment to leave the bomb in its resting-place". The Navy Supervisor of Salvage, the report noted, didn't think the bomb could be found. Energy Department engineers' best guess was that it lay "buried nose-down, probably 5-15 feet below the seabed".
Clearly, the Air Force would have been glad to let it go at that. However, it did not count on the determination of Derek Duke, a 60-year-old retired Air Force officer who lives nearby and for more than six years has been searching for the bomb in the waters around Tybee Island, about 16 miles from Savannah. Responding to Duke's claim that he had found an area of high radiation the Air Force returned last September to look again.
The report on the new search has not been released. Maj. Stephanie Holcombe, an Air Force spokeswoman, says the "coordination process" is proceeding slowly but she hopes the report will be out by the end of this month.
It would close another chapter in the saga of Bomb No. 47782. The story, based on interviews with the three living crewmembers, the Air Force accident report and other Defense and Energy Department documents, begins with a routine Cold War training mission gone awry.
3:58 p.m., Feb. 4, 1958
On a clear day, pilots departing to the north from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida occasionally can see a Cape Canaveral rocket launch, particularly spectacular from the air.
But not on this February day. Maj. Howard Richardson, 36, and his two-man crew take off in a U.S. Strategic Air Command bomber, and turn west toward New Orleans.
The B-47 is on a two-plane practice mission designed to mimic the requirements of wartime attacks on targets in the Soviet Union. Typically these flights include an aerial refueling, a round trip of about 5,000 miles at speeds up to 600 mph and an electronic "bomb drop" scored by a ground station in Europe or North America. To add verisimilitude to the SAC exercises, the bombers are often "attacked" along the way by Air Force fighters.
On this mission, the B-47 carries in its bomb bay an 11-foot-7-inch-long, 7,600-pound Mk 15 Mod 0 thermonuclear weapon, another touch of realism, although the bombs on SAC training runs usually do not contain a full load of fissionable uranium or plutonium.
Over the Gulf of Mexico, it tops off its fuel tanks, a delicate maneuver. Near New Orleans, Richardson turns north and flies to a point near the Canadian border, then turns south to make a bombing run on the radar scoring facility at Radford, Va. The B-47 drops an electronic "bomb" and heads toward home. After covering 4,000 miles in eight hours, the crew is ready to relax for the last several hundred miles. Richardson is assured by a message from headquarters that everything south of Virginia is friendly territory and "enemy" fighters will not operate there.
But at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, Lt. Clarence Stewart, 23, two other pilots and three crew chiefs, are in the alert shack near the end of the runway. During a typical 12-hour tour, they will play cards, read, sleep, drink coffee and wait for the horn to go off.
Their instructions are that they can attack Richardson's plane any time before it lands in Florida. Their three F-86L aircraft are fueled, armed and connected to power carts, ready for the start of a near-supersonic ascent to a game of cat-and-mouse six miles overhead.
12:09 a.m., Feb. 5, 1958
The horn in the alert shack blares. Air Defense Control radar has picked up a single plane about 180 miles to the north. It fails to spot the second B-47 flying in the mission. The F-86 crew chiefs race outside, the pilots strap in, and in 50 seconds the turbines are turning. The planes are airborne about three minutes later.
Radar ground control directs the pilots to a point several thousand feet above and about 15 miles behind Richardson's oblivious B-47. This brings the bomber within airborne radar range and permits the fighters to gain enough speed to overtake it. With the target in range, the F-86 pilot looks down at his radarscope to plan the attack. If he looks up to check the sky around him, he could lose the target's track.
Stewart's F-86 locks onto a plane. But his radar does not spot the second plane, the one ground radar also missed. Tracking the B-47 several thousand yards ahead, he is unaware he is descending on Richardson's plane directly in front of him. Feeling turbulence, Stewart looks up from the radar screen -- it is a bright moonlit night and visibility is excellent -- and sees the sky is "filled with airplane." His reflexes, providentially, tell him to roll his plane to the right.
The ground station records a distinct radio "click" as the planes collide.
Flight Paths
Maj. Howard Richardson and Lt. Clarence Stewart were born and raised in Mississippi and their lifelines may have crossed before that night in 1958.
Richardson's father practiced medicine in rural Winston County, delivering several thousand babies, starting in 1907. Stewart's mother, born in Winston County in 1910, before the state kept birth records, could well have been one of those babies.
In any case, the two young men both developed an interest in flying.
Discussing his career at his home outside Jackson, Miss., a year ago, Richardson says he was a college student when the United States entered World War II. He joined the Army in late 1942, took pilot training and was stationed in England as a B-17G pilot. He flew 35 combat missions over France and Germany in a bomber named "Mississippi Miss". After the war, he received a degree from Mississippi State University and joined the FBI. While he was in agent training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, the Air Force offered him a regular commission and a career in flying. He returned to active duty in 1947.
Stewart, on the other hand, just looked up at the sky one day in 1948 and found his calling.
"When I was 14, I was plowing a field behind a mule in the Mississippi Delta and a crop-dusting plane came over", he says over lunch near his home in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. "We didn't see many planes in those days and it scared the living [expletive] out of my mule. Right then I decided being a pilot would be a whole lot more fun than using a mule's [behind] for a compass the rest of my life."
He located the crop-duster's pilot and signed on with him to do odd jobs. By 16 he had learned to fly and undertook 30 or 40 crop-dusting assignments, mostly on weekends.
He went on to Sunflower Junior College in Moorhead, where one night in 1953, Stewart says, he and several acquaintances heard that an alligator had been caught in the nearby countryside. They purchased it, although memories differ on the price. Stewart remembers $5 but his friend Thomas Taylor, a retired county agricultural agent living outside Greenwood, Miss., recalls$10. One night shortly thereafter, between the first and second acts of the Sunflower spring operetta, the alligator was released into the school fishpond. (This fine body of water covers about two acres and can be seen to this day on the campus of what has been renamed Mississippi Delta Community College.) Word got around, and the third act of the operetta had to be canceled when everyone raced to the pond to see if there actually was an alligator in it. There was.
One thing led to another, Stewart says, and his academic deferment from Korean War duty suddenly became inoperative. He volunteered for the Air Force, went to flying school, thrived, and some years later wound up in the moonlit sky over Georgia on a cold winter night.
12:33:30 a.m., Feb. 5, 1958
The pilot and co-pilot of the B-47 see a bright flash as a tremendous jolt rocks the plane. Calipers in the navigator's hand bounce to the floor. A look from the pilots' position, assisted by the bright moonlight, shows the far right engine canted up at a 30-degree angle and the right external fuel tank missing.
The collision rips the left wing off the F-86. When the fuel accumulation tank bursts, the right wing is blown off. Stewart, startled to realize he is flying a wingless aircraft, ejects.
Richardson and his crew are as prepared as any B-47 crew in the Air Force for an in-flight emergency. Three months before, Richardson and co-pilot Robert Lagerstrom say, they came in third -- out of 1,000 crews -- in the Strategic Air Command Bombing and Navigation Competition. Richardson has clocked more than 1,000 hours in the aircraft, served as an instructor pilot and is well acquainted with the capabilities and peculiarities of the B-47.
The severely misaligned engine is still producing power, causing the plane to roll. Richardson cuts the fuel to it, then drops the left external fuel tank to better trim the aircraft. He takes the B-47 down to 20,000 feet, cuts the speed, extends the flaps and lowers the wheels to determine if he can land safely. The plane remains stable at 240 miles an hour and Richardson heads for nearby Hunter Air Force Base outside Savannah.
The Hunter tower advises that repair work has left an 18-inch drop at either end of the runway. If the B-47 lands short, the landing gear and dangling engine could snag, sending the 7,600-pound payload hurtling through the cockpit and down the runway at 200-plus mph. To avoid such an undesirable outcome, at about 1:10 a.m. Richardson informs SAC headquarters he'll ditch the bomb in the Atlantic. Pilots, like ship captains, have wide latitude in safety matters, and he does not feel obliged to wait for a reply. Moments after he pitches it into the saltwater near Tybee Island, SAC tells him to drop it 20 miles out.
Losing almost four tons of weapons lowers the projected landing speed and makes the B-47 easier to control, but the landing still is anything but routine. Richardson comes in at about 225 mph, 80 mph faster than normal at that weight, using full rudder and holding the right wing as high as possible to keep the damaged engine from dragging. The plane glances off the runway, becoming airborne again. The 16-foot-diameter runway-brake parachute is deployed in the air, a use for which it was not designed, and the plane hits the runway a second time and slows.
("We turned off the runway, shut down the engines and got the hell out of there", co-pilot Lagerstrom says.)
It is 1:33 a.m.
Stewart, meanwhile, is about 35,000 feet over Sylvania, Ga., in minus-50-degree air, wearing a thin flying suit and no gloves -- they have holes and Stewart had taken them off so they wouldn't snag on the radar control knob. The ejection system is designed to open his parachute at about 12,000 feet, but he isn't counting on it. He pulls the ripcord just after ejecting and is rewarded with a very long, very cold ride east across the Savannah River to a spot two miles west of Garnett, S.C. Although he has scant protection from the cold, he does have an oxygen bottle to help him breathe in the thin atmosphere. In about 30 minutes he travels six miles vertically and 22 miles horizontally.
As Stewart describes it, he touches down "in a little clearing in the biggest damn swamp in South Carolina", a lucky landing, but the temperature is just 35 degrees, according to the Air Force accident report. He inflates his life raft, turns it upside down and huddles beneath it, wrapped in his parachute. After several hours he hears an aircraft and fires the flare gun in his survival kit. His frozen fingers fumble and the flare barely misses his toes before plowing into the parachute. The plane fails to spot this interesting fiasco, but the ruckus does awaken a sleeping dog.
In due course forest ranger Andy Walker appears, convinced he's caught a poacher. By sunrise Stewart is wrapped in a blanket next to a wood stove, drinking some fine, untaxed South Carolina whiskey.
Because long-distance calls are expensive and because he considers the matter official government business, Stewart calls Charleston AFB collect to report his survival. Citing regulations, the base operator refuses to accept the call. Walker graciously foots the bill for the call and drives Stewart to the Walterboro hospital, where his hands are soaked in ice water -- appropriate treatment for frostbite. There an Air Force helicopter fetches him and returns him to his base.
Stewart remains in the hospital for a month while doctors work to save his badly swollen and discolored fingers. At one point they recommend amputating all or parts of five of them, a prospect that so horrifies him, Stewart says, that he threatens to desert from the hospital.
In addition to defending his fingers, Stewart must face an accident board, a proceeding designed to prevent future accidents rather than affix individual responsibility. He is not convinced of the board's benign purpose. "What they really wanted to do was fry my young [posterior]", he says.
That becomes impossible when the device that recorded his plane's radar images is found five weeks later and several miles away. It was part of the canopy assembly and had been blown out of the aircraft during ejection. The device confirms that the F-86's radar had indeed focused on the B-47 farthest away and somehow "missed" Richardson's looming aircraft.
One might imagine that a plane with both wings missing would smash into the ground and disintegrate. In fact, Stewart's F-86 did not. The tail surfaces apparently provided some gliding capability and, bizarrely, the aircraft hit the ground almost horizontally four miles from Sylvania, near Whitehill, Ga.
That Pesky Nuke
After 47 years, the Mk 15, a thermonuclear weapon with a design power at least 60 times the Hiroshima bomb, remains underwater within perhaps 16 miles of downtown Savannah.
Despite adamant denials by the Air Force that the bomb is a threat, Derek Duke says, "It's still out there and anything could happen in the future. Maybe terrorists could come up with a new technology that would let them do with it as they wish".
(The bomb off Tybee Island wasn't the only nuclear weapon to be dropped unintentionally by a U.S. Air Force plane. Air Force records outline three refueling incidents involving nuclear-armed bombers that led to the unscheduled release of eight weapons.)
(The most publicized incident took place in January 1966, during the refueling of a B-52 over Palomares, Spain, and killed seven of 11 crewmembers. Of the B-52's four weapons, one parachuted to earth and was recovered intact; two hit land and were destroyed when their high-explosive triggers went off, spreading plutonium dust over several hundred acres; and one landed in the Mediterranean and was recovered by a midget sub several months later.)
The Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency, in an April 12, 2001, report on the possible recovery of the Tybee weapon, states that it contains an unspecified amount of uranium and 400 pounds of high explosives.
That sounds ominous, but weapons-grade uranium is a strange substance. If present in more than a specific critical mass it explodes spontaneously, with massive power and the familiar mushroom cloud. The radiation given off by a less-than-critical mass of weapons-grade uranium, however, is primarily alpha particles, which "can't penetrate tissue paper", according to Billy W. Mullins, former associate director of nuclear and counterproliferation for the Air Force. He adds that low radioactivity of subcritical weapons-grade uranium would make it unsuitable for use in a terrorist's "dirty bomb" should the Tybee bomb ever be dug up.
In addition, while the design of the weapon has not been made public, evidence leans toward it being a gun-type nuclear weapon. To explode this type of bomb, a capsule containing one subcritical piece of uranium is fired into another, with their combined mass setting off the fission reaction. The nuclear safety technique of choice through 1957-58 was to keep the core of fissionable material (the "capsule") separate from the body of the weapon. In wartime, a second capsule could be inserted promptly in a quick-opening aperture.
Before that fateful flight, Richardson signed a receipt for the Mk 15 cautioning him not to "allow any active capsule to be inserted into it at any time". That supports the Air Force assertion in 2001 that the weapon had a removable capsule. And Richardson strongly maintains that for the training mission he did not receive a nuclear capsule.
Without the second capsule, any danger still presented by the Tybee bomb is from the 400 pounds of conventional explosives or from humans somehow ingesting uranium that might escape from the bomb and its silt prison.
The initial 1958 search for the weapon covered an area of three square miles and lasted nine weeks before the bomb was declared "irretrievably lost". The same area was the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics yachting competition.
The second search, in September 2004, was undertaken in response to Duke's assertion that he had found a hot spot of radiation near where the bomb is believed to have fallen.
Although the final report from the interagency team has not yet been released, the Associated Press reports that an April 4 letter to a Georgia newspaper from Col. James DeFrank, the Air Force deputy director of public affairs, said no "significant" levels of radiation were detected. The team reportedly concentrated its efforts in an area the size of a football field.
Silvered Wings
Clarence Stewart went on to fly 130 1/2 combat missions in Southeast Asia, he says, won the Silver Star and became a fighter squadron commander. After serving for more than 21 years, he retired, owned several restaurants, bought and sold Florida land and gained local renown for his creative services to the English language.
Grateful for his rescue from the Carolina swamp, he showed Andy Walker his appreciation by inviting him to his wedding and going hunting with him regularly over the years.
Howard Richardson became a B-47 squadron commander, moved on to B-52s and became commander of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons School. He earned an MBA and served in senior financial management positions with the Air Force, retiring as a full colonel after 31 years of service.
For bringing the B-47 and its crew back safely, Richardson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The Air Force later contended the nuclear weapon was dropped at SAC's instruction, an assertion the pilot quietly but firmly disputes.
He has on his wall at home a framed copy of Atomic Energy Commission form AL-569, revised 8-57, acknowledging his receipt on Feb. 4, 1958, of weapon serial number 47782.
The form provides him, prophetically, with an office to contact in case the bomb should somehow get lost.
Clark Rumrill was stationed at Hunter Air Force Base outside Savannah at the time of the incident. He heard of it over breakfast that morning.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
ww.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59703-2005Apr16?language=printer
Tabacco: But wait – there’s more! It happened again – that’s right; the United States of America lost 4 more H-Bombs in 1966. The good news is they found 3. The bad news is 1 H-Bomb is still missing off the coast of Spain. That means 2 USA H-Bombs are currently missing and have been lost since 1966! And you thought the Russians were sloppy!
Palomares Hydrogen Bombs Incident
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
B28RI nuclear bomb was recovered from 2,850 feet (869 m) of water and lifted aboard the USS Petrel.
Cuevas del Almanzora within the province of Almería.
On January 17, 1966 a B-52 bomber of the USAF Strategic Air Command collided with a KC-135 tanker during mid-air refueling at 31,000 feet over the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Spain. The KC-135 was completely destroyed when its load of fuel ignited, killing four of the crew. The B-52 broke apart, killing all but four of her crew. Survivors were Major Larry Messinger (pilot), Captain Charles Wendorf (aircraft commander), Michael Rooney (copilot) and Captain Ivan Buchanan (radar navigator). Of the four hydrogen bombs, probably of the Mk28 type, that it carried, three were found on land, near the small fishing village of Palomares, part of Cuevas del Almanzora, Almeria, in East Andalusia (Spain). The fourth, which fell into the Mediterranean Sea, was recovered eighty days later.
Contamination
The conventional explosion of two of the bombs, which fell on land detonated, causing contamination with uranium and plutonium of 2 square kilometres of land. 1,750 tons of contaminated material were excavated and sent for disposal at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, USA
To defuse alarm of contamination, the Spanish minister for information and tourism Manuel Fraga and the US ambassador Angie P. Duke swam on a nearby beach in front of press. There were actually two swims, first the ambassador and some companions at Mojácar (a resort 15 km away) and a second one with Duke and Fraga at the Quitapellejos beach in Palomares.
The fourth bomb
After a long search conducted by the US Navy, the fourth bomb was located by the DSV Alvin on March 17th. The bomb was brought to the surface by USS Petrel (ASR-14). While serving on the salvage ship USS Hoist (ARS-40) during recovery operations, Navy diver Carl Brashear had his leg crushed in a deck accident. His story was the inspiration for the 2000 Cuba Gooding, Jr. film Men of Honor.
Simó Orts settlement
The search for the fourth bomb was carried out by means of a novel mathematical method, Bayesian search theory, led by Dr John Craven. This method assigns probabilities to individual map grid squares, then updates these as the search progresses. Initial probability input is required for the grid squares, and these probabilities made use of the fact that a local fisherman, Francisco Simó Orts, popularly known since then as "Paco el de la bomba", witnessed the bomb entering the water at a certain location. Orts was contacted by the US Air Force to assist in the search operation.
After the bomb had been located, Simó Orts appeared at the First District Federal Court building in New York City with his lawyer, Herbert Brownell, formerly Attorney General of the United States under President Dwight Eisenhower, claiming salvage rights on the recovered hydrogen bomb. According to Craven:
"It is customary maritime law that the person who identifies the location of a ship to be salvaged has the right to a salvage award if that identification leads to a successful recovery. The amount is nominal, usually one or two percent, sometimes a bit more, of the intrinsic value to the owner of the thing salvaged. But the thing salvaged off Palomares was a hydrogen bomb, the same bomb valued by no less an authority than the Secretary of Defense at $2 billion — one percent of which is, of course, $20 million."
The Air Force settled out of court.
Recent events
In 2004, a study revealed that there was still some significant contamination present in certain areas, and the Spanish government subsequently expropriated some plots of land which would have been slated for agriculture use or housing construction otherwise. In early October, 2006, the Spanish and United States government agreed to decontaminate the remaining areas and share the workload and costs, which are hitherto unknown, as it first needs to be determined to what extent leaching of the plutonium has occurred in the 40 years since the incident.
On October 11, 2006, Reuters reported that higher than normal levels of radiation were detected in snails and other wildlife in the region, indicating there may still be dangerous amounts of radioactive material underground. The discovery occurred during an investigation being carried out by Spain's energy research agency CIEMAT and the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. and Spain have agreed to share the cost of the initial investigation, set to begin in November, but according to a U.S. embassy spokesman in Spain responsibility for clean up costs is yet to be agreed upon.
Political consequences
Four days after the accident, the Spanish government stated that "the Palomares incident was evidence of the dangers created by [NATO's] use of the Gibraltar airstrip", announcing that NATO aircraft would no longer be permitted to fly over Spanish territory either to or from Gibraltar.
Palomares and another accident involving nuclear bombers two years later near Thule Air Base, in Greenland, led the U.S. Department of Defense to announce that it would be "re-examining the military need" for continuing the so-called Airborne Alert Indoctrinal Training Program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palomares_H-Bomb_Incident
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Tabacco: Further commentary by Tabacco is unnecessary. If you do not see the horrific potential in these 3 incidents, spread over 49 years, no further rhetoric will convince you. I merely mention that Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican, was US president in 1958, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat, was US president in 1966, and George W. Bush, a Republican, is US president currently in 2007. The party in power seems irrelevant when considering the sloppiness in handling nuclear weapons and the military’s incompetence.
Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.
In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".
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