Recently, the media reported that a Canadian diver found a Mark IV atomic bomb, lost by the US Air Force over the Pacific Ocean 66 years ago, at depths near the Haida Guai Archipelago.
At first, Sean Smirichinski (this is the name of this underwater traveler) mistook the object he found under water for a UFO. However, local residents assumed that it was an American bomb lost in 1950.
And this "loss" happened like this: in February 1950, the US Air Force B-36 bomber was carrying out a training mission in this region. For some reason, three of the plane's six engines caught fire. The crew was forced to drop the bomb on board over the Pacific Ocean and leave the plane. US authorities say the bomb was not equipped with a plutonium charge.
Photos of the Mark IV, which Sean Smirichinski found on the Internet, confirmed a certain similarity between her and the object found under water. After that, the diver reported his findings to the Canadian Department of Defense. Now it's up to the Canadian sailors, who immediately got ready to go to the place of the terrible discovery.
The lost bomb … Agree, it sounds rather strange. However, for the US Air Force, this is not so rare, as it turns out. According to declassified documents, at least 21 such incidents occurred with US thermonuclear warheads between 1950 and 1968. According to some other sources, there were at least 32 such losses.
The US Department of Defense first published a list of nuclear-weapon accidents back in 1968, which mentioned 13 serious nuclear-weapon accidents between 1950 and 1968. An enlarged list was released in 1980 with 32 cases. At the same time, the same documents were issued by the Navy under the Freedom of Information Act, which listed 381 incidents of nuclear weapons in the United States between 1965 and 1977.
Here is one such case. In January 1966, an American B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker aircraft collided at an altitude of 9,000 meters over the Spanish village of Palomares, during air refueling. The planes instantly turned into one giant blazing ball, while the B-52 carried four hydrogen bombs. For some unknown reason, one of them fell unharmed in a field near the village. The non-nuclear fuses of two more detonated, and fragments of the bomb, together with plutonium dust, made a small radioactive rain at the site of the fall. The fourth fell near the coast, but where exactly? It is worth noting that the power of this lost bomb is 1000 times the power of the one that razed Hiroshima to the ground.
They say that after this incident, the surroundings of Palomares for a long time resembled the scenery for the film about the Apocalypse. The place where the bombs fell was calculated using Geiger counters, and American warships surrounded the coastline.
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The US Air Force B-52, carrying two nuclear bombs, accidentally lost its weapons in January 1961 while airborne near Goldsboro, North Carolina.
The explosion did not happen by fluke. said Robert McNamara, who served as the US Secretary of Defense in the 60s: the two wires of one of the bombs simply did not connect, and the impact on the ground of the second bomb softened the opening parachute.
“I heard the hum of an airplane and then a loud explosion. I was actually thrown out of bed by the blast. I ran to the window and saw that my whole field was on fire,”- shared his memories of an eyewitness over whose farm the incident took place.
However, both bombs were loaded. Each of them weighed 4.5 tons and had an explosive power of 3.8 megatons. To imagine what tragic consequences such a "loss" could have, let us recall that the "Kid" bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive power of only 0.01 megatons.
On January 21, 1968, a US B-52 strategic bomber crashed near the American North Star Bay base. The crashed plane had four such bombs aboard. The plane broke through the ice and ended up on the seabed. Officially, the US authorities said that all atomic bombs were raised from the sea day. However, in reality, only three bombs were discovered and recovered from the Arctic Ocean. And the fourth charge was never found.
