February 6, 2013

No more broken arrow

We have a few nuclear weapons in our US military stockpile. I don't know if you've heard.

The part that occasionally frightens me is that we've stored a few of our extra weapons in rather awkward places - like the North Carolina swamps, in wilds of northern British Columbia, of the southern coast of Spain, and other places. In each of those places, and in a few others, the United States military had an accident that resulted in the loss of a nuclear weapon - never to be found again.

The loss of nuclear weapons is apparently a frequent enough occurrence that Wikipedia has a category of articles related to it: Aviation accidents and incidents involving nuclear weapons.

Seriously...
  • 1950 - A US plane had its engines freeze up over British Columbia and was forced to drop its nuclear weapon - with 'natural uranium (?)" but without its plutonium core - before it crashed...weapon detonated
  • 1961 - after an accident of mid-air refueling, a B-52 fell apart and dropped two nuclear weapons into the North Carolina swamp...weapon never found...
  • 1961 - (Same year, two months later) a B-52F decompressed, dropped to lower altitude, and ran out of fuel before crashing to the ground with its two nuclear weapons (both of which were, from what I can tell, recovered)
  • 1964 - B-52 (pattern?) crashed in Maryland with its two nuclear weapons intact after its vertical stabilizer broke off...weapons recovered
  • 1965 - A Sea-A-4 was accidentally pushed off of a US aircraft carrier during a training exercise...weapon never recovered, assumed still lying in 16,000 ft of ocean
  • 1966 - a US military plane explodes on mid-air refueling, dropping four hydrogen bombs, three near a Spanish village, and one into the ocean...three weapons recovered, ocean-dropped weapon never found
  • 1968 - US B-52's cabin caught fire over Baffin Bay (between Canada and Greenland), forcing crew to abandon before the plane crashed into the sea and the four (FOUR) hydrogen bombs to detonate their conventional explosives and spread their radioactive material across the ocean...weapons destroyed...
Seriously?

Seriously!?!

SERIOUSLY ?!?!

I'm thinking maybe we should rethink just flying those things around...or having them at all...or even making them...

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