The Bad News About Broken Arrows

By Carl Austin

Image courtesy flickr

As you know, I'm not afraid to delve into hot button topics.  And what could be hotter than the threat of nuclear annihilation?  Today, I’m going to show you something that many Americans don’t even realize exists.  That’s because the federal government moves heaven and earth to hide the fact that its nuclear weapon stockpile is anything but 100% safe.  I’m not talking about terrorists stealing an atomic bomb.  Nor am I rattling my saber about the untold amounts of nuclear waste that is stored haphazardly all over this great nation of ours.  What I’m here to point out is that since the 1950’s, there have been hundreds of incidents where our nuclear weapons have been dropped, blown up and even lost by the US military.  The problem is so common that the government has even coined a term for this kind of incident.  It’s called a broken arrow.

Almost as soon as the United States acquired the ability to create a bomb with the power to take out a city, it started having mishaps with them.  Even before we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, the Los Alamos technician entrusted with the bombs core saw the need to arm the device only after takeoff, since he realized if the Enola Gay crashed, the resulting nuclear explosion would have wiped the airbase and everyone else on the island of Tinian off the face of the Earth.  Fortunately for the aircrew, the bomber managed to lumber into the air on August 6, 1945. 

Image courtesy flickr

Five years later, on February 14, 1950, a Convair B-36 didn’t fare as well.  While enroute from Alaska to Carswell Air Force Base in Ft. Worth, Texas, the bomber crashed in British Columbia.  Before ejecting from the stricken bomber, the crew managed to jettison the Mark 4 nuclear bomb it was carrying into the Pacific Ocean.  The bomb, which was never recovered, contained uranium, as well as 5,000 pounds of high explosives.

Less than two months later, on April 11, a B-29 laden with a nuclear weapon crashed into a mountain near Albuquerque, New Mexico.  While the 13 crewmen aboard the bomber were all killed and the bomb’s high explosives detonated, fortunately the nuclear core failed to explode.

Three months after that, on November 10, a US B-50 bomber jettisoned its Mark 4 bomb, this time over the St. Lawrence River near Quebec, Canada when the bomber experienced engine trouble.  Once again, the high explosives detonated and the only thing that prevented the nuclear core from exploding was that it lacked a vital component which was housed separately on the bomber.  That didn’t keep the weapon’s nearly 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium from scattering across the countryside.  After this incident, the Canadian government forbid the US to overfly their country with any aircraft carrying nuclear weapons.  The Air Force chose instead to fly several miles off their coast.

Now, you’d think that three incidents involving atomic bombs in one year would have caused the American populace to demand some changes in the policy that allowed them to be flown over the US.  The problem was, the American people had no idea that the crashes had even occurred.  You heard me right, those in power decided to withhold the information from the populace. As far as the Air Force was concerned, keeping the country safe from the Red Menace was worth a few incidents.  Unfortunately, these were hardly the last.

Image courtesy flickr

On March 10, 1956, a B-47 carrying two nuclear bomb cores which had a combined yield of 3.4 megatons were lost over the Mediterranean Sea.  And when I say lost, I am speaking literally, since no trace of the plane or its ordnance was ever found.  The flight which originated in Florida and was supposed to land in Morocco, completed an initial midair refueling over the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately, it failed to rendezvous with a second tanker that was supposed to refuel again it over the Med. To this day, the Department of Defense has no idea where the bomber or its deadly payload came down.

Four months later, on July 27, another incident involving a B-47 occurred over England.  Not only did this bomber crash, but the aircraft came down atop a storage facility that housed three nuclear bombs.  Air Force investigators who were summoned to the scene later concluded that it was a miracle that none of the Mark 6 nuclear bombs had exploded.

With a track record of crashes and a near atomic detonation over an allied territory, you probably think that Air Force policy would be such that nuclear safeguards would be drilled into the very crew tasked with carrying them around the world, wouldn’t you?  Well, you’d be wrong.  Another broken arrow exemplifies the problem nicely.  On May 22, 1957, a bomber transporting a hydrogen bomb to Kirtland AFB had an incident while on final approach to Albuquerque when it inadvertently dropped its bomb.  The reason I say inadvertently was that the bomb wasn’t just dropped, it literally crashed through the closed bomb bay door to create a 25-foot wide crater in a field near the airport.  Fortunately, the only fatality was a cow that had been grazing nearby.

Image courtesy flickr

Two months and six days later, a cargo plane carrying three nuclear bombs from Dover Delaware was forced to jettison two of them over the Atlantic when the plane lost power.  Neither of the bombs was ever recovered. Two and a half months after that, a plane carrying a nuke crashed on takeoff at Homestead Air Base near Miami.  The plane itself burned for more than four hours and the bomb’s high explosives cooked off without releasing its fissile material. 

On February 5 of the following year, a B-47 carrying a Mark 15 bomb collided with an F-86 fighter plane over Georgia during an exercise.  The crew of the bomber requested and was given permission to jettison the bomb over Wassau Sound near Savannah to prevent an explosion should they crash while making their emergency landing.  The bomb was lost close to shore and never found.  To this day, there lies an armed hydrogen bomb with a potential blast radius of more than four miles somewhere just off the Georgia coast.

                                               

A little more than a month after this incident, another occurred once more in Georgia when a B-47E took off from Savannah.  The bomber’s pilot, Captain Earl Koehler noted a red light on his panel indicating the bomb harness locking pin was no longer engaged.  He therefore sent a crewman back to assess the situation.  Instead of fixing the problem, the crewman inadvertently pulled the emergency bomb release which, you got it, dropped the H-bomb through the closed bomb bay doors.  After falling 15,000 feet, the bomb’s explosives detonated, creating a 70-ft wide, 35-ft deep crater.  While the nuclear capsule in the bomb failed to detonate, in this case there were civilian casualties.  A family of six was injured when their home was leveled by the blast.  They later sued the government and were awarded $54,000.

Later that same year, another bomb was released, this time over Mars Bluff, South Carolina.  The blast damaged buildings and injured six people on the ground.  The remainder of the decade saw a bomber laden with a nuke catch fire only burn to the ground in England and another bomber burning on the tarmac in Louisiana.  While neither caused a nuclear explosion, the government later admitted there was radioactive contamination released at both sites.

By 1960, when the B-52 replaced the B-47, it didn’t happen without incident.  The early models of the B-52 had several congenital defects that caused the tail to break off in several instances and a wing to fall off during flight in at least one incident.  On January 24, 1961, a B-52 laden with up to 4 hydrogen bombs (each of which had a yield of 4 megatons) broke up in midair over Goldsboro, North Carolina.  Before it hit the ground, the crew managed to release two of the bombs. One of them was later found to have activated three of four arming mechanisms. Years later one of the men tasked with recovering the bombs said, “Until the day I die, I’ll never forget hearing my sergeant say, ‘Lieutenant, I found the arm/safe switch.’  ‘Great,” I said, to which the sergeant replied, ‘Not great.  It’s on arm.’”

                                               The Goldsboro Nuclear Weapon Accident

The second bomb dropped by the same B-52 plopped down in a muddy field.  Instead of digging it out, the decision was made to leave the device buried in place.  The Army Corps of Engineers then constructed a 400-foot wide circular concrete cover to make sure that nobody ever dug it up.

During the 60’s the US experienced several embarrassing incidents that contaminated our allies, including one in Palomares, Spain when a hydrogen bomb rained plutonium down on a mile-wide area in and around the town.  This forced the US government to scrape up 1,400 tons of contaminated soil which it then shipped to a storage facility.  The other was the time a B-52 loaded with four thermonuclear bombs crashed onto the sea ice near Thule, Greenland.  While the Danish government dispatched a team to clean up the contamination, those same workers later sued for compensation when many of them came down with radiation-related illnesses.

That’s not to say that we were the only nuclear power to experience broken arrows.  The Soviet Union also had its share, although most of them have yet to be unearthed.  One that is known was the 1968 sinking of a Golf-class ballistic missile nuclear submarine 750-miles northwest of Oahu.  This was the same sub that the CIA tried to scoop from the seabed with the Glomar Explorer in 1974.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian  The latest was the loss on August 12, 2000 of the nuclear missile sub Kursk. (The Kursk which sank in relatively shallow water, was salvaged a little over a year later by the Russians.)

The US also lost two nuclear subs, the first being the nuclear attack submarine Thresher that sank with all hands in 1963 and the second being the Scorpion that sank in 1968. 

The Time We Tried to Nuke Little Rock, Arkansas

Image courtesy flickr

While I could go on and on about broken arrows that occurred in the air and on the sea, one of the most unusual occurred underground.  On September 19, 1980, a Titan II missile with a 9-megaton warhead exploded inside its underground silo in Damascus, Arkansas.  The incident began when a 2-man maintenance crew accidentally dropped a tool they were using to service the missile.  The 5-pound socket fell eight stories to ricochet off a fairing only to punch a hole in the side of the missile.  This caused the rocket to begin leaking fuel into the silo.  Instead of admitting to their error immediately and putting the base on alert, the two teenage technicians kept mum for more than an hour, by which time the silo was full of explosive vapors.  It isn’t certain that the revelation of this omission right away would have made a difference in the final outcome, but one thing was for sure; by the time the silo was evacuated and the base was put on alert, there was little that could be done to prevent the missile from exploding.

That didn’t keep another pair of brave missile technicians from venturing inside the locked down base to see if they could prevent a tragedy.  The second tragedy that day was due to the fact that not only wouldn’t the Air Force admit it had a problem, the military brass wouldn’t even tell the Vice President, who was in Little Rock at the time, whether there was any imminent danger of a nuclear explosion.  Since Bill Clinton was then governor of Arkansas, had the nuclear warhead detonated, history would have been quite different.

Shortly after the two intrepid technicians entered the base, the silo exploded with such force that it threw the warhead through the concrete blast door atop the silo.  The non-nuclear explosion resulted in one dead and twenty injured.  Fortunately, the warhead was recovered in a ditch about a quarter of a mile away, dented but intact.

Since then, there have been many broken arrows that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic.  The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 if anything made the situation even more precarious, since maintenance of its nuclear arsenal was lax to say the least.  When it comes to the US arsenal, even in the 21^st Century we are not without sin.  The hard part is trying to ferret out the incidents using the Freedom of Information Act, which takes time.  The question is how much time we all have when it’s clear, all it would take to cause a disaster of unimaginable proportions would be to have just one broken arrow go thermonuclear on home soil.  How much longer our luck can hold out is anybody’s guess.  Let me know what you think with your comments.

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