How could nuclear weapons, the most dangerous tools in the history of war, go missing?  What are the events that cause them to go missing and how are they recovered?  Join me as we explore a few of the stories of America’s Broken Arrows.

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In the waters off Tybee Island in Georgia, about eighteen miles from the beautiful city of Savannah, there lurks a danger.  No, it’s not sharks, or hurricanes, although those pass through the neighborhood often enough.  No, this danger lives there permanently. 

Tybee Island is a vacation hot spot since the late nineteenth century, known for its wide, sandy beaches, warm, gentle waves, and Georgia’s oldest and tallest lighthouse. The locals are friendly, the seafood is exquisite, and visitors can brush up on history or spend the day becoming one with nature.  It truly is a little paradise on the Atlantic.  And somewhere off its coast is an unexploded nuclear bomb, containing several pounds of enriched uranium and four hundred pounds of explosives, lost by the U.S. Air Force in February 1958, one of almost three dozen nuclear bombs that have been lost or gone missing since the dropping of Fat Man (a Plutonium bomb) and Little Boy (a uranium bomb) on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. For the past seventy-three years, we have lived under a nuclear umbrella.  Since the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons four years after the United States did in 1945, the possibility of these weapons being used again has always existed.  But perhaps, equally frightening, is the possibility of losing control of our own weapons, of letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle on our own soil by accident.

The first nuclear weapons were huge, cumbersome devices that were assembled by hand by scientists. Weighing nearly five tons, planes such as the Enola Gay or Bock’s Car, Boeing B-29 “Superfortresses” were required to carry a single bomb thousands of miles.  It’s one thing to test a bomb in a desert or on an island under optimal conditions.  It is another to drop one five miles up while being hunted by enemy fighters or targeted by anti-air missles or anti-aircraft fire.  From their inception there has been an entire industry in the United States, and virtually every other member of the so-called nuclear club, designed to develop more effective ways to deliver them.  The US now has what is referred to as the “nuclear triad”: bombers – planes that deliver the bomb, submarines – underwater vessels equipped with missiles with nuclear warheads, and land-based missiles – mostly ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads to a target on another continent.  Of the three, the bombers are the slowest and most cumbersome.  They are also the oldest form of delivering nuclear bombs.  As such, they are also prone to the same issues that plague all aircraft: weather, pilot error, mechanical issues, any one of which can lead to a plane carrying a nuclear weapon going down.  

A Broken Arrow event has occurred multiple times in the past seventy-three years.  By definition, a Broken Arrow is defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of the weapon.  In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not the only time nuclear weapons have been deployed.  They are the only times we have intentionally done so.  Since then at least thirty-two nukes been accidentally dropped, intentionally jettisoned, been lost with a submarine, and otherwise gone out of the hands of those tasked with keeping them (and us) safe.   Today, in part one of a two-part episode, we’re going to travel down the dark path when nukes are lost, and, unfortunately, not always found.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  See our videos on YouTube, visit mydarkpath.com or find us on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok.

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Finally, Thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 47, Broken Arrows, Part One.

PART ONE

The brave men and women of the Air Force and Navy are tasked with keeping America’s nuclear weapons secure and safe, ensuring that they exist ready to be used, in the hopes that they never will be. The problem with weapons is that anything that can be had, can be lost.  And that includes nukes.  Within five years of developing the bomb, we lost our first one.

That’s right - the first Broken Arrow event occurred less than five years after the end of the Second World War and only a year after the first Soviet nuclear test in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, present day Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union and one of two key Soviet testing sites.

If this topic interests you, our Patreon members have access to a special Members only episode about Soviet broken arrows.  If you want to know more, think about going to MyDarkPath.com, becoming a Patreon supporter, and scare yourself a little more with additional tales of lost nuclear weapons, with a specific focus on the Soviet Union’s Broken Arrows.

In 1950 America’s nuclear bombs were all on planes flown by the United States Strategic Air Command, or SAC for short, a branch of the newly formed Air Force, itself formed in 1947 specifically tasked with containing the Soviet Union.  Until then, the Army Air Corps and the Navy were the groups responsible for bombings and air defense during the Second World War.  However, the government felt a new service was needed to counter the new threat.  SAC was run by the legendary General Curtis LeMay, who liked to say his men were the first line of defense against communist aggression and believed that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.  To prepare for that day LeMay was demanding and exacting, holding his men to rigorous schedules and constant drills to prepare them for the day when they would have to fly thousands of miles and drop their city-destroying bombs.

By 1950 the plane of choice for SAC was the B-36 Bomber, a long-range bomber that could fly deep into Soviet territory, deliver its payload, escape the shockwave and then the enemy unscathed. The B-36 was designed and manufactured by Convair and had a very unique appearance by virtue of 6 pusher prop engines.  These were prop engines but they were mounted on the back on the wings, not the leading edge.  Later version even had 4 jet engines added to increase it’s speed.  It could carry over ten thousand pounds, the exact weight of a nuclear bomb at the time.  Its tail fin stood as tall as a five story building and its wingspan was ten feet longer than two B-24s parked side by side.  That’s a wider wingspan than even the Boeing 747.  It could fly up to 381 miles per hour to get to its target.  The Navy strongly opposed the plane, thinking its bombers were better, so the Air Force flew a B-36 from Carswell Air Force base in Fort Worth, Texas, and on the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, flew the plane right under the Navy’s defenses, dropping a dummy bomb off the coast of Hawai’i without being detected by the Navy, and flew back to Texas, all in less than thirty six hours.  This demonstration guaranteed SAC would carry America’s nuclear deterrent.  American propaganda at the time hailed it as the greatest flying machine ever built for purposes of defense.  The men who flew it knew otherwise.  Historian Norman Leach argues the crews had a love/hate relationship with the B-36, which replaced the B-29 that was so instrumental to allied victory in World War II.  The B-36 was cutting edge technology, true, but it also was a problematic design with a proclivity for fatal crashes. 

On February 13, 1950, a crew of fourteen under the command of Captain Harold L. Barry climbed aboard Flight 2075, their B-36 for a routine drill.  They were to fly from Eielson Air Force Base, 26 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, located next to Moose Creek Alaska, down through Canada to San Franciso, a planned twenty-hour flight.  San Francisco was to be the simulated target.  After simulating the bombing of San Fransisco they were to continue to fly on to Forth Worth, Texas.  This kind of exercise became routine for the time, simulating flying from Alaska to the Soviet Union, dropping their bombs, and then flying to a safe site back in or near the United States.  Flight 2075 carried a Mark IV Fat Man atomic bomb.  On bombing drills, SAC used real weapons.  General LeMay insisted that the drills be “as close to war as it gets,” so the bombs had to be real.  He wanted to know his men could carry out their orders quickly, efficiently, and without question.  He wanted the bombing of the Soviet Union to go off like clockwork when it happened, and believed the best and only way to do this was to train with real weapons.  So when the plane took off that cold Alaska morning, it carried a real nuclear bomb. The bomb was carried in a dummy capsule and was not, technically speaking, a viable bomb.  Roughly the same size and configuration as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, it contained enriched uranium and explosives, but not the plutonium core which would actually trigger a nuclear blast.  So there was no actual danger of a nuclear bomb going off, but the danger was in the bomb itself, in the event of an accident, could still be a “dirty bomb,” any damage or explosion spreading highly radioactive material all over the landscape which it hit.   Later, in a Pentagon written to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy one month after the incident, Maj. Gen. Thomas D. White wrote, “the air- plane carried an atomic bomb, less nuclear component.”

The flight was an example of what SAC called a “Maximum Effort Training Mission,” designed to test machine and crew endurance, cohesion and readiness under near-combat conditions.  SAC was training crews to have the ability to drop 300 atomic weapons on 200 Soviet and Chinese cities.  Not only did they have to fly the entire route non-stop, delivering the bomb to its “target,” they had to do so while evading detection and interception by other military aircraft.

The mission was top secret. Captain Barry and his crew had been flown from Fort Worth to Alaska on February 2, but low temperatures and the weather kept them grounded for almost two weeks. When the temperature warmed to negative twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, the mission was cleared to go. Flight 2075 had already reported a number of mechanical issues by the crew that had brought it to Alaska two weeks before. The number four engines was having problems, there was a hole in the water tank of engine number five and one of the fuel pumps in the bomb bay fuel tank was also not working. 

Regardless, early that morning the crew reported for preflight briefing and their preflight physicals. Both crew and plane were cleared to fly with no evidence of illness or fatigue among the men and no mechanical issues for the plane, despite the extreme cold.

The bomb was loaded, the final checks performed and at 2:27 pm, clearance was given and Commander Barry ordered the six engines to accelerate.  The plane took off, but despite de-icing, because of the low temperatures, the plane had a thin layer of ice coating it on takeoff. Within six hours of taking off, numerous mechanical issues started popping up.  Neither the radio nor the radar worked, and the repair on the fuel pump failed, meaning engines five and six would soon cut out.  The plane was fighting a headwind and hail as it continued to fight its way south. Ice was also building up inside the carburetors. At this point, the engines then began to catch fire.  Anything that can go wrong did on Flight 2075.  The crew struggled to keep the plane aloft.  The radio was finally fixed, although the crew was not sure if it actually worked.  The first communication of distress came at 11:25pm, saying that the plane was in trouble flying at 40,000 feet and therefore was changing altitude to 15,000 feet.  Then a second message from the plane came “One engine on fire.  Contemplate ditching in Queen Charlotte Sound between Queen Charlotte Island and Vancouver Island.  Keep a careful lookout for flares or wreckage.”

The crew planned to ditch the plane in Queen Charlotte Sound so that no one could get their hands on American technology or weapons. SAC knew Soviet ships patrolled the waters off Canada’s west coast and that there were Soviet spies in Canada, so the standing order was if the plane was going down, the crew had make sure none of the technology of plane or bomb survived or was put in a place where it could not be recovered.  Now, with three engines on fire and the plane losing altitude fast, putting it in a deep part of the Pacific was the only solution.

Commander Barry ordered Captain Ted Schreier, the mission Weaponeer to jettison the Mark IV Fat Man, but when Schreier tried to release the bomb it got stuck and the conventional explosives within it went off, sending fragments down into the Hecate Strait. Another report said that they bomb was successfully jettisoned and that the crew observed it explode before reaching the water. Barry ordered the crew to evacuate after setting the plane on a course to land in the ocean. The crew bailed out in order until only Commander Barry was left.  He set the autopilot and, donning his parachute, left the plane.  Unknown to Barry, Ted Schreier was still on the plane, struggling with a parachute. 

Barry, floating down to Princess Royal Island hanging from his chute looked up in horror as he saw the plane turn away from the ocean, and began to head back inland.  Given that the plane was on autopilot that should not have happened.  One theory is that Schreier, a trained pilot, had made his way to the cockpit and tried to turn the plane around so he could gain some altitude and have more time to jump.  Given the number of mechanical failures on the ship, it is possible the autopilot also failed and the weather simply pushed the plane were it would. Historian Norman Leach theorizes that Schreier was at the controls, trying to land the plane safely, flying it all the way to the Alaska border, 300 miles away.  Sadly, the plane was too far damaged and at 3:05 am on Valentine’s Day, 1950, the distress signal on Flight 2075 stopped broadcasting as the plane went into the side of a Canadian mountain, burying its nose into a glacier, completely tearing itself apart and leaving the wreckage of the plane, the remains of the bomb, and America’s secrets on an isolated peak.

SAC listening stations believed, per the final radio message, that the plane’s ceased signal indicated it was on its way to the bottom of the ocean.  It would be a while before they learned their worst nightmare had happened: a broken arrow was not lost in the depths of the ocean, but was now lying on the snow on the peak of Mount Kologet in the wilds of British Columbia.  Twelve of the crew were eventually rescued and brought back to the United States. 

Canadian media broke the story that evening, and SAC went into spin control, as well as scrambling to find the wreckage, which would not be located until September 1953.  But long before the wreck was found, the Air Force held a top secret board of inquiry to figure out how its most sophisticated plane carrying its most sophisticated weapon, manned by one of its most highly trained crews could have gone down so easily.  Commander Barry and two crew members all testified that heavy icing led to the crash.  No mention was made of the lost atomic bomb because the flight and the presence of the bomb had been top secret.  From the very beginning, America’s first Broken Arrow resulted in a cover up. It would not be until years later that the facts of the flight were made public.  This approach, at the height of the cold war, was common among the super powers.  The loss of advanced weapons, including nuclear secrets, were always shrouded in secrecy.  As much as this was done to protect national prestige, it also prevented the nation’s adversaries from trying to recover the wreckage and it’s secrets.  We have an amazing episode on this coming up in season 3 – about the CIAs multiyear effort to recover a downed Soviet submarine.

A survey of the area in 1997 showed no elevated levels of radiation.  But there a period of years when a broken open atomic bomb, minus the atomic core, simply sat in the wreckage on top of the mountain.

The men were cleared of wrongdoing, and four of the five men who died had streets named in their honor at their home base of Carswell AFB.  Captain Ted Schreier, however, was denied that honor.  Presumably because if he was at the helm of the plane, he left it accessible to America’s enemies, rather than the bottom of the ocean, and General LeMay was rather unforgiving.

PART TWO

Training, testing, and improving continued for the next half decade.  SAC learned from the mistakes of Flight 2075.  But, by the law of averages, another broken arrow incident was going to happen.  It was simply a question of when.

The problems with the B-36 would also need to be dealt with.  The Air Force began exploring the use of jet engines, as opposed to prop engines, on long range bombers.  The result was the development of the Boeing B-47, nicknamed the Stratojet, a long-range, six-engined, turbojet-powered strategic bomber designed to fly at subsonic speed and high altitude to avoid enemy interceptor aircraft. It was designed solely to carry nuclear bombs. Introduced in 1951 and entering wide service in 1953, by 1956 the B-47 was deployed in Europe, North Africa, Alaska, Greenland, Guam and throughout the continental United States.  By 1956, the Air Force had 28 wings of B-47 bombers and five wings of RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft, with each wing containing about 20 planes each.

On March tenth of that year, a Boeing B-47E under the command of Captain Robert H. Hodgin, carrying two capsules containing nuclear weapons, took off from MacDill Air Force Base, located only about 4 miles South-Southwest of downtown Tampa in Florida.  MacDill was a major base for SAC, and the new bomber.  The 306th Bombardment Wing was founded at MacDill, and became SAC's first operational B-47 jet bomber wing. And the 306th Bomb Wing had begun a ninety-day rotational training mission to England starting in June 1953, marking the first overseas deployment of the B-47.  Crews also began long-range endurance training missions to Ben Guerir Air Base in what is now Morocco.

Ben Guerir was built in 1951, following the Second World War, by the US Air Force in what was then called French North Africa, about thirty-six miles north of Marrakech.  It was one of 5 SAC constructed bases in north Africa. Once, on a train between Marrakesh and Casablanca, I recall being told that the airbase had been an alternative landing site for the US Space Shuttle.  While the train passed right by the airbase, I don’t recall being able to see anything of this historic location. The base was constructed specifically to allow B-47 planes  to reach the Soviet Union without air refueling.  This arc of airbases were part of SAC’s plan to contain the Soviet Union. 

The flight in question was scheduled to fly, non-stop from MacDill in Florida to Ben Guerir in French North Africa on March 10th.  Its cargo – two dummy bombs that actually contained nuclear weapon material.  Again, SAC’s philosophy was to train in as close to actual wartime conditions as possible.  

The B-47 completed the first of two planned mid-air refuelings and continued towards Ben Guerir. The bomber then descended to around fourteen thousand feet to begin its second refueling, but never actually rendezvoused with the tanker waiting for it. The aircraft's last known position was somewhere southeast of Port Say, an Algerian coastal village near the Moroccan frontier.

The plane was declared missing, and a search and rescue was ordered.  Eventually even the British Royal Navy, the French Navy and the Spanish Moroccan army joined in the search for the missing Stratojet, alongside the US Navy and Air Force, but no debris was ever found, no crew members recovered, and no information about the fate of the plane was ever found.  Captain Hodgin and his fellow officers Captain Gordon M. Insley, and 2nd Lt. Ronald L. Kurtz simply vanished from the face of the earth.

This broken arrow was different than Flight 2075, since the crew, plane and weapon were eventually recovered in that case, and it was known all along what had happened.  The B-47 that vanished over Port Say literally seemingly vanished.  To this day, the location of the Stratojet, the remains of its crew, and the nuclear bombs it carried are unknown, but most likely lie somewhere at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

A French news agency reported that the plane may have exploded in flight near Sebatna in eastern French Morocco, but this could not be confirmed by U.S. investigators.  The official record states that the plane went down, location unknown.  But somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea lies two capsules containing American nuclear weapons.

A year later, on July 27, 1957, an American C-124 carrying three nuclear weapons and one nuclear core took off from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.  The C-124 was a huge, magnificent plane.  It had a wingspan of 175 feet and relied on four massive engines to drive its four propellers.  Its manufacturer, Douglas Aircraft, called the aircraft “Globemaster” as it was designed to provide airlift services of heavy equipment and materials. It’s unique clamshell doors under the cockpit could handle bulky items like tanks, artillery and bulldozers.  Airmen, though, called the plane “Old Shaky,” which was not an affectionate nickname. 

As with the other Broken Arrow incidents discussed here, the flight in question was a routine training mission, an Air Force crew of seven men taking weapons to a base in Europe.  The flight should have taken no more than twelve hours, even in the prop propeller, relatively slow “Old Shaky.”  Almost halfway over the Atlantic, the plane developed serious engine problems and was instructed to return to the United States.  Let us remember that nuclear flights were still top secret, so some of what happened is still classified, not to mention the plane could not simply land at the nearest airport or even the nearest U.S. base.  The plane turned around as two of the engines began to fail.  Maximum power was applied to the remaining engines in the attempt to return the plane and weapons safely to American shores.  The nearest suitable airfield was the Naval Air Station in Atlantic City, and the crew were told to fly there.  Once again we should note, this policy of only landing at designated airfields was not designed to save American soldiers’ and Airmen’s lives so much as it was to prevent American technology from falling into the hands of the Soviets.  The race for hydrogen bombs and to build ever bigger and more efficient bombs was on.  Not to mention in 1957, the Soviet space program would beat America into space by launching Sputnik into orbit on October 4th, 1957.  It is hard for us to imagine in this day and age how much the cold war, the technological competition with the Soviet Union, and the need to have the biggest and best weapons obsessed American society, and how threatened the general population felt by every Soviet advance.  Keeping American technology secret was the priority, as we will continue to see through this episode.  If given a choice between saving themselves or allowing the bombs to end up somewhere where spies might have access to them, the crew was expected to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The pilots of the C-124 struggled to maintain level flight, but could not do so with the reduced engine power. They knew at current weight they could not get to Atlantic City.  So the decision was made to jettison the payload and all non-essential equipment to lower weight.  Doing so would also have increased the ability to land the plane safely, as attempting to land a fully loaded plane with two engines failing would result in both aircraft and crew being lost. The crew jettisoned equipment and the pilot dumped all excess fuel, leaving only enough to reach New Jersey.  However, the plane still continued to lose altitude, so the crew was instructed one hundred miles off the coast of New Jersey to toss the bombs one by one into the Atlantic as well.

The first weapon was ejected at 4,500 feet and the second released from the bomb bay at 2,500 feet.  This final lightening of the load proved enough to allow the C-124 to regain altitude and limp back to the nearest airbase with the final nuclear weapon still onboard. The crew reported that to the best of their knowledge neither weapon detonated, but the impact with the ocean’s surface from such a height would have certainly damaged them.  The weapons would then have sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic.  As with the B-47 off Morocco, the missing weapons have never been relocated or recovered.  Somewhere one hundred or so miles off the coast of New Jersey, two unexploded nuclear bombs sit on the bottom of the ocean. 

PART THREE

You don’t have to sail a hundred miles out to find nuclear weapons off America’s Atlantic coast, though.  I started off this episode telling you about beautiful Tybee Island, off the coast of Georgia, a beautiful vacation spot, wonderful nature preserve and home to a broken arrow.

Called the Tybee Island Midair Collision, the event on the morning of February 5, 1958 involved a simulated combat mission in which two planes collided and a Mark XV nuclear bomb was lost in the waters just off Tybee.

A B-47 Stratojet bomber out of Homestead Air Force Base, located in Homestead, Florida in Miami-Dade County, was on a simulated combat mission.  It was to fly up the coast to train its crew for a bombing run.  The plane carried a bomb with highly enriched uranium and 400 pounds of high explosive.  Again, since it was a training mission, the plutonium core had been replaced with a dummy lead core, so the bomb could not per se explode.  If damaged, however, it would act like a “dirty bomb,” spreading radioactive uranium all over the area in which it landed. 

As part of the exercise, a number of F-86 fighter aircraft were scrambled so the B-47 would have to evade them.  At 3:30 AM, one of the F-86s collided with the B-47 at thirty-eight thousand feet.  The bomber’s fuel tanks were ripped open and a massive hole was punched through the wing.  The F-86 was nearly destroyed on impact, but its pilot managed to safely eject and ride his parachute to the ground to be rescued.  The Stratojet, on the other hand, managed to stay aloft despite the damage, but was rapidly losing altitude.  The pilot managed to regain control and level the plane off at eighteen thousand feet. 

As with the crew of Old Shaky off the coast of New Jersey, the crew of the Stratojet feared the plane was too heavy to make it to safety, let alone land.  It attempted to land three times at Hunter air force base in Georgia.  But each landing was aborted because the airspeed couldn’t be reduced enough to land safely.  Rather than try a fourth time, the crew was instructed to jettison the payload at 7200 feet into the waters of the Atlantic and watched as the bomb hit the Atlantic just off the shores of Tybee Island.  No explosion was observed and the bomb presumably sunk intact, as the beaches of Tybee Island were not suddenly irradiated.  The Air Force and Navy (and locals) have continued to search for the broken arrow of Tybee Island from that day to this.  But the bomb appears to not only have sunk beneath the waves but burrowed into the sand as well, as its location is still not known.  The waters of Tybee are regularly checked for elevated radiation, which would indicate the bomb is uncovered or damaged and leaking uranium into the Atlantic, but thus far, nothing.  The impact of the lost bomb appears negligible thus far.  For now.  Let us not forget though that every unrecovered broken arrow is a rattlesnake we hold by the tail.  Things may be fine now, but we never know when it may turn and finally bite us.    

Another unrecovered broken arrow occurred only three years later.  On the morning of January 24, 1961, a crew of eight was on patrol in a B-52 Stratofortress over North Carolina.  The plane carried two Mark 39 thermonulcear bombs.

Two things to note: First, the B-52 Stratofortress was designed as the next generation after the B-47. SAC wanted a new strategic bomber "capable of carrying out the strategic mission without dependence upon advanced and intermediate bases controlled by other countries.”  In other words, a plane that could take off from American territory, fly to the Soviet Union, bomb military targets, and fly back, all without landing anywhere else.  Improvements in Soviet air defenses and ground to air missiles also provoked a desire for a plane that could withstand such assaults and still reach their targets.  Thus, the B-52 was a flying fortress, designed to protect crew and weapons until the latter could be deployed, designed to fly for very long missions without the need to land, and able to enter enemy territory either at great height or below radar.  The B-52 was thus a very flexible bomber. 

Second, just as the B-52 was the next generation in bombers, the Mark 39 was the next generation in bombs. A lightweight, thermonuclear weapon, which means it is a fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb, the Mark 39 was smaller than the previously used fission bombs but delivered a much, much bigger explosion for the size.  The mark 39 was a 3.8 megaton weapon, making it two hundred and fifty times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima or the bomb that crashed with Flight 2075 just eleven years before.  If a Mark 39 were to go off on the National Mall, for example, it would vaporize everything within the capital beltway.  Everything.  This was a big, powerful bomb in a small container.

So on that morning of January 24, the B-52 was on patrol, flying over North Carolina under the command of Major Walter Scott Tulloch.  The United States regularly flew such patrols up and down the East Coast in case of a surprise Soviet Nuclear Attack.  The US (and for that matter the Soviet Union) always kept a certain number of nuclear armed planes in the air, twenty four hours a day, every day of every year so that in the event of a surprise attack, the response would already be on the way.

During a regularly scheduled mid-air refueling, the refueling tanker crew let the B-52 crew know their plane had a fuel leak.  The refueling was aborted and the B-52 crew reported that the leak was growing worse.  The aircraft was directed to assume a holding pattern off the coast until the majority of fuel was consumed. They were then ordered to return to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldboro, North Carolina.  The aircraft began to descend, but upon approach, once they passed ten thousand feet, the pilots lost control of the plane.  At nine thousand feet, Major Tulloch ordered the men to abandon the plane. Five men landed safely after bailing out, one did not survive his parachute landing, and two died in the crash.  Between one and two thousand feet from the ground the aircraft began to gyrate and break apart, even before impact, and then smashed into the ground. During those gyrations, the bombs separated themselves from the plane, one drifting down on a parachute which opened when it left the plane.  The aircraft wreckage covered a two square miles of mostly cotton and tobacco farms. The bomb that safely parachuted to the ground was snagged on a tree where military crews quickly found it.  Although there is some contention about the truth of this, according to documents declassified in 1969, supposedly three of the four arming mechanisms were tripped on the bomb, leaving it remarkably close to detonation.  Under a freedom of information act request in 2013 it was finally revealed that indeed only one unfired switch out of four kept the bomb from detonating when it landed in that tree about twelve miles from downtown Goldboro.

Even more disturbing, the parachute of the other bomb failed, causing it to slam into a swampy, muddy field and break into pieces. It took about a week of digging to find most of its parts. On studying the bomb, crews learned that six out of seven steps in the bomb's automated activation sequence had been completed, meaning it was very close to detonating a thermonuclear explosion. Only one trigger stopped a blast — and that switch was set to "ARM", yet somehow it failed to detonate the bomb. If either bomb had gone off, not only would the nearby city have been vaporized, the fallout would have drifted over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and perhaps even up to New York City, leaving a considerable part of the East coast irradiated.

Finally, the secondary core of the second bomb was never recovered.  It still remains somewhere in the mud, possibly as deep as 200 feet, in a field in North Carolina.  The military claims the secondary core was made up of non-weapons grade uranium 238 and some weapons grade Uranium 235.  The US Army Corps of Engineers purchased the designated location of the lost bomb core, ensuring that nothing would be built on the land, but interestingly still allows it to be farmed.  But digging on the property…well that requires a permit.

PART FOUR

Thus far, all the Broken arrows have come from planes crashing or having to drop their bombs to avoid crashing.  Broken arrows have come from other situations as well, however.  Sometime in late May, 1968, the United States lost its first nuclear sub, and with it came the broken arrows it contained.

The year of 1968 was a particularly difficult one for submarines.  At least four disappeared without a trace, presumably lost at sea.  The Israeli submarine INS Dakar, the French submarine Minerve, and the Soviet submarine K-129 all vanished at sea that year, the last of which we discuss in our special Patreon episode on Soviet broken arrows. The fourth sub was American, the USS Scorpion.

In February 1968, the SSN-589 USS Scorpion, a Skipjack class nuclear submarine with a crew of ninety-nine men under the command of Commander Francis Slattery was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea with the sixth fleet.  She was a nuclear attack sub, not carrying missiles, but with two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and powered by a nuclear reactor.  The Scorpion stopped at Naval Station Rota in Spain and was then ordered to head west to Norfolk, Virginia on May sixteenth, stopping along the way to observe Soviet naval activities in the Atlantic in the vicinity of the Azores. The Soviets had a number of hunter/killer subs in the area attempting to track American ballistic missile subs, and the Scorpion was detailed to listen to the Soviet naval units and possibly provide noise cover for American subs.

Having completed her observations, the Scorpion was ordered back to Norfolk with an expected arrival day of May twenty-seventh. On the twentieth and twenty-first of May, Commander Slattery attempted to contact Naval Station Rota, but the signals only reached a Navy communication station in Nea Makri, Greece, who forwarded the messages on to the Americans. After that, silence.  No communication from the Scorpion.  Three days after it was overdue for arrival, the navy launched a secret air-and-sea search, consisting of fifty-five ships and thirty five planes. Secret because again, as part of America’s nuclear fleet, secrecy was of utmost importance. 

By June fifth the sub was declared lost.  Then, in late October, the wreckage of the sub was found.  It had sank in a little over two miles of water about three hundred and twenty miles south of the Azores.  The ship, its nuclear reactor, and nuclear armed torpedoes, as well as the entire crew sat in a trench on the ocean floor the Scorpion carved when it hit bottom.  The ship, however, was destroyed long before then, as the evidence showed the ship imploded when it sank below crush depth.  The torpedo room appeared to be still intact. 

An official court of inquiry in January of 1969 determined, "The certain cause of the loss of the Scorpion cannot be ascertained from evidence now available.” Subsequent inquiries all conclude that the Scorpion was sank by an unexplained catastrophic event on board.  A number of theories have been offered over the years: a hydrogen battery exploding, a torpedo accidentally being activated, structural damage to the vessel, an attempted intentional firing of a defective torpedo to get rid of it, and even a secret Soviet attack.  To this day, however, it is not known why she sank.

All of these stories I have told you today have centered on groups of men and women whose responsibility it was and is to protect the United States through the routine training and drilling with atomic weapons.  In every case, something went wrong resulting in the loss of control of a nuclear weapon.  Some were recovered; some were not. Some of the servicemen survived, some did not.  The Cold War was fought without weapons in a sense, but it was not without casualties.  And we have not even completed the story of the Broken arrows of the United States.  So I invite you to join us for our next episode, in which we will continue down the dark path of lost nuclear weapons.  On this podcast we’ve talked about ghosts, witches, demons, UFOs, dead bodies, and haunted dolls, among many other things.  But perhaps none of these topics is as ominous as the fact that three unexploded nuclear bombs are buried in the ground or under the ocean in and around the United States.

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our creative director, Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by My Dark Path staff writer Kevin Wetmore; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.  If you enjoyed this story, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and also on YouTube.

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We’ll see you again for the conclusion of our lost nukes narrative in Broken Arrows, Part Two.

And just a reminder — our Patreon members have access to a members only episode about Soviet broken arrows as part of our special series Secrets of the Soviet Union, again, available only to our Patreon members.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.