There’s a sign, mounted on a locked door, four decks down from the flight deck on the USS Ticonderoga, a giant aircraft carrier, a sign reads “RESTRICTED SECURITY AREA / KEEP OUT / AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY / IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER THIS AREA WITHOUT WRITTEN PEMISSION OF THE COMMANDING OFFICER” No one, except the men assigned to work in that room, was allowed to go through  that door.  Because behind that door are stored the nuclear bombs the Ticonderoga carries.  And on the floor of that room the bombs are assembled by the sailors in the weapons division.  They trained to do so efficiently, rapidly, in case they were called upon to arm the bombs for use. The location is the Philippine Sea during the Vietnam War.  The date is December 5, 1965, and before this day is over, one of those nuclear weapons will be in the ocean, armed to go off with no way of recovering it or disarming it.  Today, in our second part of our two part series on broken arrows – lost nuclear weapons – we will explore the only armed nuclear bomb the United States lost and did not recover.  All other weapons lost had fissile material, but had not been primed to explode.  The bomb lost by the Ticonderoga those fifty-seven years ago still sits at the bottom of the Philippine Sea, still capable of detonating a full nuclear explosion.

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 48, Lost in the Philippine Sea

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PART ONE

In our previous episode, we discussed a half dozen nuclear weapons that were lost while on training exercises or when submarines sunk in water too deep to retrieve them from.  Our first story today is unique because it is the only nuke the United States has lost that was actually armed and ready to be used when it was lost.  In other words, this one was a fully capable weapon, ready to go off when we lost it.

Although the world was horrified by the use of atomic weapons in the second world war, American politicians actually debated, and some even advocated, the use of nuclear bombs in Korea and Vietnam. Like German, Korea emerged from the Second World War divided.  In early 1950, the intelligence community observed a buildup of Soviet-equipped troops north of the 38th parallel.  On June 25th, a Sunday, troops from communist North Korea poured across the border and pushed far into what is now South Korea.  The Korean war had officially begun.  The war was fought with the weapons of the second world war, in some cases quite literally, with B-29 bombers that had flown over Japan five years before now doing bombing runs over North Korea.  President Truman was faced with a choice.  While the Soviets had successfully tested a bomb in 1949, by the advent of the Korean war they still had not successfully dropped a bomb from a plane.  The United States need only fear if a Soviet engineering crew spent a week building a tower, assembling a nuclear weapon at the top, and setting it off where it sat.  In other words, Soviets had the bomb but no way to use it yet.  So in July of 1950, President Truman ordered General Curtis LeMay, the head of Strategic Air Command, to send B-29s to the United Kingdom so the Soviets would see them within range of the western Soviet Union as a warning.  The truth it, it was a bluff.  The B-29s were not configured to carry nuclear weapons, Truman just wanted the Soviets to think twice about escalating in Korea.  Remember, it was just two years before that the Soviets had blockaded Berlin and the United States used the former warplanes as part of the Berlin airlift to deliver essential supplies to West Berlin. By 1949 the allies were successfully supplying Berlin and could do so indefinitely, while the counter-blockade of East Germany was causing severe shortages, which the Russians feared might lead to public unrest and resistance to Soviet domination.  So the Soviets ended the blockade and by the end of 1949 Germany then formally and permanently separated into two nations, East Germany and West Germany, with West Berlin an island of democracy in the heart of East Germany with a highway that led from West Germany into the city.  Late this year, I have a terrific episode already underway about the Berlin Airlift and the story of the US Pilot who is still remembered this day as the Candy Bomber.  But back to our current topic, this situation was reminiscent of the tensions around the Soviet blockade, The Korean war threatened to again enflame tensions between the Soviets and the west.

By August 1950, the North Korean forces, aided by the Chinese and Soviets, had pushed the western allies and the South Korean army almost to the very bottom of the Korean peninsula, around Busan.  Truman ordered atomic bombs and the bombers to carry them to Guam. Then on September 15th, the Americans made a surprise amphibious assault at Incheon, 20 miles west of Seoul, and now the site of Seoul International airport.

A memorial to the invasion, which was led by General Douglas MacArthur, sits just inland from the coast where the invasion occurred.  I’ve visited the location, called Memorial Hall.  It features a rising staircase between two stone walls, reaching up to statues of 3 soldiers.  It’s a somber, respectful site that commemorates the 70 dead and 470 wounded during this invasion to push back the north.

By mid-October the Americans had pushed all the way north to Pyongyang. The Chinese then countered by sending two hundred thousand soldiers to reinforce the north Korean army. Truman had sent nine atomic bombs to Guam, but after he fired General Douglas McArthur, the president appointed General Matthew Ridgway to the command of American forces in Korea.  Ridgway was given “qualified authority” to use the bombs if he felt he had to.  Although some politicians back in America encouraged the use of nuclear weapons in Korea to give the communists “what for,” cooler heads prevailed and the nukes were removed from Guam by 1952.  The Korea War ended in a stalemate and cease fire, not a peace treaty, but the idea of using atomic weapons if you have them was still very much on the table for the United States, and, for that matter, the Soviet Union.  A number of American congressmen publicly called for the use of atomic weapons against North Korea and China during the Korean War.  Congressman James E. Van Zant from Pennsylvania went on national television and said, “We should not only use the atomic bomb in Korea but we should use it north of the Yalu River in Manchuria…I think there are several targets in northern Korea we could use for the atomic bomb – we should destroy and contaminate them.”  In the same year, Representative Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, a Democrat who would go on to serve four terms in the Senate and be Michael Dukakis’s Vice Presidential running mate in their unsuccessful 1988 campaign, suggested on national television that the president should send a list to the leaders of North Korea of cities in North Korea that will be bombed by the U.S. Air Force with atomic weapons if they do not withdraw to north of the 38th parallel within one week.  It seems hard to believe now, but nuclear threats were regularly a part of political discourse in the fifties and sixties.  While the strikes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific, they ultimately saved millions of lives by forcing the capitulation of the Japanese army.  At this time, a nuclear attack would seem destined to unleash a horrible global escalation of nuclear conflict.

From 1960 to 1968, SAC adopted a policy requiring nuclear weapons ready to go within fifteen minutes of the order being given to use them.  While missiles for both land and submarine use were being developed, the bomber was still the center and biggest share of the nuclear triad.  If the Soviets launched their planes, then ours needed to be in the air in less than a quarter of an hour launch a counter attack. Pilots were on 24 hour-alert and could be called at any time.  Crews were kept in the air for prolonged periods, refueling tens of thousands of feet above the earth to keep them aloft longer than a single tank would allow.  To keep up with brutal hours, many of the pilots and crew took amphetamines.  This is not to disparage those individuals tasked with keeping America safe, just a reminder of the often inhuman conditions in which they were expected to work.  Remember this, as it will come back to haunt us later in the episode.

John F. Kennedy’s administration is known for perhaps the great major nuclear standoff: the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets wanted to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, so Kennedy ordered a blockade to prevent the missiles from reaching Cuba.  For three days the world thought a nuclear war was inevitable, but then Khrushchev blinked and the Soviet ships turned around and left.

Less well known perhaps is the behind-the-scenes nuclear negotiations that paralleled American involvement in Vietnam. The American military feared a missile gap and insisted on a rapid increase in the production of nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.  The irony was that there was a missile gap, all on the Soviet side.  In 1961, when Kennedy took office, the Soviet Union did not have a single functioning intercontinental ballistic missile. They were also having trouble shrinking their hydrogen bomb to a size small enough that it could fit atop a missile. But in 1962 Curtis LeMay asked for at least 2400 Minutemen missiles; Thomas Powers of the Strategic Air Command had asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation, known as the Single Integrated Operating Plan or SIOP, which also oversaw all the bombers.

Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963 (tangentially, worth a listen is our season one, episode 22 presentation, “Reflections of JFK”). Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One while flying back to Washington and inherited the responsibility for America’s nuclear forces, and the growing situation in Vietnam.

By 1964 there were twenty-four thousand American “advisors” in Vietnam, with President Johnson vowing to escalate our presence in order to turn the tide against communism.  By the end of 1965 there were over two hundred thousand American troops in country.

Navy ships were moving large numbers of soldiers to bases in Vietnam, as well as serving as launching points for bombing runs and submarine hunts.  In the last quarter of 1965, the USS Ticonderoga had spent a month launching missions against targets in Vietnam.  The near-constant activity can wear a crew out. Films like Top Gun glorify the pilots who fly off of aircraft carriers.  But the crew who work the deck, called “the gang on the roof” by the folks below deck, have dozens of ways to be hurt or even killed in the daily performance of their duties. You can get sucked into an engine intake, jet exhaust can blow you overboard or into the path of another plane before you even know what’s happening. Propellers can decapitate or dismember, a jet landing short — striking the edge of the landing strip on the deck — can throw flaming debris and burning jet fuel all over the deck, rotor wash from helicopters can throw any loose items on deck around, not to mention aerosolizing any and all of the many fluids that regularly spill on deck: fuel, oil, hydraulic fluid, etcetera. Not to mention the need for ear protection as the sounds of jets taking off rapidly on a short deck rise to the level of decibels that permanently damage hearing. And on top of that, one has the weather and the sea to contend with.  An aircraft carrier is huge, but a good storm will still cause it to roll and ride the waves.  A good wind can push things and people across the deck.  The pilots may get the glory, but the deck crew are the hard-working professionals who need to perform like clockwork under dangerous conditions to make sure pilots can even get into the air.

In our last episode we talked about the variety of planes created to carry nuclear weapons.  The B-29, the B-36, the B-47 “Stratojet,” and of course, the “flying fortress,” the B-52.  But by the sixties, engineers had been able to shrink the bomb, and in doing so, could design much smaller planes to deliver nuclear weapons.  And one of the most popular was the A-4 Skyhawk.  It was the primary American attack aircraft over North Vietnam for the first half of that war.

The A-4 Skyhawk was a delta-winged, single turbojet-engined attack aircraft designed and built by Douglas Aircraft, a rival of Boeing who had done most of the bombers until that point. The Navy had wanted a plane that minimized size, weight and complexity but could still deliver a payload of several bombs. The Skyhawk succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  So compact it did not need to fold its wings when on an aircraft carrier, yet capable of carrying two large bombs under each wing.  Pilots and crews referred to the Skyhawk by a wide variety of nicknames: Scooter, the Kiddiecar, and Tinkertoys, but at the start of the Vietnam War it was the bombing plane of choice for the American Navy. Unlike the larger bombers of the forties and fifties, which required crews of up to a dozen and a half men, the Skyhawk was a single-pilot plane.  One man flew the plane, pushed the button, and dropped the bombs.  And in the early sixties, those Skyhawk pilots, like those on the USS Ticonderoga, trained with atomic bombs.

At that time, the closed that the United States came to deploying nuclear weapons in Vietnam was in early 1954 when the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu was in danger of being overrun by an independence movement led by communist Viet Minh forces. Then President Eisenhower and his military advisors discussed using atomic weapons to help the French and stop the communists in their tracks. In the end, Eisenhower decided against their use because he did not want to provoke an international outcry and he was not convinced that atomic weapons would be effective against a dispersed fighting force like the Vietnamese guerillas, nor that an atomic bomb would save the French garrison.

President Johnson would again revisit the idea of nuclear weapon use in Vietnam in 1968. On February 1 of that year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler sent a message to General William Westmoreland, head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, recommending that he investigate the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons to break the siege of Khe Sahn.  Again, the American government decided against the use of atomic weapons.  Richard Nixon became the final president to consider the use of nuclear bombs against the North Vietnamese, threatening to bomb Hanoi as Saigon was falling.  Again, not wishing to unleash the nuclear genie from the bottle, cooler heads prevailed.

However, the entire time the United States was in Vietnam, the navy and Air Force carried out practice drills using real bombs, and that is how the only broken arrow with a fully armed bomb came about.

PART TWO

On December 5, 1965 the aircraft carrier the USS Ticonderoga, called “Tico” or “Big T” by her crews, had completed a month of bombing runs into North Vietnam.  The crew of sailors and airmen was due for R&R in Japan. There is no rest for a military at war, however.  Stationed in the Philippine Sea about 70 miles from Okinawa, Japan, the crew of the Tico continued their regular rotation of training and drills.  Lt. Douglas M. Webster, a young pilot from Ohio, was scheduled for a routine weapons-loading drill and simulated mission. Twenty-four years old, he had been made a lieutenant (junior grade), a year ago to the day on December 5, 1964. He was on his first combat tour in Vietnam, having just flown seventeen missions in the last three weeks, sometimes as many as three a day.

Pilots and crew alike were exhausted. They were working sixteen hour days in the tropical heat.  

At 1300 hours (or 1:00 in the afternoon), behind the restricted door I began this episode telling you about, the crew assembled a live B43 one megaton thermonuclear bomb as part of the drill. The B43 was a variable yield (so-called "dial-a-yield") air-dropped, thermonuclear bomb, set for a one megaton yield.  Should the call come from Top, bombs very much like this would be placed on planes such as the A-4 Skyhawk and sent directly to the heart of North Vietnam, or, as I mentioned, if certain politicians got their way, into communist China as well.

The training exercise for the day involved the assembly of the nuclear weapons, which would then be brought into the number two hanger and loaded onto the Skyhawks that were also training. The planes would then be brought to the flight deck via the number two aircraft elevator with pilot and weapon successfully installed onboard.  The training exercise would then involve Webster and the other pilots training on atomic weapons delivery taking off, flying around, and then landing on the deck and the crew would then take the planes back down to hanger two and remove the bombs.  That did not happen that afternoon. 

The Skyhawks have a low-slung yellow tractor called a mule.  These are used to move the planes around and can also serve as a means to anchor the plane, or used as brakes to stop the plane from moving.  All the Skyhawks had them that afternoon except Webster’s.  His plane, the first in line, was missing its mule. Ordinarily, the plane and mule would be loaded into the elevator, brought to the deck, brought to the catapult on deck that helps launch the planes quickly into the air.  Without a mule, the Skyhawk had to be pushed by the crew by hand.  With two external fuel tanks and a nuclear bomb attached, not to mention the pilot, the entire plane weighed close to 12 tons. 

According to Jim Winchester, the trainee crew that was working had little experience in this particular drill, as they had been working with conventional bombs, not nuclear ones, and many were literally new to the aircraft, as Tico had been understaffed and sent new crew.  An inexperienced crew, working eighteen hour days while learning new procedures that required attention to detail and precise movement is a recipe for disaster.

Word came from the flight deck they were ready for the first plane.  Webster strapped himself in and gave thumbs up.  Remember, the A4, like most planes, does not have power steering, nor is it really equipped to be driven like a car – its is designed to fly. The men pushed the plane forward on the elevator, which rose up to the flight deck.

Upon arrival at the flight deck, the Skyhawk rolled out of the elevator and the crew began to frantically wave at Webster, calling on him to hit the brakes. Chief Petty Officer Delbert Mitchell, who was on the crew that loaded the bomb onto the Skyhawk, told the U.S. Naval Institute in 2019, “According to testimony during the post-incident Board of Inquiry investigation, the pilot seemed oblivious to the whistles and was looking down.”

A deckhand signaled to him to hold the brakes and the other crew attempted to hold onto the plane to prevent it from moving. One crewman got a chock down in front of one wheel, and thus they managed to pivot the Skyhawk in place, but then it hit the netting on the side of the elevator.  The net is designed to prevent the fall of sailors, not a twelve ton fighter jet.  The skyhawk broke through and rolled to the edge of the aircraft carrier.  Immediately, pilot, plane and bomb toppled over the side of the Ticonderoga and into the ocean, sinking immediately to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.  The plane had tipped upside down as it fell from the deck, so the last image anyone had of Lt. Webster and his plane was the white belly of the jet as it sank, the nuclear weapon strapped to the centerline of the bottom of the plane, the final thing to vanish from view.

The ship’s weapon officer ran to a phone to alert command that man, plane and bomb were overboard and to start a rescue mission immediately, but it was far too late.  The aircraft quickly sank, preventing Webster from escaping. The waters in the area are roughly three miles deep.  The navy called in other ships to aid in what was quickly determined to be a search and recover effort.  They only ever found Webster’s helmet.  The aircraft, remains of the pilot, and the weapon has never been recovered.  The other thing the Navy did was immediately begin a coverup. The Navy reported the incident to Congress a year later when the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was studying the shocking number of Broken Arrows. But this committee and its work was top secret. Details of the incident were not made public until 1989.

Just like off the coast of New Jersey, off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, on some North Carolina farm, and somewhere in the Mediterranean, all incidents we discussed in our last episode, somewhere in the South Pacific, in the Philippine Sea, a nuclear bomb sits on the ocean floor.

PART THREE

As the United States began to develop better means to deliver nuclear weapons, most notably submarines and missiles, the military sought to maintain the bomber fleet at the center of the nuclear triad.  But two crashes after the Ticonderoga incident convinced the brass to reduce America’s reliance on bombers as the primary means of nuclear war.

Operation Chrome Dome was the name of the plan which kept twelve strategic bombers in the air at all times between 1960 and 1968. The dozen B-52s would fly patterns near points outside the Soviet Union, ready to head to their targets within the USSR at the given signal.  If you have seen the film Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s satire of the cold war arms race, the plane in that film is an example of America’s approach to keeping planes aloft around the clock and going in if a Russian attack is expected.  By 1966, three separate Chrome Dome mission routes were being flown: one east over the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, another north though Baffin Bay, and a third over Alaska and the Pacific.  All three keep planes circling the same path, often over other nations, in a state of readiness for prolonged periods. Two Chrome Dome crashes effectively ended the reign of the bomber as nuclear king.

The first crash occurred in 1966, less than a year after Lt. Douglas Webster and an armed nuclear weapon sank to the bottom of the Philippine Sea. At 10:30 in the morning on January 17, 1966, in the fishing village of Palomares, in the municipality of Cuevas del Almanzora, Almería, Spain, the fishermen looked up from their shrimp boats to see two giant fireballs falling towards the village and a twisted white shape with something hanging from it drift down rapidly and sink below the waves. The fireballs struck near the village, debris and body parts falling around the area, buildings shaking from the impact.  The villagers had just seen a midair collision between two American planes, one of which carried nuclear weapons.

The B-52G began its mission from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina, carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs. The European Chrome Dome route required flying across the Atlantic and then the Mediterranean, then north outside the European border of the Soviet Union and its client states in the southeast of Europe, then circle around and fly back over the Atlantic.  The long, circuitous route required two mid-air refuelings over Spain, one in each direction, to complete the mission. On its return leg over the Mediterranean, the B-52 commenced its second aerial refueling with a KC-135, a Stratolifter refueling flying tanker plane.  Something went wrong, and the two planes collided. Four of the seven crew members of the bomber, the commander, pilot, co-pilot and navigator, managed to parachute to safety, but the other three crew as well as all four crew members on the KC-135 were killed in the explosion.

Three of the nuclear bombs were found on land near the village.  They were part of that debris that had rained down in view of the fishermen. The non-nuclear explosives in two of the weapons detonated upon impact with the ground, resulting in the contamination of a square mile area with radioactive plutonium. The fourth bomb fell into the Mediterranean.  All three, however, were recovered by the American military within twenty-four hours of the incident.

A few weeks after the crash, Philip Meyers, a bomb disposal officer at the Naval Air Facility Sigonella in Sicily, was told he was being given a top secret assignment in Spain.  Perhaps with a sardonic smile, he responded the assignment was not that secret: the media in Italy and Spain had been reporting about the midair collision and presumed lost bomb since it happened.

Meyer’s job was to aid in the recovery and disarming of the bomb that had fallen into the Mediterranean.  After arriving in Palomares he then had to wait for two more weeks for equipment to arrive, but then the team went to work in earnest.  Using a cutting-edge deep-ocean submarine able to dive to unprecedented depths and nicknamed “Alvin,” the team was able to search the sea floor for the bomb.  On March first the team found the track cut in the sea bed when the bomb first landed, and from there they found the bomb, entangled in its parachute, pushed into the silt. That bomb was the “twisted white shape” the villagers had seen drift into the ocean, the other bombs not deploying their parachutes had landed directly below the crash site.  Locating the broken arrow was only half the battle.  Now Meyer’s job as a bomb disposal specialist was to figure out how to safely secure and raise the bomb which sat over a half mile down off the coast of Spain.

Meyer secured the bomb with nylon rope, but the parachute made it very difficult to lift.  The flowing current pulled the parachute in one direction while the military attempted to raise the bomb.  Suddenly, the rope snapped and the bomb sank even deeper into the ocean. Eventually, two and a half months after the search began, another remote sub was finally able to lift the bomb by its parachute and bring it to the surface, were the disposal experts discovered that the casing had shifted and they could not disarm the bomb in the usual manner, though a design port in the side of the bomb specifically designed to allow friendlies to disarm the bomb.  Instead, the officers had to drill a hole in the side of the casing without setting off the conventional explosives within the bomb or the nuke itself.  Arguably, this job might be the most nerve-wracking one we’ve talked about yet in this series.

The fallout, if you will pardon the pun, was immediate.  The Spanish government told NATO and the United States they could no longer fly any plane in Spanish airspace if that plane was carrying nuclear weapons or nuclear material.  American prestige had also taken a hit.  But some of the consequences of the crash were much more long term.  The area around Palomares is still contaminated by the bombs that crashed and cracked open on land.  Zaria Gorvett reports that, “Some of the US military personnel who helped with the initial clean-up efforts – involving shovelling the surface of the soil into barrels – have since developed mysterious cancers which they believe are linked. In 2020, a number of survivors filed a class action suit against the Secretary of Veterans Affairs – though many of the claimants are currently in their late 70s and 80s.”  Similarly, the residents of Palomares have also reported higher incidents of cancers and other radiation-linked diseases.

The second incident occurred two years after the Palomares crash, this time in Greenland.  Called The Thule incident, The Thule Affair or the Thule accident, depending on with whom you are speaking, the crash of a B-52 on January 21st was due to human error and was the incident that ended Operation Chrome Dome and changed America’s approach to long-range bomber flights.

Planes on the North American route for Operation Chome Dome flew from Sheppard Air Force Base in north Texas or other central or eastern Air Force bases, along the American east coast, up to Maine, then around the coast of Newfoundland, flying over Baffin Bay and Thule Air Base in Greenland, along the Arctic circle in Northern Canada, down Alaska, and then down the West coast of the United States to return to Texas.

On January 21, 1968, a B-52G Stratofortress left Plattsburgh Air Force Base in New York to fly the Chrome Dome route. Callsign "HOBO 28" and her crew of seven took off and headed north when it developed an onboard fire over Greenland.

The cause of the inflight fire still seems highly unusual.  It was a particularly cold day and the crew had struggled to keep warm as they headed north.  They decided to open an engine bleed valve to direct additional heat to the cabin air conditioning from the engine manifold.  The problem was that the cabin then grew uncomfortably hot.  As anyone who has driven in a car on a cold winter day knows, maintaining the right temperature and not being too cold or too hot is a real struggle, usually resulting in constantly changing the car’s heat controls.  One of the crew members then stuffed some seat cushions in front of a heating vent in an attempt to keep warm but not too hot.  These cushions subsequently caught fire. The crew could neither land nor put out the fire. The smoke quickly became so thick that the crew needed to eject. Six of the crew members parachuted out safely, but sadly, one crew member suffered a fatal head injury exiting the plane.  Pilotless and without any crew, the flaming B-52 crashed onto the sea ice in North Star Bay approximately seven miles west of Thule Air Base – seven hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. 

HOBO 28 had been carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs when it crashed. On impact, the conventional explosive components of the four nuclear bombs all detonated, spreading parts of the B-52, the bombs, and radioactive material over a wide area. Fortunately, the fissile material was not triggered and there was no nuclear explosions, but the extreme heat from the explosion and burned jet fuel melted the ice, resulting in the wreckage and munitions sinking into the ocean below. Individuals from Thule made their way to the crash site immediately, joined later by others from the United States, rescuing the survivors and beginning the process of attempting to clean up the radioactive mess.  As they reconstructed the bombs they found pieces of three of them but found that one warhead was missing. Apparently, it had drilled its way into the ice of North Star Bay in the Arctic Ocean and remains there to this day, joining the broken arrows in the Philippine Sea, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Mediterranean on the bottom of the sea floor.  At least five nuclear weapons sit to this day under tons of water all over the world.

Just as the Palomares incident resulted in tense relations between Spain, the United States and NATO, the Thule incident severely strained American relations with Denmark, which, then as now, owns Greenland.  The situation was made even more difficult as Denmark had announced in 1957 that the nation would be a nuclear-free zone, a policy that had prohibited the presence of any nuclear weapons in Denmark or its territories. The crash revealed that the United States had been violating that policy by flying nuclear bombs over Danish airspace regularly. Further straining relations, the United States and Denmark disagreed on how to deal with HOBO 28’s wreckage and radioactivity. The Americans wanted to just let the bomber wreckage sink into the fjord and remain there, but Denmark wouldn’t allow that. Denmark wanted all the wreckage gathered up immediately and moved, along with all of the radioactively contaminated ice, to the United States. Since the United States’ ability to maintain Thule Air Base hung in the balance, the U.S. reluctantly agreed to Denmark’s demands, but the last warhead, as I noted before, lies somewhere in the ice or the waters of the Artic, under or near Greenland. Its specific location remains unknown to this day.

The Palomares and Thule incidents, coming in rapid succession, represent the only cases of the conventional explosives of American nuclear bombs accidentally detonating and dispersing nuclear materials.  After these incidents, the policy of keeping nuclear bombers in the sky at all times flying over allied territory was politically untenable and U.S. military policy placed far greater emphasis on the other two branches of the nuclear triad: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from silos in the continental United States and submarine- based missiles and nuclear-tipped torpedoes instead.  Bombers were kept in use, but the many incidents we have discussed in these two episodes, with the Thule Accident as the icing on the cake, convinced the government and the military that bombers were the least reliable delivery vector for nuclear weapons, the potential for incidents and accidents too high.

The irony is, in 2017, Thule Air Base received an upgrade for its radar systems due, in part, to increased concern about Russia as a nuclear threat, and also because of worries about recent Russian military forays into the Arctic. Although its importance as a base for nuclear bombers ended in 1968, Thule Air Base remains indispensable to American defense against nuclear weapons.  An environmental team studied the radiation levels in North Star Bay and the surrounding fjords in 2003 and discovered low levels of radiation still present, even after thirty-five years. The levels are not high enough to be dangerous, but high enough to be detectable. No visible evidence of the crash remained, but the tell-tale radioactivity still lingers, and most likely will for years.

PART FOUR

The good news is that none of the bombs still missing, sitting in the silt on the ocean floor, is likely to explode. The bad news is that at least a dozen or so nuclear weapons sit in the ocean, salt water slowly corroding them. They are all probably long past the point of detonating, but the nuclear material is still there, waiting to slip into the water.  The half-life of fissile Uranium, the kind used in weapons is four point five billion, yes, billion with a B, years, or roughly the current age of the solar system.  In double the age of the solar system, another four point five billion years, the uranium in those bombs will have lost half its radioactivity.  Depending on the isotope, Plutonium has a half-life between 87 years and twenty-four thousand years.  As in North Star Bay, decades after a broken arrow, the radiation in the area might still be at elevated levels.  

And despite the far greater reliance on ICBMs, that is Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, launched from the continental United States and capable of delivering multiple warheads each anywhere inside the Soviet Union, America still has a strategic bombing fleet. According to the Department of Defense, though the smallest leg of the nuclear triad, the United States still maintains a nuclear bomber wing consisting of 46 nuclear-capable B-52H Stratofortress and 20 B-2A Spirit aircraft. 

The United States also controls all government and military functions during an emergency onboard one of four Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post, collectively referred to as Nightwatch, perhaps more popularly known as “The Doomsday Plane.”   These four planes have state-of-the-art communications systems, hardwired against electromagnetic pulses and possess five-mile long low frequency antennae that can be trailed behind the plane. There are no windows besides the cockpit to protect the communications system from the outside heat or an electromagnetic pulse.  The planes are designed to serve as mobile command centers that can stay aloft during a nuclear war and communicate with anyone anywhere on the planet. These planes are aging, however, so the Air Force announced just last year that they have begun developing a replacement for the E-4. The new platform is currently known as the "Survivable Airborne Operations Center" (SOAC), but is still years from actually going into service.

The Nightwatch also serves practical functions outside of nuclear war.  During natural disasters when phone lines are down and cell towers are destroyed, the plane can and has served as a communication center, allowing state governments and governors to contact relevant federal agencies and create a hub for first responders to reach each other. The government has also finally learned from the human errors that tend to grow exponentially when the crew is on extremely long and challenging missions without sufficient breaks in between.  All crew assigned to the Nightwatch follow a rotation of two weeks on alert, four weeks on the ground on assignment at their respective bases.

And yet we still have a few dozen lost nuclear weapons, mostly under the ocean, some, as in the Greensboro Incident from episode one, buried in the earth and unable to be found.  Experts believe the environmental impact of these broken arrows are negligible, especially those on the ocean floor.  Any significant increase in radiation due to a leaking bomb would have been picked up by now, and would have subsequently dissipated in the ocean currents.  These weapons are also considered to be safe from recovery from bad actors, as it would be less expensive to develop and produce your own bomb than to try to recover one from three miles down that might not even work when you get it.  Besides, if the most advanced technologies, wielded by the largest militaries in the world cannot recover these weapons, what hope does even a well-funded terrorist group have?

These expert opinions, however, also display a bit of naivete.  Nothing is a problem until it is; and things are only impossible until someone actually does them.  Then they become very possible. Much nuclear policy, oddly, is based on optimism and the idea that if it is not a problem immediately, then it will not ever be a problem.  This may be revealed someday to be wishful thinking.  For several decades the Titanic was considered lost, it has since been located and items even brought up from it.  Lt. Douglas Webster’s Skyhawk and its thermonuclear bomb are lost under three miles of water, but that does not mean they always will be.

Perhaps the final concern is that these incidents all demonstrate the same thing: despite the best equipment, the best training, and highly motivated and intelligent crews, nuclear weapons can and have been lost.  At least thirty two times, several of which we have highlighted in these episodes, the handlers have lost control of a nuclear device.  While the reduced use of bombers has diminished the number of broken arrow incidents, as I have said before, what can be had can be lost, and we are not now immune to the same forces that caused these accidents and mishaps.  It is not a question of if but when the next broken arrow happens.

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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 is 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.

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