2023-05-18 14:25:05
The movie ‘Broken Arrow’ by John Woo presents the scenario of the loss of a nuclear bomb, a phenomenon that in military jargon is known in Spanish as ‘broken arrow’. A unique scenario before which one of the protagonists of the film responds: “I don’t know what is more terrifying, losing nuclear weapons or that there is a term for that.” In fact, since 1950 there have been documented 32 nuclear weapons accidents (access in this link) that imply from the detonation, to the theft or loss of this weapon by the United States. In some cases they did not recover.
“There are still many nuclear secrets that we know nothing about,” he went on to point out. Stephen Schwartzauthor of ‘Atomic Audit’, a work that analyzes the US nuclear program.
After World War II and in the midst of the Cold War, a nuclear race broke out that caused the US and the Soviet Union to begin to accumulate atomic arsenals. At that time, the US began the operation ‘Chrome Dome’, nuclear-charged B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers that flew day and night, always on the alert in case they had to respond to a surprise Russian attack.
But in some cases things did not go as planned. They range from bombs dropped by mistake to those released during an emergency and never heard from again.
The US Government declassified reports (access at this link) in which he admitted that they had gone astray 11 nuclear bombs: 6 in the United States, and 5 in the waters of the Pacific, Mediterranean or Atlantic Ocean. In some cases, they were rigged to be detonated or allegedly contained no nuclear charge.
And the missions to recover them also posed risks to the area. Jaya Tiwari, a researcher at the Washington think tank Center for Defense Information, went so far as to say that some of these accidents were more dangerous than might be suspected.
Document describing events involving accidents with nuclear weapons
Also, the absence of data makes it difficult to know exactly what environmental impacts they may have caused. In case of dovecotesin Almería, is paradigmatic in Spain and has once again dominated the news after the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and the head of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez agreed to meet to work on a permanent solution to clean up the floor contaminated with plutonium from the Spanish town. But is not the only example.
official and unofficial
The longest missing nuclear weapon 73 years, was lost on February 3, 1950. The United States Air Force Convair B-36 bomber was conducting an attack simulation, following the Alaska-Texas route, when it had engine problems. And to avoid crashing, he was ordered to release his 30-kiloton Mark 4 bomb into the Pacific Ocean. The official report stated that the bomb did not contain the plutonium nucleus necessary for a nuclear detonation, but did contain a substantial amount of uranium.
And one of the events most highlighted by experts occurred in January 1968, a B-52 bomber loaded with four nuclear bombs after an emergency landing attempt crashed near the military base of Thule, Greenland. The version of the American authorities said that the four heads were destroyed during the explosion, and an operation by the military and civilians was organized to clean up radioactive material from the area. By then, they already had in mind what they did in Palomares as a model to follow.
But documents obtained by the media revealed that “one of the nuclear warheads it had crossed the ice and ended up at the bottom of the sea», where to this day its exact location remains unknown. The Danish parliament that represents Greenland requested a study on the damage that the accident could have caused in the area. Among other reasons, because the workers who took part in the cleaning at that time went to the European courts, arguing that they suffered severe health problems since they carried out this work. However, it is difficult to establish a direct relationship between the two issues, at a legal level.
“Irretrievably lost”
One of the examples that has given more than talking was the one that occurred in Savannah Georgia, in the USA. in 1958. A US Air Force aircraft was returning at midnight carrying a hydrogen bomb on board when it collided with an aircraft. “The pilot of the other plane managed to bail out, while the bomber planned an immediate emergency landing at the Savannah airport,” retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Duke told the media, who in 1998 he restarted his search.
However, the emergency landing in the middle of a runway under construction forced the pilot to decide to dispose of a 6,500 kg nuclear bomb off the coast of Georgia. Although the government stated that the hydrogen bomb was not equipped with plutonium, Lt. Col. Duke questions this because of an April 1966 letter in which the aide to the secretary of defenserefers to the pump as a “full weapon”.
And he added to the BBC that “the man who was there that night, an expert in nuclear technology, said that he had never received or dispatched a bomb at that time that did not have plutonium.” After authorities searched for it for nine weeks, the Air Force declared the bomb “irretrievably lost.”
At the edge of the abyss
Some incidents such as the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga en 1965 affecting Japan, according to documents collected by the Washington Institute for Political Studies, were deliberately concealed by the US Navy. And represented a breach of the prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons in the security treaty between the two countries.
The Americans, at the time, were towing an A4E Skyhawk plane, loaded with a hydrogen bomb to an elevator. However, the pilot did not notice that the ship was about to go down. A miscalculation caused the nuclear charge to end up at the bottom of the Philippine Sea, sinking more than 130 kilometers from the Japanese Ryukyu archipelago.
But a case that meant being on the verge of an atomic explosion occurred on Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961. A B-52 plane dropped two nuclear weapons on the ground. One of them broke, although most of its parts were recovered, one of them was left under 15 meters of mud. In the end, the US Air Force ended up buying the land to prevent strangers from approaching the scene.
As for the second bomb, it remained intact thanks to the parachute opening. But in a declassified document from 1963, the US Secretary of Defense concluded that «a nuclear explosion was avoided by the slimmest of margins.”
real science fiction
However, the United States is not the only one to misplace bombs. It is more difficult to access the figures for other countries such as Russia. Where the incidents have more to do with Soviet nuclear submarines. A 1970 fire in the air conditioning system of a nuclear submarine K-8 spread while it was in the Bay of Biscay and it sank with four nuclear torpedoes without a trace.
More mysterious, and taken from a movie script, was the Soviet K-129 near Hawaii, carrying 3 nuclear missiles. The US attempted to deploy a secret operation to get it back with the support of billionaire filmmaker Howard Hughes. But ‘Project Azorian’ (can be accessed with this link) it failed because the submarine broke apart when they were trying to raise it to the surface.
As we changed the decade, they began to think about betting on artifacts More smalls and not just in nuclear-charged missiles. Thus, in the nineties before the military committee of the US Congress, Alexey Yablokov, a scientist who is a former member of Russia’s National Security Council and adviser to President Boris Yeltsin. He acknowledged that Russia developed 250 portable nuclear bombs, and that the Soviet authorities did not exhaustively monitor them. For this reason, some experts have come to say that Russia lost about 100 of this type.
The Spanish case
Raphael Moreno Leftprofessor at the Complutense University of Madrid and author of the book “The secret history of the Palomares bombs”, points out that what was recently announced about Palomares and the official petition to remove the more than 50,000 cubic meters of radioactive land, only indicates that the United States is open to dialogue about a second cleanup of Palomares, “but this does not mean that there is a commitment, something similar was already announced in the Margallo era and with the Aznar government,” Moreno told ABC.
But, for Moreno. With this they are acknowledging that the first cleaning of Palomares was not complete «when in 1966 the opposite was sold. It’s more they gave certificates to the landowners saying that the land was exactly the same than before the accident, which today we know perfectly well was not true. And they are signed by the Spanish authorities in the case of the Franco regime and the United States government.
Decontamination certificate from 1966
He adds that “it seems that the steps that can be taken with the United States are related to the US military presence in Spain. It is curious the coincidence between the acceptance of the Spanish Government of two new destroyers for Rota and at least the public declaration that they are now willing to sit down and talk about Palomares ». And he qualifies “Spain has not declassified documents related to Palomares, what is actually known is from the documents declassified by the United States.”
Moreno also points out that “in addition to plutonium, we have americium, which is much more volatile and they say that there will be more risk of suspended americium by 2030”
Moreno indicates that his book intends to explain why B-52 bombers with nuclear cargo were flying over Almería that year, and then, more collaterally, to ask the question of whether Spain also had a nuclear program. Spain had a project of this type in the words of General Velarde, “but only according to his words that cannot be confirmed by third parties,” Moreno adds.
And according to this general, Franco stopped the nuclear program because of what happened in Palomares and because he thought it would generate tensions with the United States. And B-52 flights resumed just 48 hours after the Palomares crash. «There are things in the past that are still not understood, but above all there are things in the present that are not understood. And the issue continues to expand without a dialogue that leads to a final cleaning.
What we know about nuclear accidents is only thanks to the declassification of documents that is produced dropper. But maybe the nuclear accounting in B keep giving surprises.
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