Now a word from our sponser: While we're changing the subject, did you know Mrs Renfro's Salsa Veges and Chow Chow is family and Texas owned??
~BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Ok, back to our story ;)
Posted on 09/13/2004 7:15:02 PM PDT by gutshot
Device dropped in ocean off Georgia during Cold War WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Government experts are investigating a claim that an unarmed nuclear bomb, lost off the Georgia coast at the height of the Cold War, might have been found, an Air Force spokesman said Monday.
The hydrogen bomb was lost in the Atlantic Ocean in 1958 following a collision of a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter.
A group led by retired Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Duke of Statesboro, Georgia, said in July that it had found a large object underwater near Savannah that was emitting high levels of radioactivity, according to an Associated Press report.
...... Smolinsky said if the bomb were found, a decision would have to be made about whether to try to recover it or leave it where it is. .....
The 7,600-pound, 12-foot-long thermonuclear bomb contained 400 pounds of high explosives as well as uranium.
.....
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace. ......
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
180 miles, why?
I had a genius friend who was involved in all this who told me 10 years ago not to worry about bombs. He said if anyone pushed the button for thermonuclear war, 95 percent of the bombs wouldn't work, something about their systems being bad or out of date or something. It was nice to hear.
TNT has no nitroglycerin. It does not "sweat". Most dynamites "sweat", or settle out after prolonged storage if not turned. I doubt that TNT was used. Although I never had any "Restricted Data" access, I thought RDX or HMX was the component in PU fission devices. Overall, I suspect that sophisticated devices do poorly when stored in salty, high pressure muck. Since the AF says there's no trigger (that can mean many different things in the explosive train of a 3F nuke), the thing is about as dead as Franco.
IVAN is coming to pay it a visit!!!!!
That being said, let's all recite that 70's era bumper sticker phrase, "One thermonuclear bomb can ruin your whole day"
Then this isin't the one that was dropped off of Tybee Island?
~BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Ok, back to our story ;)
LoL
hehehe only one way to find out if its the real one .... ;-)
The term "Broken Arrow" was an actual term used in the AF. It was used identify a peacetime, nuclear weapons accident. (A peacetime nuclear weapons security incident was called a "Bent Spear") I do not know the exact date, but some time during the 60's a cargo aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon crashed at the USAF air base at Wheelus in Libya. The crash caused the weapon to break open and when the aircraft burned some of the high explosives in the weapon detonated spreading radiation over a portion of the base. Extensive cleanup ensured the remove the radioactive debris. I have a friend of mine who was at Wheelus when it happened and he told me almost all of the base, including families, were evacuated to Europe. As a result of the accident the AF realized it did not have any procedure or training in how emergency services would respond to an aircraft accident involving nuclear weapons. Early in my career I was a firefighter and I can remember responding to simulated aircraft accidents involving nuclear weapons. The secenario would usually be a cargo aircraft carrying nuclear weapons had an inflight emergency of some type. There was a classified Tech Order that had code terms for different types of weapons so that the firefighters would know how much HE was onboard. Base emergency services would respond and then the excercise would simulate the aircraft crashed, broke up, and caught fire. The fire department would respond and fight the fire. The next stage of the excercise would be that the fire department was unable to keep the fire from spreading to the weapon. All emergency services would then evacuate a safe distance. Fire would spread to the weapon causing the HE to either catch fire or explode, spreading radioactive material. Base decontamination personnel would then respond and start the cleanup. Not all Broken Arrow excercises went that way but that was a typical way the excercise flowed.
I don't know if these type of training excercises are still held but the potential for having an accident with an aircraft carrying nuclear weapons is still very much real. So I am sure that the AF still has some type of emergency training excercise to deal with this type of emergency.
No, not even the same type. The A-bombs dropped on Japan were fission bombs. This was an H-bomb, or a fusion device. Several orders of magnitude more powerful.
Port protection technology must almost be ready?
Impossible to for it to detonate at this point. Unless some turd world wack digs it up and remakes it. A 1950's nuke has enough enriched uranium for a dozen modern nukes.
I remember the night we had a loose nuclear weapon in Damascus, Arkansas. Someone dropped a wrench into a missile silo and it exploded. The warhead popped out and noone could find it for a few hours. It was an interesting night.
"Impossible to for it to detonate at this point."
Yeah. The only good thing about a high-order detonation is how hard it is to make it happen. Everything has to be just right.
I'm sure that these bombs probably aren't capable of detinating themselves. They do still pose a threat, though. What is to stop non-proliferation nations from salvaging them to make new weapons?
Forgive me.........detonated.
they lack the technology to recover first of all. You'd wind up with several dead guys not too long after recovering it if it has been breached. Of course, there are many who would willingly die for such a cause.
One of the main problems is reshaping the "material" into a proper design. IOW, no one can simply find a ball of plutonium and shave off some material, surround it with TNT and have a fissionable weapon. It has to be shaped precisely and the initiator has to be perfect (thank God).
It was reported that Israel was making "buttons" (at the Dimona facility in the Negev desert) about the size of a thumbnail (IIRC) that were dome-shaped and had to be uniformly curved with curvature that deviated less than the width of a human hair. Of course this all had to be done by remote for safety and precision. Improper shaping usually results in low-yield or even a "non-event".
This is not to say somebody couldn't use the material in a dirty bomb to spread the radioactive material around. While this would not be good, it would by no means be anything on the order of magnitude of the damage done by a nuclear detonation. You'd have some contamination that would have to be cleaned up and you'd see people with injuries depending upon the exposure.
Many of the weapons in the ocean are so deep they'll never be recovered, such as the Russian sub that sank in 18,000 feet in the Atlantic with 6 megaton warheads, 2 each on 16 missiles for a total of 192 megatons back in the 1980's. He knew he was in trouble after a collision with the USS Augusta Los Angeles 688 sub so he steered to deep water.
If it's at a point where some terrorist might mount an operation to recover it and has discovered the location by the activity surrounding the area, we'll have to do something with it because it will be too tempting for the terrorists (if it's in relatively shallow water).
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