10 Nuclear Warheads America Lost & Never Recovered
Most nuclear weapons are not small. They usually weigh a couple of thousand pounds, are extremely large, and are very recognizable. Misplacing one and not being able to find it would be a chore for almost anyone, but it has happened at least nine times for the United States.
These accidents are the weapons lost and not recovered. Plenty of other nuclear accidents were recovered, and there were several accidental detonations.
Sometimes the vessels carrying them are lost, or they are purposefully jettisoned to save the crew. Combining the USSR and US Broken Arrows totaled 24 nuclear accidents. The stories of their loss vary, but they all remain unfound. These undiscovered weapons of mass destruction serve to remind us how easily accidents can occur, even with deadly atomic bombs.
February 13, 1950: Nuke 1
A Convair B-36 Bomber crashed in northern British Columbia after dumping a Mark 4 nuclear bomb. The US Air Force crew had 12 of the 17 survivors, who fishermen rescued. This marked the first ‘Broken Arrow’ in history. The Mark 4 bombs have various yields and blast types, and this one was on the smaller end as a 1-kiloton air burst.
The USAF made a statement that claimed a dummy core had been placed into the bomb, but in the same statement, they claimed the wreck occurred on Vancouver Island, which was later found not to be the case. Scientists have not found any elevated radiation levels in the water where the bomb was presumed to be jettisoned.
March 10, 1956: Nukes 2 & 3
A Boeing B-47 Stratojet took off from MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, and headed to Morocco. It refueled once and then was never seen or heard from again. The Stratojet was carrying two nuclear weapons capsules in carrying cases.
Nuclear weapons capsules are fissile material but are not able to detonate on their own. The bomber is thought to be at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, but since it was never recovered, that cannot be confirmed. The last known position was radio contact during its refueling descent 90 miles southwest of Oran, Algeria. The crash is most likely off the coast near the border of Algeria and Morocco.
The Algerian Basin is an extremely deep part of the Mediterranean Sea, which may explain why the bomber and nuclear pits have not been found to this day.
February 5, 1958: Nuke 4
A B-47 Stratojet collided with an F-86 Sabre during a simulated combat mission over Georgia. If that’s not bad enough, the Stratojet was carrying a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb. The bomb was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean near Tybee Island and the mouth of the Savannah River, where the pilot assumed it could be easily recovered. Sonar and a nine-week search could not locate the bomb in 1958. A search was mounted in 2002 as well, but no bomb turned up.
There were false reports that Canadian tourists found this warhead, and it was recovered in 2015. The reports were meant to be satire, but the news became viral, and many assumed the headline was real.
The corrosion from decades of saltwater exposure would make detonation impossible today, and the bomb is assumed to be under at least 15 feet of seabed sediment. Retrieving the bomb would be pointless at this time, and the Air Force has moved on, considering it irretrievably lost.
January 24, 1961: Nukes 5 & 6
A B-52 flying over North Carolina was carrying two Mark 39 warheads, with a combined payload of 7.6 megatons. A fuel leak in the wing caused an explosion that dropped the warheads into swamp land near Goldsboro, NC.
One bomb broke apart, and the plutonium was recovered, but the highly enriched uranium core was never found. The impact site was excavated 50 feet deep, but the most radioactive component could not be found. The USAF purchased a 1-acre easement around the site to prevent digging and recovery after they could not find it. It is thought that the component sank even further into the swampy ground.
This accident was also found to be the closest to disaster, with six of the seven safeties failing. A nuclear weapons safety engineer concluded in the after-action report that only one low-voltage switch prevented the thermonuclear bomb from detonating at a force 250 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
December 5, 1965: Nuke 7
The USS Ticonderoga was underway to Yokosuka, Japan, from Vietnam when an A-4E Skyhawk rolled overboard. The Skyhawk was armed with a B-43 nuclear bomb, and it sank to a depth of 16,000 feet off the Ryukyu Islands.
This is one of the few bombs that was lost that was primed first, giving it the potential to have a nuclear detonation. The US only confirmed the accident in 1989, keeping it a secret from Japan for 24 years.
The secrecy was due to the bomb’s existence violating the agreement of not possessing, manufacturing, or permitting nuclear weapons in Japanese territory.
This bomb is the only one on the list lost by the US Navy rather than the Air Force.
January 21, 1968 – Nuke 8
A B-52 Stratofortress caught fire, forcing the crew to bail out over the North Star Bay in Greenland. The conventional explosives in the four B28 thermonuclear bombs detonated when the pilotless bomber crashed, but not the nuclear components.
This caused plutonium, uranium, and americium to scatter into the fjord, launching a massive cleanup operation from the US and Denmark. Three of the four bombs were accounted for, but a highly enriched uranium stage of the fourth bomb was never found.
May 21, 1968 – Nukes 9 & 10
The USS Scorpion, an attack submarine returning from deployment, sank 400 miles from the Azores. The classified inquiry cited a hot-running torpedo as the most probable cause for the accident, but the US Navy’s position simply states, “The certain cause of the loss of Scorpion cannot be ascertained from any evidence now available.”
The photos of the wreckage are not consistent with torpedo malfunctions, and mechanical failure from poor maintenance (hull compromised or battery cell venting) are the leading theories.
99 crewmembers, two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and one nuclear reactor were lost along with the wreckage on the ocean floor in one of the most disastrous Broken Arrows to date.
The Final Word
After a string of losing warheads in the middle of the century, the US Air Force and our nuclear Navy have become better at preventing broken arrow events. Although those bombs are still out there, they are unlikely to pose much of a threat. That doesn’t mean nuclear accidents aren’t possible, though, as they also include nuclear reactors.
No matter the number of safeguards or redundancies, accidents will still happen. When accidents involve powerful weapons, they can be catastrophic. Be sure to know how other people’s negligence can affect you and plan accordingly. Learning about your threat level from nuclear accidents is a good start.
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And they say that Pakistan is the most dangerous nation on Earth. I’ve been trying to be a nation for some time but we are still a state