Was A-bomb aboard B-36 that crashed in B.C.?

[EvanL]

Filmmaker alleges U.S. covered up 1950 incident

OLIVIA CHENG
CanWest News Service


Thursday, April 29, 2004
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A Canadian filmmaker has teamed up with one of the world's leading nuclear weapons experts to unravel a U.S. military mystery, involving a potential nuclear disaster more than five decades ago on the West Coast.

The resulting story - a potboiler about the crash of a Convair B-36 bomber, government conspiracy and military coverup - will be the subject of Michael Jorgensen's next documentary, tentatively titled Lost Nuke.

To research it, the award-winning director obtained "a phone book" full of official U.S. air force documents.

According to the papers, on Feb. 13, 1950, a 17-man crew flew a B-36 out of Fairbanks, Alaska, for a simulated combat mission. They had a nuclear bomb onboard, similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, five years earlier.

The mission was to take them to Fort Worth, Tex.. Halfway there, flying along the B.C. coast, three of the bomber's six ice-bound engines caught fire. The U.S. air force insists the crew dropped its bomb into the ocean before bailing out, and that the bomb "detonated in a non-nuclear explosion."

It was the world's first Broken Arrow, the U.S. military's code term for an accident involving a nuclear weapon.

As for the plane, the pilot tried to aim it so it would crash in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, Jorgensen says, crew members watched from the ground as "the plane turned around 180 degrees and started flying back north."

Fast-forward three years: The U.S. air force, searching north of Terrace, B.C., for a lost Texas oilman whose private plane has crashed, stumble upon the missing B-36, some 300-plus kilometres in the opposite direction from where it should have crashed.

To Jorgensen, this makes no sense.

Then, deepening the mystery, "the air force does something they've never done before. They send a special operations team to go into the crash site and destroy the plane." Jorgensen pauses before adding: "There's obviously something they're trying to hide."

Some claim the bomb remained onboard and a lone crew member crashed the plane into a B.C. mountaintop.

To find his own answers, Jorgensen followed a three-man expedition team led by nuclear weapons expert John Clearwater to the remote crash site about 250 kilometres north of Terrace. He also tracked down two of the B-36's four surviving crew members.

Jorgensen says he has managed to dig up new clues. He will say only: "The conclusions that (the team) have come to are in total, direct, 180 degrees from what the air force is maintaining happened."

Lost Nuke, now being edited, is to air on the Discovery Channel this fall.

Edmonton Journal, Global TV




And from the burning wreckage, the Bastard CHild emerges covered in Radiation. To wreck havoc on the world.

[2Sheds_Jackson]

Aw hell, this ain't nothin. We lose those things all the time! Shoot - there's a trident missle sittin' in my bathtub...

This incident appears to be the fist one on the list. What's a little creative coverup between friends? It's better than the alternative...having the wrong people searching for a lost nuke...and finding it.


13 February 1950
A B-36 en route from Alaska to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, developed serious mechanical difficulties, complicated by severe icing conditions, leading to the world's first nuclear accident. The crew headed out over the Pacific Ocean and dropped the nuclear weapons from 8,000 feet off the coast of British Columbia. The weapons' high-explosive material detonated on impact, but the crew parachuted to safety.

27 July 1956
A U.S. B-47 practicing a touch-and-go landing at Lakenheath Royal Air Force Station near Cambridge, England went out of control and smashed into a storage igloo housing three Mark 6 nuclear bombs, each of which had about 8,000 pounds of TNT in its trigger mechanism. No crewmen were killed, and fire fighters were able to extinguish the blazing jet fuel before it ignited the TNT.

22 May 1957
A 10 megaton hydrogen bomb was accidentally dropped from a bomber in an uninhabited area near Albuquerque, New Mexico owned by the University of New Mexico. The conventional explosives detonated, creating a 12 foot deep crater 25 feet across in which some radiation was detected.

28 July 1957
A C-124 Globemaster transporting three nuclear weapons and a nuclear capsule from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to Europe experienced loss of power in two engines. The crew jettisoned two of the weapons somewhere east of Rehobeth, Del., and Cape May/Wildwood, New Jersey. A search for the weapons was unsuccessful and it is a fair assumption that they are still there at the bottom of the ocean.

31 January 1958
Unbeknownst to Moroccan officials, a B-47 loaded with a fully-armed nuclear weapon crashed at a U.S. Strategic Air Command base 90 miles northeast of Rabat. The Air Force evacuated everyone within 1 mile of the base while the bomber burned for seven hours. During cleanup operations a large number of vehicles and aircraft were contaminated with radiation.

11 March 1958
A B-47 on its way from Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia to an overseas base accidentally dropped an unarmed nuclear weapon into the garden of Walter Gregg and his family in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The conventional explosives detonated, destroying Gregg's house and injuring six family members. The blast resulted in the formation of a crater 50-70 feet wide and 25-30 feet deep. Five other houses and a church were also damaged; five months later the Air Force paid the Greggs $54,000 in compensation.

25 May 1958
A B-47 collided with another jet and a hydrogen bomb was accidentally dropped, never to be recovered, in the ocean off Savannah, Georgia. [Note: Some sources list this incident as having occurred on 5 February; i am reasonably assured that 25 May is the correct date.]

4 November 1958
A B-47 with nuclear bombs caught fire in mid-air, crashing in Texas.

15 October 1959
A B-52 with two nuclear bombs collided in mid-air with a KC-135 jet tanker and crashed in Kentucky. Both bombs were recovered.

7 June 1960
A BOMARC-A nuclear missile burst into flamesafter its fuel tank was ruptured by the explosion of a highpressure helium tank at McGuire Air Force Base in New Egypt, New Jersey. The missile melted, causing plutonium contamination at the facility and in the ground water below.

24 January 1961
A B-52 bomber suffered structural failure and disintegrated in mid-air 12 miles north of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, NC, releasing two hydrogen bombs. Five crewmen parachuted to safety, while three others died when the aircraft exploded in mid-air. The bombs jettisoned as the plane descended, one parachuting to earth intact, the other plunging deep into waterlogged farmland. To this day, parts of the nuclear bomb remain embedded deep in the muck. The area is off-limits, and is tested regularly for radiation releases. More information can be found at the Broken Arrow: Goldsboro, NC site at www.ibiblio.org/bomb/.

14 March 1961
A B-52 with nuclear bombs crashed in California while on a training mission.

13 January 1964
A B-52 with two nuclear weapons crashed near Cumberland, Maryland.

17 January 1966
A B-52 collided with an Air Force KC-135 jet tanker while refueling over the coast of Spain, killing eight of the eleven crew members and igniting the KC-135's 40,000 gallons of jet fuel. Two hydrogen bombs ruptured, scattering radioactive particles over the fields of Palomares; a third landed intact near the village of Palomares; the fourth was lost at sea 12 miles off the coast of Palomares and required a search by thousands of men working for three months to recover it. Approximately 1,500 tons of radioactive soil and tomato plants were removed to the U.S. for burial at a nuclear waste dump in Aiken, S.C. The U.S. eventually settled claims by 522 Palomares residents at a cost of $600,000, and gave the town the gift of a $200,000 desalinizing plant.

22 January 1968
A B-52 crashed 7 miles south of Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, scattering the radioactive fragments of three hydrogen bombs over the terrain and dropping one bomb into the sea after a fire broke out in the navigator's compartment. Contaminated ice and airplane debris were sent back to the U.S., with the bomb fragments going back to the manufacturer in Amarillo, Texas. The incident outraged the people of Denmark (which owned Greenland at the time, and which prohibits nuclear weapons over its territory) and led to massive anti-U.S. demonstrations. One of the warheads was reportedly recovered by Navy Seals and Seabees in 1979, but a recent (August 2000) report suggests that in fact it may still be lying at the bottom of Baffin Bay.

24 July 1969
U.S. missile production was temporarily suspended due to a serious fire at the Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky Flats plutonium bomb factory. The surrounding countryside was irradiated by plutonium, and several buildings at the factory were so badly contaminated that they had to be dismantled.

2 November 1981
A fully-armed Poseidon missile was accidentally dropped 17 feet from a crane in Scotland during a transfer operation between a U.S. submarine and its mother ship.

[Ichhabe]

Well, what if the wrong people do that?

And disposing your nukes in a friendly country? Is that kosher?