Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm the host Job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So here on tech Stuff, we've actually covered the subject of nuclear weapons a few times. So way back on April fourth, twenty twelve, Chris Pollette, my original co host, and I we did an episode on how nuclear weapons work. I'm probably going to go over some of that same material again in this one, but you know, it's been more than a decade, so hopefully that's okay. In twenty seventeen, I did an episode titled Close but No Nuclear War about the handful of times circumstances could have precipitated into what we in the eighties would have referred to as the Big One. But thankfully, cooler heads prevailed we did not have a nuclear war, and I got to thinking about nuclear weapons again because I, like a lot of other people, watched the Fallout streaming series. Now, I've played a couple of the Fallout games, a few of them in fact, and I really enjoy them. There's some of my favorite games, particularly Fallout New Vegas, which I think for a lot of people is the favorite. And then I was curious about the streaming series and no spoilers, But overall, I really enjoyed the adaptation. It's not a direct adaptation of any particular game, though it does contain elements that are found in several of the other games, and I thought that generally speaking, they did a really good job with it. I got a few quibbles, but you know, nothing major. Now. The entire setting for the Fallout series, it's a world that's trying to rebuild itself after a nuclear war that this nuclear war had happened like two hundred years in the past, and this is the fallout of that conflict that you are thrust into. And it got me thinking about nuclear weapons. So today I want to talk about lost nuclear weapons. So we're going to talk about the half dozen times the United States, you know, misplaced a nuclear bomb and wasn't able to get it back, which you know, that's an awful lot of times when you're talking about weapons capable of truly massive amounts of destruction. And also, this would just be six incidents that we know about. In fact, I'll end the episode with one that is disputed as a potential seventh. Now, I'm not saying that there are a ton more than six incidents in which the United States lost a nuclear weapon and was unable to retrieve it. I have no way of knowing that it could be that there's more. It could be that six or seven is exactly how many there are. It is possible, though, I think that the public hasn't learned about certain cases that may have happened. I mean, it's turns out the United States military and the Department of Defense isn't super eager to spread information about lost nuclear weapons for reasons that are both I think totally legitimate and some that are probably not. Now, there have been way more than just six accidents with nuclear weapons. If we're talking about, you know, big accidents, there have been at least thirty two. That's just the officially acknowledged ones. In the United States. We have this charming little name for incidents in which essentially the United States loses control of a nuclear weapon, and that nickname is called broken Arrow. That nickname insisted long before John Travolta and Christian Slater made a movie based on the premise of a thermonuclear weapon going walk about Hands up if you actually remember that film, it's one that I have seen. I would say that as action films go, it's not great. It's not terrible, but you know, not great. Now, before we get into the whip sees, let's talk a little bit about how nuclear weapons actually work from a very high level, and in some ways, at least an initial part of a nuclear weapon detonation is has got some similarities to the way that nuclear fission power plants work. Now, obviously with a power plant, we want to have a nuclear reaction that is really well controlled. And in nuclear weapons, the whole goal is to kind of get the sucker to go into a chain reaction that you know, goes well, not ballistic, that's the wrong the wrong word, but you know, out of control. Nuclear weapons, however, do not just use fission. That's just part of it, at least for modern thermonuclear weapons. That's not the whole entirety of the explosion. Detonating a nuclear weapon these days actually involves three explosive processes. So you got your bog standard chemical based explosives, just your regular non nuclear explosives. This is what kind of initiates the whole sequence of events and the purpose of these explosives is not to blow up the nuclear material. It's to compress it, to put intense pressure on that material and compact it down in order to get to what we call critical mass. So the nuclear material that is typically in nuclear weapons is either highly enriched uranium, like a more than ninety percent content of uranium two thirty five, for example, or plutonium more than ninety three percent plutonium two thirty nine. Now, the special thing about these particular atoms, you two thirty five andonium two thirty nine, is that they belong to a subset of atoms that will break apart under certain circumstances. Sometimes they decay on their own and they break apart, but they can also be induced to break apart. They are fissile, in other words, because they can undergo fission, they can split. Now, not all fissile atoms will cause a chain reaction, but uranium two five and plutonium two thirty nine totes can. And when they are induced to break apart, these atoms don't just split into smaller atoms. They also release a tremendous amount of energy. You know, stuff like X rays and gamma rays. You get a ton of light and heat. They also shoot out excess neutrons. Now, if you've got a mass of this stuff and those atoms are packed close enough together, then some of these escaping neutrons can collide with these other atoms and then induce the exact same reaction. Those atoms will then split apart, then they'll release neutrons. So again, if the material is packed closely enough, these neutrons can start this chain reaction, and that's what makes this escalate very quickly. If the material is not very close together, then the neutrons can miss the other atoms, and you know, you will get a release of energy, but it'll be a limited release. You won't get this chain reaction. That's really the devast aiding part of nuclear weapons. So it's a very specific approach to weaponizing this energy. You know, that chain reaction, that runaway reaction is really what you want to really cause massive destruction. Now, the very first nuclear weapons, which really the atomic weapons is what we would really call them. They relied solely on fission to release destructive energy upon a target. You add Little Boy, which was the nickname for the first such atomic bomb, and Little Boy had a hollow cylinder made from uranium two thirty five that upon detonation of a charge explosive would then shoot toward a target plug of U two thirty five. So you can think of it like a target and a bullet. So this little bullet of you two thirty five gets shot to collide with a target of U two thirty five. Now, separately, these two masses of uranium two thirty five did not have enough mass to maintain fission, but upon on collision, the two would form critical mass that could maintain this fission reaction. Now, the second bomb, fat Man, did not use uranium two thirty five. It used plutonium. The scientists who are working on fat Man could not get the gun type method that worked for uranium two thirty five based bombs to work with plutonium, so they had to come up with something else. In fact, originally the idea was that there was going to be a thin Man bomb because it would use this gun approach that the Little Boy did. But because they could not get that to work, they had to go with explosives, conventional explosives that would compress the plutonium in order to initiate the fission chain reaction. That implosion explosive charge meant that the bomb had to be much larger than was anticipated originally when they want to do the gun method. Thus you get fat Man because it's bigger around. The plutonium atoms would get squeezed together tightly enough to reach critical mass, and then you could get the same sort of fission reaction. However, as I mentioned, modern nuclear weapons also have a fusion component to them. Fusion is the atomic process of two lighter atoms fusing together to make a heavier atom. This is what goes on in the Sun in which hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. So the fission reaction in a modern thermonuclear weapon can also be called the primary blast or primary charge, and the fusion component is the secondary charge. So the lighter atoms used for fusion are typically hydrogen and hydrogen isotopes. And just to be clear, the actual process inside and exploding thermonuclear device gets way more complicated than what I'm covering here. There are different elements in both the primary and secondary charges, but that would require a full episode by itself. In fact, we did one back in twenty twelve, so we've spent enough time on the basics of how these bombs work. Now we do have to talk about what happens when these bombs detonate. Now, I mentioned that fission and fusion as well will release an enormous amount of energy. The energy takes lots of different forms. We're talking heat and light and radiation. And the blast creates an incredible shock wave, So you get this massive increase in air pressure that's like a wrecking ball slamming into everything outward. The explosion creates this enormous fireball, and that fireball is about as hot as the surface of the Sun is initially. Remember again, fusion is how the Sun shines, So this is like igniting a miniature sun in Earth's atmosphere, and that heat vaporizes everything within that fireball and pushes it upward into the atmosphere, and that stuff forms the iconic mushroom cloud that we associate with a nuclear explosion. Now, among all that stuff is radioactive material from the bomb itself, and this kind of mixes and bonds with other things that are vaporized in that explosion. These tiny particles condense and we end up with radioactive dust that eventually is heavy enough to start to fall back to earth. This is the so called fallout. It's the stuff that can contaminate things like soil and water and cause problems for ages. Now, obviously we're talking tremendous immediate destructive power, not to mention the problems of dealing with radioactive material that will remain dangerous. Most of it actually kind of degrades fairly rapidly, like within a couple of weeks you get down to survivable conditions. There's this thing called the seven ten rule that means the amount of radiation reduces tenfold for every sevenfold increase in time. So the really dangerous stuff that can be decreased dramatically within a few hours to a day, like within a day, fallout is going to give off more than eighty percent of its inner energy, and within again two weeks you're down to you know, survivable ambient radiation. Now, to be clear, radioactive contamination is not immediately life threatening too. Like again we have this perception that this is all a death sentence immediately. That's not necessarily the case. One thing that can you can do if you were, you know, near a nuclear blast, not obviously outside of the blast zone itself, because if you're near that then that's that's game over, right. If you're a few miles out, however, well, you can decontaminate yourself. You can strip off the you know, whatever clothing you were wearing when you were exposed to the nuclear dust, and you can take a shower with mild soap and and you can decontaminate yourself. Of course, it is hard to figure out a way to do all this without tracking a radiated dust into the area where you're taking your shower, but that actually could be a pretty effective way to get rid of any radioactive material that has settled on you, which gives a bit of a different picture than what we get with fallout, right, in which the world remains this radioactive wasteland two hundred years after the conflict. And you know, radiation is this invisible thing, this destructive, invisible thing, and it's really scary. And in fact, one of the really big challenges that experts have identified as far as nuclear weapons go is how do you communicate to the public what to do in the wake of a nuclear event, whether it's an accident or an attack or whatever, so that folks don't go and make the problem even worse. And to be clear, a nuclear blast is truly terrifying. It's awful. And again, if you are closer, like within a few miles of the blast zone, your chances of survival are incredibly small. But on the flip side, it is different from the way it's depicted in shows and games like Fallout. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to start talking about the actual Broken Arrow events and why these remain these kind of scary incidents that can every few years come back and fire up imaginations and make people really anxious. That's not my goal, but we are going to talk about these things. First though, Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All Right, We're going to now talk about the broken Arrow events in which some sort of misha involving at least one nuclear weapon have happened, or, as defined by the Department of Defense, an incident in which at least one of the following things occurred. And I'm quoting from a declassified document from nineteen eighty one here, So here are the parameters for a broken Arrow event. Accidental or unauthorized launching, firing, or use by US forces or supported allied forces of a nuclear capable weapon system which could create the risk of an outbreak or war. Nuclear detonation, that one seems like it's no brainer, right, Non nuclear detonation or burning of a nuclear weapon or radioactive weapon component, including a fully assembled nuclear weapon, an unassembled nuclear weapon or radioactive nuclear weapon component, radioactive contamination, seizure, theft or loss of a nuclear weapon or radioactive nuclear weapon component, including jettisoning, public hazard actual or implied. Those are the parameters. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there have been thirty two of these on record, with six incidents in which the US of A has been unable to retrieve the loss nuclear weapon. And again, this is the Pentagon's official tally. I have no way of knowing if that number is actually accurate. In fact, a letter from the Defense Atomic Support Agency, which has since evolved into the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, and both of these are part of the overall Department of Defense, it lists more than two hundred and ten pages worth of accidents and incidents between the years nineteen fifty seven and nineteen sixty seven alone, just a little more than a decade here. But to be clear, some of these cases are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. Incidents involving improper handling or transportation are on there, for example, So I guess it really comes down to how you define a big problem. Also, these thirty two incidents that are detailed in this Department of Defense document happened between nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty, and again that makes you wonder have there been any more that have happened in the forty plus years since. However, we also have to acknowledge that there has been a massive change in the technology around nuclear weapons in that time because in the old days, you know, when we talked about nuclear weapons, we were talking about bomb that would be delivered by an aircraft or maybe a little later by a submarine. These days, we have intercontinental ballistic missiles and such, so it's a different story and there are fewer opportunities to misplace a bomb, although a nuclear armed submarine could still be such an incident. So we're going to talk about the six times America lost a nuclear weapon and couldn't get it back. And first up is the very first of the incidents listed in that declassified letter. So the letter starts with an incident in which the bomb was not recoverable. It happened on February thirteenth, nineteen fifty, so a day before Valentine's Day. Talk about a bummer. A crew was piloting a B thirty six bomber as part of a simulated combat mission. They were flying from an Air Force base in North Starborough, Alaska. They were headed all the way to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, which is a journey that's like three thousand miles more than that. So, according to the the weapon carried by the crew had a quote unquote dummy capsule in it, so, in other words, it lacked the actual nuclear core needed to make it a viable thermonuclear weapon. It did still have at least some radioactive material inside it, just not like the two charges needed to create the big fusion boom. Six hours into the flight, the aircraft started to have some pretty serious problems, big enough to force the crew to shut down three of the B thirty six's engines. Now, the B thirty six had a ton of engines, Like initially the earliest B thirty six models had just six piston engines driving propellers, right, but you had six of them, so shutting down three you still have half of your engines left. Later on, they had four jet engines added to it as well, so like the later B thirty six aircraft were ten engine planes. That's kind of incredible. Now, on top of these engine problems, the aircraft also had issues with ice building up on the plane's wings, and the aircraft was at twelve thousand feet altitude, and the military determined that the conditions were beyond risky considering the presence of a nuclear weapon on board the aircraft, So the call was made for the aircraft to deviate from its flight path, to fly out over the Pacific Ocean and to drop the bomb with the dummy capsule at eight thousand feet. Now, according to the declassified letter quote, a bright flash occurred on impact, followed by a sound and shockwave. Only the weapons high explosive material detonated the crew aboard. The aircraft bailed out over Princess Royal Island, and the aircraft itself crashed on Vancouver Island. And that is our first lost bomb out of the way. The second time America lost a nuclear bomb was on March tenth, nineteen fifty six. That we apparently went six whole years without another totally lost bomb is nice because, as we will soon see, sometimes we were looking at incidents that were happening a year or two apart, or sometimes in the same year. Anyway, a group of four aircraft, including a B forty seven Stratojet, were en route from McDill Air Force Base in Florida to quote and overseas air base end quote which overseas airbase, I honestly don't know. It's not mentioned in the Department of Defense document. Anyway. The B forty seven carried quote two nuclear capsules in carrying cases in the quote, and that sounds a lot like a suitcase bomb, right, But according to the DoD, a nuclear detonation of this stuff was impossible, like it did not have the initial charges that would work in order to actually create a nuclear bomb, but it was the material that could be used inside a nuclear weapon. So I guess it's a good thing that it wasn't like a bomb raay to explode or anything. And tragically the aircraft and its crew were lost above the terranean c The accident happened as the aircraft were all changing altitude because they had to go through a mid air refueling operation, so they had been at a cruising altitude much higher up, but in order to refuel, they needed to descend to fourteen thousand feet between them, and fourteen thousand feet was a solid cloud formation, according to the document, so descending through this meant that your visibility was obviously really limited. The base of the clouds was somewhere at the altitude of fourteen thousand, five hundred feet. The B forty seven, carrying this case filled with nuclear capsules, never made contact with the refueling tanker, and despite extensive searches, the military was not able to locate the vehicle or the crew piloting it, or, for that matter, the carrying case with the nuclear capsules inside of it. So that's lost. Bomb number two. Next up, we have an incident that's very close to home for me, well sort of close to home for me. It is the so called Tybee bomb, which happened two years after the incident we just talked about. On February fifth, nineteen fifty eight, a B forty seven took off from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and it was on a simulated combat mission. The B forty seven carried a nuclear weapon that, according to the DoD did not contain a nuclear capsule inside of it, which you know, that's a good thing, but the weapon still had plenty of conventional explosives which would have caused an issue right like cause again you've got the chemical based explosives in there too. And as it turned out, the story that the bomb only carried a dummy trigger would later be disputed, and it was said that in fact, the bomb aboard the B forty seven was, as Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars Fame would say, fully operational. So around three point thirty in the morning, while flying over coastal Georgia, calamity struck. A pilot flying an F eighty six Saber Jet fighter was descending from a higher altitude and did not see the B forty seven flying beneath him, Like he wasn't showing up on his radar. He didn't notice it, and so he descends and collides with the B forty seven. This is like one of those crazy accidents, like it really required a wild coincidence for this to happen. But these two aircraft did collide, and Lieutenant Clarence Stewart, who was the pilot of the Saber Jet, was able to eject from his vehicle and he safely landed in a swamp, which, you know, not the best place to land if you're not really a big fan of leeches and snapping turtles and snakes and the occasional alligator, all of which are native to this part of Georgia, but still is a good ending for him considering that one of the wings of his saber Jet got completely ripped off, so the fact that he was able to eject and land safely was a pretty phenomenal thing. The B forty seven was in slightly better shape than the saber Jet, but it was still very damaged. So the pilot attempted to make an emergency landing at Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia, but he was not able to get the air speed of the aircraft down enough to make us safe landing, so the call was made to jettison the bomb before attempting a landing in order to avoid having a high explosive going off in an American Air Force base. So the pilot was able to jettison the bomb off the coast of Tybee Island, which again is off coastal Georgia, And I've been to Tybee Island several times in fact. But yeah, they dropped the bomb not too far from where the Savannah River lets out, and the bomb sank it to the ocean, and the Department of Defense wasn't exactly sure where it landed. And fortunately the bomb did not detonate. And that really is fortunate because in nineteen ninety four, a nearly thirty year old document that was submitted to Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was declassified. So it was declassified in ninety four. The actual document dated from nineteen sixty six, and in this nineteen sixty six letter, the claim was that the bomb that was dropped off Tybee in fact did have a nuclear capsule inside of it, that the DoD was not being truthful when it said that there was no nuclear capability of the weapon, that in fact, it had contained plutonium and was capable of full detonation. So there's this dispute here between that nineteen sixty six letter from the Secretary of Defense that was sent to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and the official documentation from the Department of Defense about the thirty two Broken Arrow incidents. So the military searched the area for the bomb for a couple of months, but they weren't able to track down this missing nuclear weapon. So the question is there a functional well probably not functional now, but was there a functional nuclear weapon buried in the silt off the coast of Tybee Island, complete with a plutonium capsule? And I don't know the answer to that, but, boy, Hettie, that is scary. The Navy did do several surveys to make sure that there wasn't any signs of plutonium leaking out of this bomb, and they didn't find anything. There was one point where they found an area of higher radiation than expected, and at first the thought was they had detected the actual location of the bomb itself, but upon further investigation, they found that the radiation was actually naturally occurring. It was from minerals that were on the ocean bed, and it wasn't byproducts of a thermonuclear device itself. So it still remains a mystery as to exactly where that bomb is. Okay, we've got three of those bombs covered already. We've got three more plus a bonus to go. So before we get to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, So next up, we have an accident that happened three years after the Tybee bomb incident. So this one happened in nineteen sixty one. On January twenty fourth of nineteen sixty one, a B fifty two aircraft was on an airborne alert mission. And you might owe my drugiz one da what that means. Well, back in the day, and by that I mean most of the nineteen sixties, America had this practice of having nuclear armed B fifty two bombers in the air above North America at all times. So there were always a squadron of these aircraft flying routes over North America. The idea was that these aircraft could be sent to drop bombs on the Soviet Union, you know, if things kind of took a turn for the worst. So the Cold War sure was fun to lift through, y'all. No, granted, I was. I was born after the era of the B fifty twos. For me, it was all intercondinental ballistic missiles. Anyway. Crews would operate these B fifty two aircraft as part of a project. They got the super fun nickname Operation Chrome Dome because it's a lot easier to deal with the possibility of existential destruction if you've got a fun nickname for it. So the operation always makes me think of the Stanley Kubrick film Doctor Strangelove aka How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. That film came out nineteen sixty four, so when Chrome Dome was in full effect, and it features pilots who are ordered by a psychotic officer to launch an attack on the Soviet Union. And this is all done without the realization that the USSR had recently created a doomsday device designed to automatically deploy in the event of a nuclear conflict. The film is a great satire, well worth watching if you haven't seen it. But let's get back to the actual incident. So on January twenty fourth, nineteen sixty one, this crew were flying their nuclear armed B fifty two over North Carolina when the aircraft experienced a structural failure of the right wing, which quote resulted in two weapons separating from the aircraft during aircraft breakup at two thousand to ten thousand feet altitude end quote. One of those two weapons deployed a parachute and apart from some minor damage, descended without further incident. The other one plummeted to the earth and broke apart upon hitting the ground. It did not, however, explode, which is good because this happened over a farm in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The accident was a major one. Three of the eight person crew died in this accident. The military swept in did a thorough search for the weapon, specifically for the uranium core of the weapon, but despite a long search, they could not find it. According to the DoD quote, the Air Force subsequently purchased an easement requiring permission for anyone to dig there end quote. This is to help prevent someone from just unearthing a nuclear bomb, which seems like a reasonable precaution to me. According to the News Observer, which was a North Carolina paper, quote, seven of the eight arming, fusing and firing switches and devices in one bomb automatically activated. Only a crew controlled switch prevented a nuclear detonation end quote. Which is a big old woolf All right, So we are nearly done, and this time four whole years would pass before the next incident of a lost bomb, almost five years. In fact, this next incident happened on December fifth, nineteen sixty five. The DoD entry on this one is pretty brief, and in fact, i'll just read it out verbatim because it's very short. Quote. An A four aircraft loaded with one nuclear weapon rolled off the elevator of a US aircraft carrier and fell into the sea. The pilot, aircraft, and weapon were lost. The incident occurred more than five hundred miles from land end quote. Now, the A four in this case refers to a Douglas A four E Skyhawk. It's a light attack aircraft that obviously can carry various weapons, including nuclear armed weapons. Now we do have a few more details that emerged subsequently. The same nineteen sixty six letter that mentioned the Tybee bomb to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress also mentioned this incident. For one thing, that letter names the aircraft carrier as the USS Taekwonderoga and that the incident happened in quote two thy seven hundred fathoms of water end quote. A fathom is equal to two yards, so this means the seafloor was some three miles below. Further later details would reveal the location was in the Philippine Sea and the pilot who was lost was one Lieutenant junior grade Douglas Webster of the US Navy. Chief Petty Officer Delbert Mitchell detailed exactly what happened that day from his perspective in a blog post for the Naval History Magazine in twenty nineteen. Mitchell relates that he, as part of a guided missile crew, took part in an exercise to load and then the plan was unload a nuclear weapon onto this A four aircraft, and he wrote that it was a weapon with one megaton yield. That means this particular bomb had an explosive force equal to a million tons of TNT. So Webster entered the cockpit after they had loaded the bomb onto the aircraft, and the aircraft was pushed toward the aircraft elevator. Now, what happened next was the actual disaster. Plane directors were signaling for the pilot to set the brakes on the plane. It was rolling toward the elevator and it needed to stop. But apparently Webster was looking down and he didn't see them or hear them whistling to indicate that there was an emergency. So the plane kept rolling toward the elevator and crews attempted to set chocks on the wheels of the aircraft who were to force it to stop, but only one person was able to do it, so instead the plane pivoted, it turned, it hit the netting on the aircraft elevator and broke through, and then it toppled over head, over heels essentially and into the ocean. It landed on its top onto the ocean. In nineteen sixty six, when that letter was sent to Congress, this incident was not yet public because quote this subject is considered sensitive because of its potential impact upon visits of the Taekwonderoga and other warships to foreign ports end quote, and I can definitely see how the tragic loss of a pilot and an aircraft and a nuclear weapon might make the Taekwonderoga a little bit unwelcome in some parts of the world. In fact, the Navy did not acknowledge this accident until nineteen eighty nine, and at that point Japan had a pretty dramatic response, understandably so, to learning about the loss of this nuclear weapon, and they launched their own diplomatic inquiry into the incident. Now, the final Broken Arrow incident, in which the US military was unable to retrieve the nuclear weapon involved and put an asterisk behind final here. Actually, technically I guess this would be final because this does happen after the penultimate one. Anyway, this happened in the spring of nineteen sixty eight. This one's very tricky to cover compared to the other ones because the Department of Defense document that I keep referencing, the one that lists the thirty two incidents that happened between nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty. Remember, only six of those actually include incidents where the weapon was unrecoverable. Well, that documents entry on this particular incident says, quote Spring nineteen sixty eight at sea Atlantic details remain classified end quote. And that's it. But do a little digging, and that reveals that the incident likely refers to the sinking of the USS Scorpion, a nuclear powered submarine. So this was a submarine that also carried two new nuclear weapons. In late May of nineteen sixty eight, the Scorpion was lost. The crew aboard the Scorpion were assigned the duty of observing Soviet naval activities around the Azores region, and the last message from the Scorpion before tragedy struck indicated that the submarine was gaining on a Soviet submarine. The Scorpion was due to return to its home port in Virginia on May twenty seventh, but it did not arrive, and the Navy launched an investigation and a search, and eventually in October of nineteen sixty eight, remember it was lost in May, but October nineteen sixty eight, the Navy was able to locate part of the Scorpion's hull several hundred miles off the southwest of the Azores. And what exactly caused the Scorpion's destruction was unknown. What was known was that the loss meant that all hands on board a total of ninety nine crew members were also lost, and there were several hypotheses as to what could have caused the sinking. The prevailing theory was that a torpedo explosion inside the sub itself was the cause. That was a torpedo within the Scorpion that detonated for a reason that was undetermined. Whether it was an accident and malfunction, that was unknown, but that was the going hypothesis and it's truly truly awful, terrible loss. And it also meant that the two nuclear weapons that were aboard the Scorpion, now rested at the bottom of the Atlantic. The Navy has since conducted several surveys to monitor the area for signs of radioactive material over the many years that have passed, but it appears the weapons remained safely housed en dormant, and they're so far down that there's no easy or or practical way to retrieve them, so they've just stayed down there now. From what I can tell, that is that for the six incidents of nuclear weapons that were lost by the United States, however, there is another one that also happened in nineteen sixty eight. In fact, it happened in January nineteen sixty eight, so before the loss of the Scorpion. Now, the official record states that the four nuclear weapons involved in this incident were all destroyed. But let's go over what happened with detail. So we're talking January nineteen sixty eight, and a B fifty two from Plattsburg Air Force Base was flying near Thule Air Base in Greenland as part of the aforementioned Chrome Dome operation. So on January twenty first, nineteen sixty eight, a fire broke out inside this aircraft. Apparently caused by some stowed cushions catching fire after the crew had tried to put the aircraft's heater into overdrive to battle the frigid operating temperatures inside. Six of the seven crew members were able to eject to safety as the aircraft caught fire. One hand aboard did not make it. The aircraft, like I said, was carrying four nuclear weapons. Now, the Department of the Fence, in that document of the thirty two insidants says that all four weapons were destroyed in the fire, so that this does not count toward that six tally because the bombs, at least, according to the official account, were destroyed. Now, these weapons caused radioactive contamination within that area off the coast of Greenland, and the US, in partnership with Denmark, launched a cleanup operation that removed literally tons of contaminated materials and then transported those to the United States for disposal. For years, the United States maintained that all four of those weapons were destroyed, but Danish newspapers began to publish articles that said one of the four weapons was unaccounted for that the cleanup effort indicated that you know, just based upon the amount that they were encountering, and how much uranium versus plutonium they were encountering, that only three of the weapons had been destroyed, and that the secondary charge of the fourth weapon had not and was missing. So, like I said, going by the official count isn't necessarily the most accurate approach, but you know, it's pretty hard to get firm information on this stuff for understandable reasons. I also think it's a good idea to point out that other nations have also lost nuclear weapons in various incidents over the years. The United States is not alone in this. The Soviet Union in particular has lost a few, mostly due to the loss of nuclear armed submarines in various places around the world. Other nations have surely lost some as well, though we don't exactly have readily available documentation for them. Again, no one super eager to talk about this stuff because obviously there's potential for things like international incidents and stuff and panic. It is part and parcel with the nuclear age. So yeah, these are the ones that we in the United States know about due to the fact that certain documents have been declassified and the Freedom of Information Act has allowed access to certain documents. Again that mention these incidents. Otherwise we likely wouldn't know about this either. Scary stuff. No telling what we don't know. I mean, some people surely know it, but I don't. But yeah, I thought it would be good to kind of revisit this again, inspired by the Fallout series. I guess the silver lining for all this is that, as devastating as nuclear weapons are, if you are not like, within a few miles of the blast zone and you're very careful, then you're not gonna end up being turned into a ghoul or a super mutant. You're not gonna end up being, you know, wandering a barren wasteland and constructing buildings out of scrap material. That appears to just be the realm of post apocalyptic science fiction films, but it's not great anyway. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you're all well. I hope you are reasonably avoiding radioactive areas. You know that's important, And I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm the host Job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So here on tech Stuff, we've actually covered the subject of nuclear weapons a few times. So way back on April fourth, twenty twelve, Chris Pollette, my original co host, and I we did an episode on how nuclear weapons work. I'm probably going to go over some of that same material again in this one, but you know, it's been more than a decade, so hopefully that's okay. In twenty seventeen, I did an episode titled Close but No Nuclear War about the handful of times circumstances could have precipitated into what we in the eighties would have referred to as the Big One. But thankfully, cooler heads prevailed we did not have a nuclear war, and I got to thinking about nuclear weapons again because I, like a lot of other people, watched the Fallout streaming series. Now, I've played a couple of the Fallout games, a few of them in fact, and I really enjoy them. There's some of my favorite games, particularly Fallout New Vegas, which I think for a lot of people is the favorite. And then I was curious about the streaming series and no spoilers, But overall, I really enjoyed the adaptation. It's not a direct adaptation of any particular game, though it does contain elements that are found in several of the other games, and I thought that generally speaking, they did a really good job with it. I got a few quibbles, but you know, nothing major. Now. The entire setting for the Fallout series, it's a world that's trying to rebuild itself after a nuclear war that this nuclear war had happened like two hundred years in the past, and this is the fallout of that conflict that you are thrust into. And it got me thinking about nuclear weapons. So today I want to talk about lost nuclear weapons. So we're going to talk about the half dozen times the United States, you know, misplaced a nuclear bomb and wasn't able to get it back, which you know, that's an awful lot of times when you're talking about weapons capable of truly massive amounts of destruction. And also, this would just be six incidents that we know about. In fact, I'll end the episode with one that is disputed as a potential seventh. Now, I'm not saying that there are a ton more than six incidents in which the United States lost a nuclear weapon and was unable to retrieve it. I have no way of knowing that it could be that there's more. It could be that six or seven is exactly how many there are. It is possible, though, I think that the public hasn't learned about certain cases that may have happened. I mean, it's turns out the United States military and the Department of Defense isn't super eager to spread information about lost nuclear weapons for reasons that are both I think totally legitimate and some that are probably not. Now, there have been way more than just six accidents with nuclear weapons. If we're talking about, you know, big accidents, there have been at least thirty two. That's just the officially acknowledged ones. In the United States. We have this charming little name for incidents in which essentially the United States loses control of a nuclear weapon, and that nickname is called broken Arrow. That nickname insisted long before John Travolta and Christian Slater made a movie based on the premise of a thermonuclear weapon going walk about Hands up if you actually remember that film, it's one that I have seen. I would say that as action films go, it's not great. It's not terrible, but you know, not great. Now, before we get into the whip sees, let's talk a little bit about how nuclear weapons actually work from a very high level, and in some ways, at least an initial part of a nuclear weapon detonation is has got some similarities to the way that nuclear fission power plants work. Now, obviously with a power plant, we want to have a nuclear reaction that is really well controlled. And in nuclear weapons, the whole goal is to kind of get the sucker to go into a chain reaction that you know, goes well, not ballistic, that's the wrong the wrong word, but you know, out of control. Nuclear weapons, however, do not just use fission. That's just part of it, at least for modern thermonuclear weapons. That's not the whole entirety of the explosion. Detonating a nuclear weapon these days actually involves three explosive processes. So you got your bog standard chemical based explosives, just your regular non nuclear explosives. This is what kind of initiates the whole sequence of events and the purpose of these explosives is not to blow up the nuclear material. It's to compress it, to put intense pressure on that material and compact it down in order to get to what we call critical mass. So the nuclear material that is typically in nuclear weapons is either highly enriched uranium, like a more than ninety percent content of uranium two thirty five, for example, or plutonium more than ninety three percent plutonium two thirty nine. Now, the special thing about these particular atoms, you two thirty five andonium two thirty nine, is that they belong to a subset of atoms that will break apart under certain circumstances. Sometimes they decay on their own and they break apart, but they can also be induced to break apart. They are fissile, in other words, because they can undergo fission, they can split. Now, not all fissile atoms will cause a chain reaction, but uranium two five and plutonium two thirty nine totes can. And when they are induced to break apart, these atoms don't just split into smaller atoms. They also release a tremendous amount of energy. You know, stuff like X rays and gamma rays. You get a ton of light and heat. They also shoot out excess neutrons. Now, if you've got a mass of this stuff and those atoms are packed close enough together, then some of these escaping neutrons can collide with these other atoms and then induce the exact same reaction. Those atoms will then split apart, then they'll release neutrons. So again, if the material is packed closely enough, these neutrons can start this chain reaction, and that's what makes this escalate very quickly. If the material is not very close together, then the neutrons can miss the other atoms, and you know, you will get a release of energy, but it'll be a limited release. You won't get this chain reaction. That's really the devast aiding part of nuclear weapons. So it's a very specific approach to weaponizing this energy. You know, that chain reaction, that runaway reaction is really what you want to really cause massive destruction. Now, the very first nuclear weapons, which really the atomic weapons is what we would really call them. They relied solely on fission to release destructive energy upon a target. You add Little Boy, which was the nickname for the first such atomic bomb, and Little Boy had a hollow cylinder made from uranium two thirty five that upon detonation of a charge explosive would then shoot toward a target plug of U two thirty five. So you can think of it like a target and a bullet. So this little bullet of you two thirty five gets shot to collide with a target of U two thirty five. Now, separately, these two masses of uranium two thirty five did not have enough mass to maintain fission, but upon on collision, the two would form critical mass that could maintain this fission reaction. Now, the second bomb, fat Man, did not use uranium two thirty five. It used plutonium. The scientists who are working on fat Man could not get the gun type method that worked for uranium two thirty five based bombs to work with plutonium, so they had to come up with something else. In fact, originally the idea was that there was going to be a thin Man bomb because it would use this gun approach that the Little Boy did. But because they could not get that to work, they had to go with explosives, conventional explosives that would compress the plutonium in order to initiate the fission chain reaction. That implosion explosive charge meant that the bomb had to be much larger than was anticipated originally when they want to do the gun method. Thus you get fat Man because it's bigger around. The plutonium atoms would get squeezed together tightly enough to reach critical mass, and then you could get the same sort of fission reaction. However, as I mentioned, modern nuclear weapons also have a fusion component to them. Fusion is the atomic process of two lighter atoms fusing together to make a heavier atom. This is what goes on in the Sun in which hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. So the fission reaction in a modern thermonuclear weapon can also be called the primary blast or primary charge, and the fusion component is the secondary charge. So the lighter atoms used for fusion are typically hydrogen and hydrogen isotopes. And just to be clear, the actual process inside and exploding thermonuclear device gets way more complicated than what I'm covering here. There are different elements in both the primary and secondary charges, but that would require a full episode by itself. In fact, we did one back in twenty twelve, so we've spent enough time on the basics of how these bombs work. Now we do have to talk about what happens when these bombs detonate. Now, I mentioned that fission and fusion as well will release an enormous amount of energy. The energy takes lots of different forms. We're talking heat and light and radiation. And the blast creates an incredible shock wave, So you get this massive increase in air pressure that's like a wrecking ball slamming into everything outward. The explosion creates this enormous fireball, and that fireball is about as hot as the surface of the Sun is initially. Remember again, fusion is how the Sun shines, So this is like igniting a miniature sun in Earth's atmosphere, and that heat vaporizes everything within that fireball and pushes it upward into the atmosphere, and that stuff forms the iconic mushroom cloud that we associate with a nuclear explosion. Now, among all that stuff is radioactive material from the bomb itself, and this kind of mixes and bonds with other things that are vaporized in that explosion. These tiny particles condense and we end up with radioactive dust that eventually is heavy enough to start to fall back to earth. This is the so called fallout. It's the stuff that can contaminate things like soil and water and cause problems for ages. Now, obviously we're talking tremendous immediate destructive power, not to mention the problems of dealing with radioactive material that will remain dangerous. Most of it actually kind of degrades fairly rapidly, like within a couple of weeks you get down to survivable conditions. There's this thing called the seven ten rule that means the amount of radiation reduces tenfold for every sevenfold increase in time. So the really dangerous stuff that can be decreased dramatically within a few hours to a day, like within a day, fallout is going to give off more than eighty percent of its inner energy, and within again two weeks you're down to you know, survivable ambient radiation. Now, to be clear, radioactive contamination is not immediately life threatening too. Like again we have this perception that this is all a death sentence immediately. That's not necessarily the case. One thing that can you can do if you were, you know, near a nuclear blast, not obviously outside of the blast zone itself, because if you're near that then that's that's game over, right. If you're a few miles out, however, well, you can decontaminate yourself. You can strip off the you know, whatever clothing you were wearing when you were exposed to the nuclear dust, and you can take a shower with mild soap and and you can decontaminate yourself. Of course, it is hard to figure out a way to do all this without tracking a radiated dust into the area where you're taking your shower, but that actually could be a pretty effective way to get rid of any radioactive material that has settled on you, which gives a bit of a different picture than what we get with fallout, right, in which the world remains this radioactive wasteland two hundred years after the conflict. And you know, radiation is this invisible thing, this destructive, invisible thing, and it's really scary. And in fact, one of the really big challenges that experts have identified as far as nuclear weapons go is how do you communicate to the public what to do in the wake of a nuclear event, whether it's an accident or an attack or whatever, so that folks don't go and make the problem even worse. And to be clear, a nuclear blast is truly terrifying. It's awful. And again, if you are closer, like within a few miles of the blast zone, your chances of survival are incredibly small. But on the flip side, it is different from the way it's depicted in shows and games like Fallout. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to start talking about the actual Broken Arrow events and why these remain these kind of scary incidents that can every few years come back and fire up imaginations and make people really anxious. That's not my goal, but we are going to talk about these things. First though, Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All Right, We're going to now talk about the broken Arrow events in which some sort of misha involving at least one nuclear weapon have happened, or, as defined by the Department of Defense, an incident in which at least one of the following things occurred. And I'm quoting from a declassified document from nineteen eighty one here, So here are the parameters for a broken Arrow event. Accidental or unauthorized launching, firing, or use by US forces or supported allied forces of a nuclear capable weapon system which could create the risk of an outbreak or war. Nuclear detonation, that one seems like it's no brainer, right, Non nuclear detonation or burning of a nuclear weapon or radioactive weapon component, including a fully assembled nuclear weapon, an unassembled nuclear weapon or radioactive nuclear weapon component, radioactive contamination, seizure, theft or loss of a nuclear weapon or radioactive nuclear weapon component, including jettisoning, public hazard actual or implied. Those are the parameters. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there have been thirty two of these on record, with six incidents in which the US of A has been unable to retrieve the loss nuclear weapon. And again, this is the Pentagon's official tally. I have no way of knowing if that number is actually accurate. In fact, a letter from the Defense Atomic Support Agency, which has since evolved into the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, and both of these are part of the overall Department of Defense, it lists more than two hundred and ten pages worth of accidents and incidents between the years nineteen fifty seven and nineteen sixty seven alone, just a little more than a decade here. But to be clear, some of these cases are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. Incidents involving improper handling or transportation are on there, for example, So I guess it really comes down to how you define a big problem. Also, these thirty two incidents that are detailed in this Department of Defense document happened between nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty, and again that makes you wonder have there been any more that have happened in the forty plus years since. However, we also have to acknowledge that there has been a massive change in the technology around nuclear weapons in that time because in the old days, you know, when we talked about nuclear weapons, we were talking about bomb that would be delivered by an aircraft or maybe a little later by a submarine. These days, we have intercontinental ballistic missiles and such, so it's a different story and there are fewer opportunities to misplace a bomb, although a nuclear armed submarine could still be such an incident. So we're going to talk about the six times America lost a nuclear weapon and couldn't get it back. And first up is the very first of the incidents listed in that declassified letter. So the letter starts with an incident in which the bomb was not recoverable. It happened on February thirteenth, nineteen fifty, so a day before Valentine's Day. Talk about a bummer. A crew was piloting a B thirty six bomber as part of a simulated combat mission. They were flying from an Air Force base in North Starborough, Alaska. They were headed all the way to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, which is a journey that's like three thousand miles more than that. So, according to the the weapon carried by the crew had a quote unquote dummy capsule in it, so, in other words, it lacked the actual nuclear core needed to make it a viable thermonuclear weapon. It did still have at least some radioactive material inside it, just not like the two charges needed to create the big fusion boom. Six hours into the flight, the aircraft started to have some pretty serious problems, big enough to force the crew to shut down three of the B thirty six's engines. Now, the B thirty six had a ton of engines, Like initially the earliest B thirty six models had just six piston engines driving propellers, right, but you had six of them, so shutting down three you still have half of your engines left. Later on, they had four jet engines added to it as well, so like the later B thirty six aircraft were ten engine planes. That's kind of incredible. Now, on top of these engine problems, the aircraft also had issues with ice building up on the plane's wings, and the aircraft was at twelve thousand feet altitude, and the military determined that the conditions were beyond risky considering the presence of a nuclear weapon on board the aircraft, So the call was made for the aircraft to deviate from its flight path, to fly out over the Pacific Ocean and to drop the bomb with the dummy capsule at eight thousand feet. Now, according to the declassified letter quote, a bright flash occurred on impact, followed by a sound and shockwave. Only the weapons high explosive material detonated the crew aboard. The aircraft bailed out over Princess Royal Island, and the aircraft itself crashed on Vancouver Island. And that is our first lost bomb out of the way. The second time America lost a nuclear bomb was on March tenth, nineteen fifty six. That we apparently went six whole years without another totally lost bomb is nice because, as we will soon see, sometimes we were looking at incidents that were happening a year or two apart, or sometimes in the same year. Anyway, a group of four aircraft, including a B forty seven Stratojet, were en route from McDill Air Force Base in Florida to quote and overseas air base end quote which overseas airbase, I honestly don't know. It's not mentioned in the Department of Defense document. Anyway. The B forty seven carried quote two nuclear capsules in carrying cases in the quote, and that sounds a lot like a suitcase bomb, right, But according to the DoD, a nuclear detonation of this stuff was impossible, like it did not have the initial charges that would work in order to actually create a nuclear bomb, but it was the material that could be used inside a nuclear weapon. So I guess it's a good thing that it wasn't like a bomb raay to explode or anything. And tragically the aircraft and its crew were lost above the terranean c The accident happened as the aircraft were all changing altitude because they had to go through a mid air refueling operation, so they had been at a cruising altitude much higher up, but in order to refuel, they needed to descend to fourteen thousand feet between them, and fourteen thousand feet was a solid cloud formation, according to the document, so descending through this meant that your visibility was obviously really limited. The base of the clouds was somewhere at the altitude of fourteen thousand, five hundred feet. The B forty seven, carrying this case filled with nuclear capsules, never made contact with the refueling tanker, and despite extensive searches, the military was not able to locate the vehicle or the crew piloting it, or, for that matter, the carrying case with the nuclear capsules inside of it. So that's lost. Bomb number two. Next up, we have an incident that's very close to home for me, well sort of close to home for me. It is the so called Tybee bomb, which happened two years after the incident we just talked about. On February fifth, nineteen fifty eight, a B forty seven took off from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, and it was on a simulated combat mission. The B forty seven carried a nuclear weapon that, according to the DoD did not contain a nuclear capsule inside of it, which you know, that's a good thing, but the weapon still had plenty of conventional explosives which would have caused an issue right like cause again you've got the chemical based explosives in there too. And as it turned out, the story that the bomb only carried a dummy trigger would later be disputed, and it was said that in fact, the bomb aboard the B forty seven was, as Emperor Palpatine of Star Wars Fame would say, fully operational. So around three point thirty in the morning, while flying over coastal Georgia, calamity struck. A pilot flying an F eighty six Saber Jet fighter was descending from a higher altitude and did not see the B forty seven flying beneath him, Like he wasn't showing up on his radar. He didn't notice it, and so he descends and collides with the B forty seven. This is like one of those crazy accidents, like it really required a wild coincidence for this to happen. But these two aircraft did collide, and Lieutenant Clarence Stewart, who was the pilot of the Saber Jet, was able to eject from his vehicle and he safely landed in a swamp, which, you know, not the best place to land if you're not really a big fan of leeches and snapping turtles and snakes and the occasional alligator, all of which are native to this part of Georgia, but still is a good ending for him considering that one of the wings of his saber Jet got completely ripped off, so the fact that he was able to eject and land safely was a pretty phenomenal thing. The B forty seven was in slightly better shape than the saber Jet, but it was still very damaged. So the pilot attempted to make an emergency landing at Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia, but he was not able to get the air speed of the aircraft down enough to make us safe landing, so the call was made to jettison the bomb before attempting a landing in order to avoid having a high explosive going off in an American Air Force base. So the pilot was able to jettison the bomb off the coast of Tybee Island, which again is off coastal Georgia, And I've been to Tybee Island several times in fact. But yeah, they dropped the bomb not too far from where the Savannah River lets out, and the bomb sank it to the ocean, and the Department of Defense wasn't exactly sure where it landed. And fortunately the bomb did not detonate. And that really is fortunate because in nineteen ninety four, a nearly thirty year old document that was submitted to Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was declassified. So it was declassified in ninety four. The actual document dated from nineteen sixty six, and in this nineteen sixty six letter, the claim was that the bomb that was dropped off Tybee in fact did have a nuclear capsule inside of it, that the DoD was not being truthful when it said that there was no nuclear capability of the weapon, that in fact, it had contained plutonium and was capable of full detonation. So there's this dispute here between that nineteen sixty six letter from the Secretary of Defense that was sent to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and the official documentation from the Department of Defense about the thirty two Broken Arrow incidents. So the military searched the area for the bomb for a couple of months, but they weren't able to track down this missing nuclear weapon. So the question is there a functional well probably not functional now, but was there a functional nuclear weapon buried in the silt off the coast of Tybee Island, complete with a plutonium capsule? And I don't know the answer to that, but, boy, Hettie, that is scary. The Navy did do several surveys to make sure that there wasn't any signs of plutonium leaking out of this bomb, and they didn't find anything. There was one point where they found an area of higher radiation than expected, and at first the thought was they had detected the actual location of the bomb itself, but upon further investigation, they found that the radiation was actually naturally occurring. It was from minerals that were on the ocean bed, and it wasn't byproducts of a thermonuclear device itself. So it still remains a mystery as to exactly where that bomb is. Okay, we've got three of those bombs covered already. We've got three more plus a bonus to go. So before we get to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, So next up, we have an accident that happened three years after the Tybee bomb incident. So this one happened in nineteen sixty one. On January twenty fourth of nineteen sixty one, a B fifty two aircraft was on an airborne alert mission. And you might owe my drugiz one da what that means. Well, back in the day, and by that I mean most of the nineteen sixties, America had this practice of having nuclear armed B fifty two bombers in the air above North America at all times. So there were always a squadron of these aircraft flying routes over North America. The idea was that these aircraft could be sent to drop bombs on the Soviet Union, you know, if things kind of took a turn for the worst. So the Cold War sure was fun to lift through, y'all. No, granted, I was. I was born after the era of the B fifty twos. For me, it was all intercondinental ballistic missiles. Anyway. Crews would operate these B fifty two aircraft as part of a project. They got the super fun nickname Operation Chrome Dome because it's a lot easier to deal with the possibility of existential destruction if you've got a fun nickname for it. So the operation always makes me think of the Stanley Kubrick film Doctor Strangelove aka How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. That film came out nineteen sixty four, so when Chrome Dome was in full effect, and it features pilots who are ordered by a psychotic officer to launch an attack on the Soviet Union. And this is all done without the realization that the USSR had recently created a doomsday device designed to automatically deploy in the event of a nuclear conflict. The film is a great satire, well worth watching if you haven't seen it. But let's get back to the actual incident. So on January twenty fourth, nineteen sixty one, this crew were flying their nuclear armed B fifty two over North Carolina when the aircraft experienced a structural failure of the right wing, which quote resulted in two weapons separating from the aircraft during aircraft breakup at two thousand to ten thousand feet altitude end quote. One of those two weapons deployed a parachute and apart from some minor damage, descended without further incident. The other one plummeted to the earth and broke apart upon hitting the ground. It did not, however, explode, which is good because this happened over a farm in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The accident was a major one. Three of the eight person crew died in this accident. The military swept in did a thorough search for the weapon, specifically for the uranium core of the weapon, but despite a long search, they could not find it. According to the DoD quote, the Air Force subsequently purchased an easement requiring permission for anyone to dig there end quote. This is to help prevent someone from just unearthing a nuclear bomb, which seems like a reasonable precaution to me. According to the News Observer, which was a North Carolina paper, quote, seven of the eight arming, fusing and firing switches and devices in one bomb automatically activated. Only a crew controlled switch prevented a nuclear detonation end quote. Which is a big old woolf All right, So we are nearly done, and this time four whole years would pass before the next incident of a lost bomb, almost five years. In fact, this next incident happened on December fifth, nineteen sixty five. The DoD entry on this one is pretty brief, and in fact, i'll just read it out verbatim because it's very short. Quote. An A four aircraft loaded with one nuclear weapon rolled off the elevator of a US aircraft carrier and fell into the sea. The pilot, aircraft, and weapon were lost. The incident occurred more than five hundred miles from land end quote. Now, the A four in this case refers to a Douglas A four E Skyhawk. It's a light attack aircraft that obviously can carry various weapons, including nuclear armed weapons. Now we do have a few more details that emerged subsequently. The same nineteen sixty six letter that mentioned the Tybee bomb to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in Congress also mentioned this incident. For one thing, that letter names the aircraft carrier as the USS Taekwonderoga and that the incident happened in quote two thy seven hundred fathoms of water end quote. A fathom is equal to two yards, so this means the seafloor was some three miles below. Further later details would reveal the location was in the Philippine Sea and the pilot who was lost was one Lieutenant junior grade Douglas Webster of the US Navy. Chief Petty Officer Delbert Mitchell detailed exactly what happened that day from his perspective in a blog post for the Naval History Magazine in twenty nineteen. Mitchell relates that he, as part of a guided missile crew, took part in an exercise to load and then the plan was unload a nuclear weapon onto this A four aircraft, and he wrote that it was a weapon with one megaton yield. That means this particular bomb had an explosive force equal to a million tons of TNT. So Webster entered the cockpit after they had loaded the bomb onto the aircraft, and the aircraft was pushed toward the aircraft elevator. Now, what happened next was the actual disaster. Plane directors were signaling for the pilot to set the brakes on the plane. It was rolling toward the elevator and it needed to stop. But apparently Webster was looking down and he didn't see them or hear them whistling to indicate that there was an emergency. So the plane kept rolling toward the elevator and crews attempted to set chocks on the wheels of the aircraft who were to force it to stop, but only one person was able to do it, so instead the plane pivoted, it turned, it hit the netting on the aircraft elevator and broke through, and then it toppled over head, over heels essentially and into the ocean. It landed on its top onto the ocean. In nineteen sixty six, when that letter was sent to Congress, this incident was not yet public because quote this subject is considered sensitive because of its potential impact upon visits of the Taekwonderoga and other warships to foreign ports end quote, and I can definitely see how the tragic loss of a pilot and an aircraft and a nuclear weapon might make the Taekwonderoga a little bit unwelcome in some parts of the world. In fact, the Navy did not acknowledge this accident until nineteen eighty nine, and at that point Japan had a pretty dramatic response, understandably so, to learning about the loss of this nuclear weapon, and they launched their own diplomatic inquiry into the incident. Now, the final Broken Arrow incident, in which the US military was unable to retrieve the nuclear weapon involved and put an asterisk behind final here. Actually, technically I guess this would be final because this does happen after the penultimate one. Anyway, this happened in the spring of nineteen sixty eight. This one's very tricky to cover compared to the other ones because the Department of Defense document that I keep referencing, the one that lists the thirty two incidents that happened between nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty. Remember, only six of those actually include incidents where the weapon was unrecoverable. Well, that documents entry on this particular incident says, quote Spring nineteen sixty eight at sea Atlantic details remain classified end quote. And that's it. But do a little digging, and that reveals that the incident likely refers to the sinking of the USS Scorpion, a nuclear powered submarine. So this was a submarine that also carried two new nuclear weapons. In late May of nineteen sixty eight, the Scorpion was lost. The crew aboard the Scorpion were assigned the duty of observing Soviet naval activities around the Azores region, and the last message from the Scorpion before tragedy struck indicated that the submarine was gaining on a Soviet submarine. The Scorpion was due to return to its home port in Virginia on May twenty seventh, but it did not arrive, and the Navy launched an investigation and a search, and eventually in October of nineteen sixty eight, remember it was lost in May, but October nineteen sixty eight, the Navy was able to locate part of the Scorpion's hull several hundred miles off the southwest of the Azores. And what exactly caused the Scorpion's destruction was unknown. What was known was that the loss meant that all hands on board a total of ninety nine crew members were also lost, and there were several hypotheses as to what could have caused the sinking. The prevailing theory was that a torpedo explosion inside the sub itself was the cause. That was a torpedo within the Scorpion that detonated for a reason that was undetermined. Whether it was an accident and malfunction, that was unknown, but that was the going hypothesis and it's truly truly awful, terrible loss. And it also meant that the two nuclear weapons that were aboard the Scorpion, now rested at the bottom of the Atlantic. The Navy has since conducted several surveys to monitor the area for signs of radioactive material over the many years that have passed, but it appears the weapons remained safely housed en dormant, and they're so far down that there's no easy or or practical way to retrieve them, so they've just stayed down there now. From what I can tell, that is that for the six incidents of nuclear weapons that were lost by the United States, however, there is another one that also happened in nineteen sixty eight. In fact, it happened in January nineteen sixty eight, so before the loss of the Scorpion. Now, the official record states that the four nuclear weapons involved in this incident were all destroyed. But let's go over what happened with detail. So we're talking January nineteen sixty eight, and a B fifty two from Plattsburg Air Force Base was flying near Thule Air Base in Greenland as part of the aforementioned Chrome Dome operation. So on January twenty first, nineteen sixty eight, a fire broke out inside this aircraft. Apparently caused by some stowed cushions catching fire after the crew had tried to put the aircraft's heater into overdrive to battle the frigid operating temperatures inside. Six of the seven crew members were able to eject to safety as the aircraft caught fire. One hand aboard did not make it. The aircraft, like I said, was carrying four nuclear weapons. Now, the Department of the Fence, in that document of the thirty two insidants says that all four weapons were destroyed in the fire, so that this does not count toward that six tally because the bombs, at least, according to the official account, were destroyed. Now, these weapons caused radioactive contamination within that area off the coast of Greenland, and the US, in partnership with Denmark, launched a cleanup operation that removed literally tons of contaminated materials and then transported those to the United States for disposal. For years, the United States maintained that all four of those weapons were destroyed, but Danish newspapers began to publish articles that said one of the four weapons was unaccounted for that the cleanup effort indicated that you know, just based upon the amount that they were encountering, and how much uranium versus plutonium they were encountering, that only three of the weapons had been destroyed, and that the secondary charge of the fourth weapon had not and was missing. So, like I said, going by the official count isn't necessarily the most accurate approach, but you know, it's pretty hard to get firm information on this stuff for understandable reasons. I also think it's a good idea to point out that other nations have also lost nuclear weapons in various incidents over the years. The United States is not alone in this. The Soviet Union in particular has lost a few, mostly due to the loss of nuclear armed submarines in various places around the world. Other nations have surely lost some as well, though we don't exactly have readily available documentation for them. Again, no one super eager to talk about this stuff because obviously there's potential for things like international incidents and stuff and panic. It is part and parcel with the nuclear age. So yeah, these are the ones that we in the United States know about due to the fact that certain documents have been declassified and the Freedom of Information Act has allowed access to certain documents. Again that mention these incidents. Otherwise we likely wouldn't know about this either. Scary stuff. No telling what we don't know. I mean, some people surely know it, but I don't. But yeah, I thought it would be good to kind of revisit this again, inspired by the Fallout series. I guess the silver lining for all this is that, as devastating as nuclear weapons are, if you are not like, within a few miles of the blast zone and you're very careful, then you're not gonna end up being turned into a ghoul or a super mutant. You're not gonna end up being, you know, wandering a barren wasteland and constructing buildings out of scrap material. That appears to just be the realm of post apocalyptic science fiction films, but it's not great anyway. That's it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you're all well. I hope you are reasonably avoiding radioactive areas. You know that's important, And I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.