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Umm, no, not really

Two nuclear bombs exploded in 1966 after US aircraft involved in mid-air collision over Palomares in Almería

I think we’d have noticed if they had.

Of the four 1.5 megatonne nuclear bombs the B-52 was carrying, three fell to Earth, of which two exploded as conventional bombs, spreading radioactive debris over a wide area, while the fourth landed in the sea. It was recovered 80 days later.

The triggers went off, perhaps, but the nuclear bombs did not.

15 thoughts on “Umm, no, not really”

  1. It could still have been a nuclear fizzle rather than the high explosive bang. Early warheads were invariably not nuclear safe in the advent accidental damage. The US later developed the “one-point safety” standard for all of its nuclear weapons. This standard dictates that the probability of achieving a nuclear yield greater than four pounds of TNT must not exceed one in a million for any event involving the initiation of the warhead’s high explosive at a single point on its periphery.

  2. With all that plutonium kicking about, they could build their own little power station. Or flog it to some Jihadist.

    The Yanks were losing nukes left right and centre in the 1950s and 60s. Didn’t one accidentally go off in Alaska ?

  3. Nuclear weapons are extremely hard to get an atomic bang out of. Why it took the Manhattan Project. Palomares didn’t even produce a fizzle. Just a big clear up needed.
    But it is great fun telling tourists this story. After they’ve holidayed a couple of weeks at Roquetas de Mar. Especially if you’re insisting they keep some considerable distance.

  4. From a 1990s action movie (starring John Travolta as a Bad Guy, directed in Hong Kong style by John Woo): “I’m not sure what worries me more, sir. That we’ve lost a nuclear weapon… or that we do it so often we have a codeword for it.”

    Back in the days when nuclear arsenals were in the tens of thousands, and there were standing alerts ready to unleash retaliatory Armageddon in “minutes, very few” – including, for the USAF, continuous airborne alert with nuclear-armed bombers loitering over the oceans, ready to dash for their SIOP targets at the drop of a microphone, there was a lot more opportunity for accidents, errors and problems.

    The USN has a nuclear weapon that they insist is not “lost”: the one-megaton B43, the A-4E Skyhawk it was attached to, and the pilot in the cockpit all went off the flight deck of the USS Ticonderoga into the Pacific in 1965 and have never been found or recovered. However, strictly speaking the pilot (Lieutenant j.g. Douglas M. Webster USN) signed for the weapon and still has custody of it…

  5. I’m impressed that a Skyhawk can carry a nuke. As the Argies showed us, it was quite an aircraft.

    “Broken Arrow” is the codeword for a missing Bomb. If one can put up with Christian Slater it is a rollickingly fun film. Also has the immortal line uttered by JT
    “Please do not shoot at the thermonuclear devices !”

  6. Ah, that would explain all those Spanish mutants we read about so often. And, come to think of it, bloke in spain.

  7. I think we’d have noticed even a ground blast 1000 times the force of the Hiroshima drop. That kind of Bang tends to leave a mark..

    It also would have made it literally impossible to have a second blast..
    The first detonation would have vaporised any other bombs still dropping along with anything within a mile or so.
    With, of course, a bit more widespread contamination than that bit of Local Glow…

    So yeah… nice story, no bikkie.

  8. Bloke in the Fourth Reich

    Jason Lynch,

    Lieutenant j.g. Douglas M. Webster USN, or rather his remains, may well still have custody of the bomb, but as he has been AWOL for almost 60 years, the US Navy certainly does not have custody of the bomb!

  9. Ottokring,

    The Skyhawk – a.k.a. “Scooter” or “Heinemann’s Hot Rod” – was designed purely as a nuclear strike platform: “one aircraft, one pilot, one bomb, one way”. Hence the exaggeratedly spindly landing gear, giving it the clearance to carry one of the thermonuclear weapons of the day on the centreline.

    A factor causing misunderstandings in 1982, was that when asked for “strike range of the A-4 Skyhawk”, Defence Intelligence looked up a figure of some 700 nautical miles: which was two external tanks, a hydrogen bomb, and a one-way trip (since in an all-out game of Global Thermonuclear War the carrier the Skyhawk launched from, was likely to be radioactive debris on the seabed by the time the Skyhawks reached their targets) – this led to the Task Force carriers poising further East than was, with hindsight, ideal.

    But the early Skyhawk design was a stripped-down thing of beauty, with Heinemann pointing out that “the component you don’t fit, can’t break” and keeping it light, simple and efficient for its task (which also allowed a lot of design growth as missions, tasks and requirements evolved).

    One wry point of humour was the design of the vertical stabiliser; the original, conventional design on the first prototype suffered from vibration issues, bad enough that the metal skin cracked and peeled away in flight. Heinemann hastily sketched an inside-out modification with a central panel with external stiffening ribs, instead of the skin going over the internal ribs, which fixed the problem for initial flight testing and allowed time to find a better solution.

    Yes, you guessed it: twenty-five years later in 1979, the last of 2,960 A-4 Skyhawks was built and delivered to the US Marine Corps, with the same inside-out vertical stabiliser still there.

  10. A bit of technical stuff:

    A “warhead” is a part of a self-propelled missile, the bit that goes BANG either triggerd by a proximity of a onctact fuse.

    A “bomb” is essentially a dumb beast that is the thing and the whole of the thing and doesn not have/is not a “warhead”. Sure, these days it may be guided but it still relies on gravity for final stage delivery to the target.

    In simple terms, an atomic weapon (bomb or missile) is a composite creature. The first stage is a conventional explosion that compresses the nuclear material into a critical mass to create the nuclear bang. Which it is why, unless the weapon was fully armed or is damaged it is possible for it to explode without a resultant mushroom cloud.

    As for a Lt jg being “in charge” of a nuclear weapon, standard practice in any flying service is that the captain of an aircraft signs before flight for it and any thing it may be carrying – the same in civilian aviation.

  11. “Please do not shoot at the thermonuclear devices !”

    Not a bad move, though worth watching for Travoltas delivery of that line alone

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