The lost nuclear bombs that no one can find
Hey, mistakes happen!
The lost nuclear bombs that no one can find
The US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located – they're still out there to this day. How did this happen? Where could they be? And will we ever find them?
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In fact, the Palomares incident is not the only time a nuclear weapon has been misplaced. There have been at least 32 so-called "broken arrow" accidents – those involving these catastrophically destructive, earth-flattening devices – since 1950. In many cases, the weapons were dropped by mistake or jettisoned during an emergency, then later recovered. But three US bombs have gone missing altogether – they're still out there to this day, lurking in swamps, fields and oceans across the planet.
"We mostly know about the American cases," says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-proliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies, California. He explains that the full list only emerged when a summary prepared by the US Department of Defense was declassified in the 1980s.
Many occurred during the Cold War, when the nation teetered on the precipice of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) with the Soviet Union – and consequently kept airplanes armed with nuclear weapons in the sky at all times from 1960 to 1968, in an operation known as Chrome Dome.
"We don't know as much about other countries. We don't really know anything about the United Kingdom or France, or Russia or China," says Lewis. "So I don't think we have anything like a full accounting."
The Soviet Union's nuclear past is particularly murky – it had amassed a stockpile of 45,000 nuclear weapons as of 1986. There are known cases where the country lost nuclear bombs that have never been retrieved, but unlike with the US incidents, they all occurred on submarines and their locations are known, if inaccessible.
