Incidents with nuclear weapons in the USSR. Pandora's box: where and how many nuclear charges did the military lose? The United States lost an atomic bomb off the coast of Greenland

According to new declassified data, the USSR and the West were terrifyingly close to using nuclear weapons due to a computer glitch caused by a faulty component worth just 46 cents. Declassified documents testify to more than 1,000 accidents since the 70-80s, which occurred due to the bungling of American military personnel.

Including fires, explosions and accidental bombings that could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The world was on the brink of nuclear war in 1979, when the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado reported on a massive strike from the USSR.

The computer screens at the top-secret base were filled with dots indicating that Moscow had launched and the US was ready to strike back. The return launch was canceled at the last minute - after a thorough investigation and verification of data using other radars. If the US had reacted and struck at the Soviet Union, World War III would have been inevitable.

In another incident, caused by a malfunction of the American early warning system, the US detected the launch of hundreds of Soviet missiles. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to US President Jimmy Carter, was woken up at 2:30 a.m. to hear the disturbing news. It soon became clear that 2,200 Russian missiles were heading towards the United States. Brzezinski had only a few minutes to decide whether the US should use its own nuclear arsenal. As he prepared to contact the president, he was informed that the alarm was a false alarm, caused by a faulty computer chip worth just 46 cents. Another incident with nuclear weapons occurred in 1962. Then the crew of a B-52 bomber accidentally dropped a plutonium rocket on North Carolina during a routine flight. At that time, American bombers were in the air 24 hours a day, so that the US could instantly respond to any threat.

The plane was carrying two hydrogen bombs when the pilot noticed that there was a weight imbalance. As the crew attempted to return to the air base, the aircraft began to disintegrate and the atomic bomb was accidentally released. Only one activation device did not work - the bomb fell to the ground before the signal to detonate was sent. If this last device had been activated, a full-scale thermonuclear explosion would have occurred on American soil.

In light of the aggravation of the situation, hair-raising incidents are described in detail in the book "Control and Management: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident and the Illusion of Security", authored by American Eric Schlosser. The official Pentagon discloses 32 incidents involving American nuclear warheads. But Schlosser, who gained access to classified documents, speaks of more than 1,000 nuclear weapons accidents between 1950 and 1968. The disclosure of confidential information demonstrates how close the Soviet Union and the West were to during the Cold War.

In light of the aggravation of the situation, the world can survive the modern cold war, the author believes. However, he warns that both the US and Russia are still using the old systems. The main US nuclear bomber has remained unchanged since the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the main land-based nuclear missile, still in use today, was to be retired in the early eighties.

Today, in the second half of 2015, the situation in the arena is heated to the limit and any spark can cause the Third World War to start, and an incident with nuclear weapons can mean the death of all mankind.

During the Cold War, nuclear bombs were often accidentally dropped from the sky. Some have not been found to this day and lie somewhere, disturbing the minds of screenwriters, paranoids and villains who dream of gaining world domination.

Lyubov Klindukhova

The disappearance of the B-47 Stratojet bomber with two nuclear warheads

Coast of Algiers on the border with Morocco

Four Boeing B-47 jet bombers took off from US Air Force MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. With dangerous cargo on board - charges for atomic bombs - they made a non-stop flight across the Atlantic to the Ben Guerir base in Morocco. Question: how many bombers flew to the base?

During the flight, two in-flight refuelings were scheduled. The first passed without incident, but during the descent over the Mediterranean Sea in conditions of heavy cloud cover for the second refueling, one of the four bombers did not get in touch. The Stratojet with two capsules of weapons-grade plutonium, intended for the creation of nuclear weapons, disappeared without a trace.

The last known coordinates of the aircraft were recorded off the Algerian coast on the border with Morocco. The military of France and Morocco were sent to search, even the ships of the Royal Navy of Great Britain sailed, but neither the wreckage of the aircraft, nor traces of nuclear weapons, nor the crew were found. It was officially announced that the plane was lost at sea off the coast of Algeria.

The release of two bombs from the military transport aircraft S-124 "Globemaster" II

Atlantic coast, New Jersey

Such incidents with the irretrievable loss of nuclear weapons in the United States were called "Broken Arrow". And the next "arrows" were destined to fall off the coast of New Jersey.

A C-124 heavy cargo plane carrying three nuclear bombs and a charge for a fourth was bound for Europe from Dover, Delaware. Shortly after takeoff, two of the four engines failed on the plane. On the remaining engines, the crew could not keep the heavy aircraft with cargo at altitude. The only solution was to land the car at the nearest US Navy airfield in Atlantic City. But the plane continued to rapidly lose altitude.

Got rid of excess fuel - did not help. There was a radical solution. The crew dropped two of the three bombs into the ocean about 160 kilometers off the coast of New Jersey. There was no explosion, bombs with a total mass of three tons went under water. With the remaining weapons, the plane landed safely.

Collision between a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter

Tybee Island, Atlantic Coast, Georgia

A fighter with a bomber did not share the sky in the east of the US state of Georgia, over Tybee Island, and collided at an 11-kilometer altitude. Pilot fighter Lieutenant Clarence Stewart managed to eject before the machine collapsed. A bomber with a three-ton Mark-15 thermonuclear bomb had its fuel tanks pierced and the engine damaged.

After several unsuccessful attempts by the bomber to land, the crew received permission to drop the bomb into the waters of Wasseau Bay. After that, Commander Howard Richardson, no longer fearing an explosion, landed the plane at Hunter Air Force Base.

The search for the bomb yielded no results. And so it lies, covered with silt, under the water column near the resort town of Tybee Island. The locals insisted that they be spared from such a neighborhood, but the US military assures that it is much more dangerous to get a bomb than to leave it at the bottom of the bay. The official 2001 report on this incident states that the Mark-15 bomb was a zero modification, that is, a training one, and did not contain a nuclear capsule.

Loss of a bomb while patrolling the coast

Goldsboro, North Carolina

And there was another case: the bomb was lost in a swamp.

The B-52 Stratofortress (a second-generation bomber designed for the needs of the Cold War with the main goal of delivering two thermonuclear bombs anywhere in the USSR) crashed on the night of January 24 while patrolling over the city of Goldsboro in the area of ​​​​the military base. Seymour Johnson. The aircraft's fuel system failed. Performing an emergency landing, at an altitude of three thousand meters, the crew lost control, four managed to leave the plane and survive, the fifth crashed upon landing. During the destruction of the bomber, two Mark-39 thermonuclear bombs with a capacity of 3.8 megatons fell out in the air (for comparison: the power of the bomb detonated over Hiroshima did not exceed 18 kilotons of TNT).

The parachute of the first bomb opened and was found unharmed. From the second, only a few wrecks were found, but the most dangerous parts sank in the swampy area. To prevent someone from accidentally stumbling upon the bomb, the US engineering troops responsible for clearing the territories of former military installations closed access to the alleged location of the bomb.

Attack aircraft "Douglas A-4 Skyhawk" with a bomb went under water

Philippine Sea, Okinawa Island, Ryukyu Archipelago

The American aircraft carrier Ticonderoga was heading from Vietnam to a base in Japan, but on the way near the island of Okinawa in the Philippine Sea, it lost a Skyhawk attack aircraft with a B43 nuclear bomb.

An unsecured attack aircraft rolled off the deck of an aircraft carrier and sank at a depth of almost five thousand meters. Lieutenant Douglas Webster was in the car at the time of the fall. The lieutenant died, and the nuclear bomb was never found.

In 1989, the Japanese suddenly remembered that a bomb was floating near them, and sent a diplomatic request to the States. They were told that yes, it was the case, they lost it, but they couldn’t do anything about it.

Greenland Patrol

North coast of Greenland, US Air Force Thule Air Base

Set of four B28 thermonuclear bombs

The US Air Force Thule Air Base, located in the north of Greenland, was of decisive importance for the defense of the United States in the event of a Soviet attack from the Arctic. Therefore, in the 1960s, large-scale patrols were launched here with the participation of B-52 bombers with thermonuclear weapons on board. They did not wait for an enemy strike, but they staged several catastrophes and almost destroyed themselves on their own, without any help from the USSR.

The last incident, after which the US Air Force Strategic Command turned off the Greenland patrol, occurred on January 21, 1968. Time magazine ranked this incident as one of the most serious nuclear disasters.

A technical malfunction and a fire that started in the cockpit led to the disaster. The cabin filled with acrid smoke, and 140 km from the Thule base, Captain John Hog ​​transmitted a distress signal. The pilots could no longer make out the instrument readings, it was unrealistic to land the car in these conditions, and the commander ordered the crew to leave the plane.

Captain Hogue and another pilot successfully landed right on the base. One crew member was killed. The longest search was for the second captain, Curtis. He left the burning plane first and landed ten kilometers from the base. They found him almost a day later. In January, in Greenland, as you understand, there was a merciless frost, but he survived by wrapping himself in a parachute.

Meanwhile, the bomber itself collapsed and went under the ice. There were four bombs on board. There was no nuclear explosion (if the bombs had exploded, Greenland would have turned from an ice island into a molten coal), but the area where the debris was scattered was subjected to radioactive contamination. The cleanup operation was led by US Air Force General Richard Hunziker. Infected snow and ice were loaded into wooden containers. Containers - in steel tanks. Along the way, they collected the wreckage of the aircraft and hydrogen bombs. At the request of the Danish authorities (Greenland is under the control of Denmark), all this radioactive good was transported to the United States. However, after examining the wreckage, they came to the conclusion that only the components of three bombs were recovered. The fourth remained in Greenland waters!

P.S. If you think that these are all bombs that can interfere with your scuba diving or ice fishing off the coast of Greenland, then you are mistaken: these are just the most high-profile cases of irretrievably lost nuclear bombs. And not only the efforts of the United States in the oceans flooded a terrible weapon. Officially, there were no such cases in the USSR Air Force, but the Soviet Union bypassed the United States in terms of the number of nuclear submarines lost in the ocean with nuclear warheads.

During the Cold War, we constantly feared that the US and the USSR would start a nuclear war. But we were much more likely to die from our own nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons incidents among the military have many ominous names - Broken Arrow, Withered Giant, NUCLEAR FLASH. In fact, there have been dozens of such cases, but we will talk about five serious incidents in the United States.

Travis AFB, 1950, Broken Arrow

During the Korean War, the US military and politicians seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons. In August 1950, 10 B-29 bombers took off from what was then known as Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, bound for Guam. each of the bombers carried a Mark IV atomic bomb, which was twice as powerful as those dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s reported an engine failure. On board was General Robert Travis. He ordered the plane to return to base, but the landing gear failed at the plane. Realizing that the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid the populated areas around the base, and the plane crashed in the northwest corner of the base. The impact killed 12 of the 20 on board, including General Travis. The fire detonated 5,000 pounds of explosives that were a component of the Mark IV atomic bomb. This explosion killed 7 more people on the ground. If the bomb had been equipped with a fissile capsule, the death toll might have been in the six figures.

The USAF covered up the incident by saying that conventional bombs were loaded for a training flight. A few months after that, the base was renamed in honor of General Travis. The term Broken Arrow is used to refer to various incidents with nuclear weapons that are not related to the start of a nuclear war.

Fermi 1 Enrichment Reactor, 1966, Withered Giant

This incident was immortalized under the title "When We Almost Lost Detroit" in John Fuller's book of the same name.

What happened at Fermi 1 was the result of engineering errors, non-compliance with safety regulations, and simply lack of experience. The engineers made changes to the cooling system, but did not write it down in the documentation, so the engineers who worked on the reactor did not know that there were additional dispersion plates in the liquid sodium tank. When the cooling pipes blocked in one of the tanks, the core of the reactor overheated to 700 degrees Fahrenheit (approx. 370C; approx.) and partially melted.

During the meltdown, the reactor fuel overheated beyond what the cooling systems could handle. This eventually resulted in the melting of the surrounding infrastructure, such as the containment housing, cooling systems, and in extreme cases the base of the plant. When completely melted, the fuel ignites and maintains a temperature of about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1000C). Although the term has not been used since 1966, the hypothetical (and technically impossible) chance of a molten reactor burning through the ground and making its way to China has given rise to the definition of "China Syndrome".

Fermi 1 is actually located between Detroit and Toledo, but I guess "When we almost lost Toledo" doesn't sound so exciting.

Tybee Island, 1958 - Broken Arrow

In the waters near Tybee Island, Georgia, on the border of the states of Georgia and South Carolina, a hydrogen bomb rests at a depth of about 10 feet (3m). She has been there for almost 50 years.

In 1958, a B-47 Stratojet bomber crashed during an exercise. On board, he carried a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb, a 12-foot-long light bomb armed with 400 pounds of explosives and highly enriched uranium. The crew of the crashing plane decided that they would not want to carry such a dangerous cargo on board during an emergency landing, and requested permission to drop a bomb into the ocean. It did not explode when it hit the water, and no one has seen it since.

There is some discrepancy as to whether the bomb was fully armed. Some reports suggest that there was, but the Air Force officially announced that there was a training pod inside. Attempts were made to find her, but the natural radiation of the earth made search activities extremely difficult. If it was equipped, and if it detonated, then the nearby city of Savannah would practically disappear from the face of the earth.

Idaho Falls, 1961 - Withered Giant

It was a potentially serious disaster, and populated areas were exposed to radioactive gas. But the Idaho Falls incident stands alone among the nuclear incidents as the worst disaster yet relatively little is known about it.

The SL-1 reactor was experimental and operated by the Army near Idaho Falls. On January 3, 1961, everyone was awakened by an alarm siren. Nearby personnel arrived urgently in case of emergencies. Due to high radiation, they could not get to the control room for more than an hour and a half. When they finally succeeded, they found two victims, one of whom was still showing signs of life (he died shortly after). Even after the victims were carried out of the building where the reactor was located, the bodies of the people were so radioactive that they had to be buried in lead burial grounds.

The worst was yet to come. A few days later, emergency services located a third operator. When the incident happened, he was standing on top of the reactor. The force of the explosion tore the control rods, and they passed through his chest, pinning his body to the ceiling.

The cause of the incident was the ability of operators to control the reaction rate. A stable reaction requires that each fission cycle generate enough neutrons to break up additional atoms, producing the next fission cycle. The control was carried out using control rods made of a material that safely absorbs neutrons. The introduction of several elements of control rods into the reactor slows down the reaction. The SL-1 was undergoing maintenance that required the control rods to be pulled out a few inches. Since the design of the reactor involved the use of one large control rod, a single mistake (pulling out the rod almost completely) led to an instantaneous supercritical reaction - fission cycles that increased exponentially.

The massive surge in energy output vaporized the cooling water, and part of the reactor itself, resulting in a massive explosion that ended the reaction. So you could write a book, The Day We Almost Lost Idaho Falls.

NORAD, 1979 - NUCLEAR FLASH (almost)

This is how NORAD taught not to work with computer simulations of a Soviet nuclear attack using systems that respond to a real nuclear attack. The Missile Defense Agency has received disturbing indications that an entire armada of Soviet nuclear warheads is heading towards the United States. Combat aircraft equipped with nuclear weapons were raised into the air. The president's protected plane was also taken off (although it was not there at the time).

The finger hovered over the button. The aircrew commanders waited for the order to attack. For six tense minutes, no one was sure it wasn't World War III... and oddly enough, no one used the "red phone" hotline with the Soviets. Finally, a signal came from the satellites and Early Warning Radar that no nuclear attack had been detected. The culprit of the commotion was a training tape that generated false positive signals, which was accidentally turned on. In military jargon, NUCLEAR FLASH means a real nuclear explosion that can lead to nuclear war.

If all of the above doesn't sound scary enough, there are dozens more similar incidents in the US alone. Here we can recall the famous Caribbean crisis. The sad moral is that it would be wiser to be less afraid of overt aggression than of your own incompetence and bad technique.

Sources

Farmer, James H. "Korea and the A-Bomb." Flight Journal, Dec. 2010.

US authorities have declassified data on the fall of a B-52G Stratofortress strategic bomber with two Mark 39 mod 2 hydrogen bombs on board in North Carolina in 1961. Judging by the report, compiled back in 1969, one of the bombs was almost ready to explode, and only a miracle saved most of the US East Coast from radiation damage. In general, various emergencies with strategic weapons have occurred in the United States many times, and in at least five cases the country was exposed to a real nuclear threat.

The Goldsboro Incident

On the night of January 23-24, 1961, the American strategic bomber B-52G Stratofortress, as part of Operation Coverall to practice high combat readiness of the strategic units of the US armed forces, patrolled the coast. Over the city of Goldsboro in North Carolina, the bomber was supposed to refuel in the air, but when approaching the tanker, the aircraft commander discovered a fuel leak from the fuel tank of the right wing console. It was decided to stop refueling.

The ground flight control center instructed the B-52G commander to head for the coast and stay in the air until the fuel was completely depleted, but it was soon discovered that fuel losses increased and amounted to 17 tons in three minutes. The bomber was ordered to land at an airfield near Goldsboro. While descending, the aircraft began to break down, and the crew was ordered to leave the falling bomber. Five crew members survived, one died on landing with a parachute and two more ─ when the plane crashed: they could not get out of the B-52G in the air.

The destruction of the bomber began at an altitude of about three thousand meters. At the same time, the first Mark 39 mod 2 nuclear bomb fell out of it, and the second at an altitude of 610 meters. One of them fell in a swampy area and burrowed deep into the ground, while the other, on a parachute that worked, sank to the ground without damage. Over the next few days, the area of ​​impact was carefully combed. Several parts, a tritium tank and a first-stage plutonium charge, were found from a bomb that fell in a swampy area.

Since the site of the alleged fall of the bomb was constantly flooded with groundwater, the search for the remnants of the ammunition soon had to be abandoned. Later, for security reasons, the US Army Corps of Engineers bought the site where the remains of the Mark 39 mod 2 are located. The bomb, which had landed by parachute, was promptly taken out for inspection and recovery. In general, this is all the information that was known about the incident until recently.

On September 20, 2013, The Guardian wrote that the US had declassified a report on the investigation into the Goldsboro bombing incident. A copy of the report was received by journalist Eric Schlosser, who is writing a book on the nuclear arms race and the development of nuclear weapons. The documents came to the journalist under the American law on freedom of information dissemination; they can be found on The Guardian website.

At first, only material about the bombing in North Carolina was published on the website of the British edition. He described an already known sequence of events, but revealed one hitherto unknown fact. The safety systems of the parachute bomb were deactivated in sequential order of battle. In total, four of them were installed in the ammunition; by the time of landing, three had time to turn off. According to the newspaper, the last, low-voltage switch should have worked to detonate a four-megaton bomb, but this did not happen.

A few hours after the publication of the first material, The Guardian posted a copy of a report prepared in 1969 by Parker Jones, head of nuclear security at Sandia National Laboratories. Curiously, this document claims that the bomb was equipped with six safety mechanisms, five of which switched to firing position. The fuses were turned off as the bomb went down, starting from the moment the parachute opened. At the same time, the power of the bomb in the report was already declared at the level of 24 megatons (this is 1200 times more than the power of the "Kid" bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945).

In conclusion, Jones wrote: "One simple low-voltage switch has come between the United States and a massive catastrophe!" The specialist also noted that, due to the peculiarities of their design, Mark 39 mod 2 bombs should be excluded from participation in air patrol operations, since when a B-52 falls, they can fall out of a bomber, as in a normal reset, which means they will be brought into combat condition. . “Another conclusion: the Mk 39 mod 2 bomb could have exploded,” Jones noted again.

According to the military, if the nuclear charge had worked, most of the US East Coast, including Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, would have been exposed to radiation damage. What kind of information published by The Guardian should be trusted is not clear. The point is that the 24 megaton bomb yield given by Jones does not match the type mentioned in the same report. Mark 39 bombs were produced in the USA from 1957 to 1966 in three versions: mod 0, mod 1 and mod 2. The differences between the versions were only constructive: the number of protection systems, as well as the principle of initiation (in the air or on contact with the ground) .

According to open sources, the capacity of two-phase bombs created according to the Teller-Ulam scheme was 3.8 megatons. Simplistically, the Teller-Ulam scheme implies detonation in two stages: at the first stage, the primary charge is detonated, the energy from which is transferred to the secondary through a special channel. The detonation of the secondary charge gives the greatest output of energy. Thus, the report incorrectly states either the power of the bombs that fell in Goldsboro or their type. In 1961, the United States had only one type of nuclear bomb with a yield of about 25 megatons: Mark 41. They were mass-produced from 1960 to 1962.

On the brink of extinction

The fall of the bombs in Goldsboro is not the only case when the territory of the United States was under the threat of nuclear destruction. According to official figures, from 1950 to 1968, about 700 different incidents occurred in the United States with 1250 American nuclear weapons of various types. At the same time, according to the US Department of Defense, since 1950, 32 accidents with strategic weapons have been recorded. At least five of them could have ended in a nuclear explosion.

This is not about the banal loss of nuclear weapons as a result of an accident, as, for example, happened in February 1958 in the state of Georgia. Then a B-47 Stratojet bomber and an F-86 Saber fighter collided in the air. On board the bomber, which fell after the collision (the pilots ejected), was a Mark 15 mod 0 bomb with a capacity of about three megatons. She fell out of a plane near Tybee Island and was never found. Later, in 1964, at Frostburg, Maryland, a B-52 bomber with nuclear bombs on board hit a zone of severe turbulence and broke up in the air. The bombs were soon discovered and removed from the crash site.

There are many such cases in the history of American nuclear weapons. However, for the first time, the United States faced a real threat of a nuclear explosion on its territory on July 13, 1950. Then the B-50 Superfortress bomber, which took off from Biggs Air Force Base near Lebanon in Ohio for exercises with a nuclear bomb on board, lost control and crashed not far from the take-off site. The wreckage of the plane caught fire, and equipped nuclear bombs were on fire. In 1986, a parsimonious description of this incident was made public by the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiological Research Institute (AFRRI).

The second time an atomic explosion almost occurred on May 22, 1957, when a B-36 Peacemaker bomber was transporting a thermonuclear bomb from Biggs Air Force Base to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. When approaching the end point of the route, the bomb, the type of which was never named, fell out of the aircraft. The ammunition fell seven kilometers from the Kirtland airbase control tower and only 500 meters from the Sandia nuclear weapons depot. The fall detonated the bomb's conventional explosive, which under normal conditions initiates the detonation of the plutonium core. There was no nuclear explosion, but a crater 3.7 meters deep and 7.6 meters in diameter formed at the site of the bomb fall.

The incident that occurred on July 27, 1956, was not related to the transport of nuclear weapons. Then the B-47 bomber itself fell on the storage of strategic bombs Mark 6 (these bombs were produced in versions with a capacity of eight, 26, 80, 154 and 160 kilotons). According to the operational report of the US Air Force, during the fall, the wreckage of the aircraft destroyed the storage, knocked down three bombs from the stands. Then there was an explosion of fuel in the tanks of the B-47, which spilled over six bombs. One of the sappers who worked on the scene stated in a report that one of the bombs had detonators set on the B-47 at the time of the fall and "it's a miracle that it didn't explode."

On March 11, 1958, a B-47 bomber flying on patrol from Hunter Air Force Base near Savannah, Georgia, accidentally dropped an atomic bomb due to a malfunction in the bomb bay. She fell on a residential building, after which a conventional explosive device worked in the bomb, which served as a fuse for the plutonium core. The latter did not detonate. As a result of this incident, several people were injured. The details of the incident are still unknown. This event came just a month after the mid-air collision between B-47s and F-86s over Georgia.

The listed cases are officially known facts, when only a miracle separated the United States from far from nuclear test explosions. Whether all such incidents are known to the public today, one can only guess. The last time the Pentagon officially disclosed data on incidents with nuclear weapons was in 1986, and the published information was extremely scarce and did not contain details of the incidents.

After the fall of the B-47 bomber in 1958, many more major incidents with nuclear weapons were recorded in the United States. For example, in 1961, a B-52 bomber carrying two nuclear bombs crashed near Yuba City, California. The fuses on the bombs did not fail; the ammunition did not explode despite the fall and the fire. In 1980, spilled propellant from a Titan-II rocket exploded in Damascus, Arkansas during maintenance. A nine-megaton W53 warhead thrown out by the explosion fell 30 meters from the mine. But in these cases, despite their scale, there was still no nuclear threat to the United States.

The plot of a large number of feature films is based on the fact that a group of some intruders steals a nuclear bomb, after which they try to realize their bad plans with its help (how ominous they are depends only on the scriptwriters' imagination). But as practice shows, it is much easier to lose a nuclear bomb than to steal it.
The championship title in the number of incidents with lost bombs seems to be firmly held by the US Air Force. However, this is not surprising - until the 1960s, strategic bombers remained the main means of delivering American nuclear weapons. The paranoia of the Cold War also contributed - the Pentagon was very afraid that the Russians were already "coming", and as a result, a certain number of bombers with nuclear bombs were almost always in the air to provide a guaranteed opportunity to deliver an instant strike. With the growing number of nuclear bombers patrolling the skies around the clock, the fall of one of them was only a matter of time.

The "beginning" was laid in February 1950, when during the exercises the B-36 bomber, playing the role of a Soviet aircraft that decided to drop a nuclear bomb on San Francisco, crashed in British Columbia. Since the exercises were as close to real as possible and there was a warhead on board the aircraft. True, fortunately, without the nuclear capsule necessary to start a chain reaction - because, as it turned out later, the bomb detonated upon impact. The funny thing is that the remains of the B-36 were only accidentally stumbled upon in 1953 - during the initial search operation, its wreckage was not found, and the military decided that the plane had crashed on the surface of the ocean.

In the same 1950, three more bombers with nuclear bombs crashed in the United States. I suspect that such a number of accidents in one year is due to the fact that in the previous 1949 the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, which naturally led to a sharp increase in the activity of the US Air Force.

But the most notable case of that year, again, involved Canada. During the flight, the B-50 bomber had problems with the engine, and the crew decided to throw the Mark 4 nuclear bomb on board into the St. Lawrence River, after turning on its self-destruct system. As a result, the bomb exploded at an altitude of 750 meters, and enriched the river with 45 kilograms of uranium. The locals were told that it was a tactical exercise.

In 1956, a B-47 bomber flying to a base in Morocco disappeared without a trace over the Mediterranean Sea - its wreckage was never found. On board the missing aircraft were two containers of weapons-grade plutonium. The following year, a transport S-124 carrying three nuclear warheads had engine problems. As a result, the crew dropped two of the three bombs into the Atlantic Ocean. The warheads were never found.

In February 1958, during an exercise near Tybee Island, an F-86 fighter jet and a B-47 bomber collided. As a result, the crew of the latter had to drop the Mark 15 hydrogen bomb, which is still resting on the bottom somewhere in that area - numerous searches have not been successful. The only question is whether there was a nuclear capsule in the bomb or its training analogue (different sources give different answers to this question).

A month later, another, fortunately comical rather than tragicomic, incident occurred. During a B-47 formation flight to England, one of the crew members decided to inspect a 30-kiloton Mark 6 bomb. He climbed on it and accidentally hit the emergency release lever. As a result, the bomb broke through the hatch of the bomb bay and fell to the ground from a height of 4.5 kilometers. The bomb was not put on alert (it did not have a nuclear capsule), but the conventional explosive charge detonated on impact. As a result, the ammunition left a crater 9 meters deep and 21 meters in diameter on the ground of South Carolina. Now there is a memorial sign at this place.

In 1959, another nuclear bomb sank to the seabed after a P-5M patrol plane crashed off the coast of Washington state. This charge was also not found. In 1961, a catastrophe occurred that could lead to extremely serious consequences. A B-52 bomber carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs exploded mid-air. One of the bombs fell into the swamp - during the excavations, the military managed to find its tritium tank and the plutonium charge of the first stage, later this area was bought by the engineering troops.

The second bomb's parachute went off and it gently landed on the ground. It was she who almost caused the disaster - for the bomb was in a fully equipped state, and during its parachute descent, three of the four fuses that kept it from exploding were successively turned off. The east coast of the United States was saved from a four-megaton thermonuclear explosion by a conventional low-voltage switch that served as the fourth fuse.

One of the most ridiculous cases of the loss of nuclear weapons happened in 1965, when an A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft with a hydrogen bomb on board fell off the deck of the Ticonderoga aircraft carrier. The depth in that place was 4900 meters, the bomb was never found. The following year, a catastrophe occurred near the Spanish Palomares - during aerial refueling, a tanker collided with a B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs. Three of the four bombs fell to the ground (the conventional explosive charges of two of them detonated, resulting in radioactive contamination of the area), the fourth fell into the ocean. After almost three months of searching, they managed to raise it - and this is so far the only case when a nuclear bomb that fell into the sea could be returned.

After Palomares, the flights of American bombers with nuclear weapons were significantly reduced. Finally, they came to an end after the catastrophe that occurred at the Thule base in Greenland.

Back in 1961, the US Air Force launched Operation Chrome Dome. Within its framework, B-52 bombers with thermonuclear weapons on board carried out daily combat patrols along specified routes. Before departure, they were assigned targets on the territory of the USSR, which were to be attacked upon receipt of the appropriate signal. At any given time, there were at least a dozen B-52s in the air. As part of this operation, the Hard Head mission was also carried out to constantly visually monitor the radar station at Thule Air Base, which served as a key component of the BMEWS missile early warning system. In the event of a loss of communication with Thule, the crew of the B-52 had to visually confirm its destruction - such confirmation would be a signal of the beginning of the Third World War.

On January 21, 1968, one of the B-52s involved in the operation, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed near the base. As a result of the plane crash, thermonuclear munitions collapsed, causing radiation contamination of the area. A long and laborious operation to collect debris and decontaminate the area followed, but one of the uranium cores was never found. The catastrophe provoked a big scandal and soon after it the regular flights of bombers with nuclear weapons were finally canceled as too dangerous.

I have described here only some of the incidents that led to the loss of bombs. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were many other disasters involving nuclear bombers. In 1956, in England, there was a case when a B-47 fell directly on a nuclear weapons storage, where at that time there were three nuclear bombs, one of which had a fuse inserted. There was a fire, but by some miracle there was no detonation.

As for such incidents in the Soviet Union, they all remain classified and there is nothing left but to be content with rumors and urban legends. I can only note that the Soviet strategic bomber aviation has always been noticeably inferior in number to the American one. In theory, fewer bombers = fewer flights = less chance of a plane crashing. On the other hand, I doubt that the overall accident rate of the Soviet Air Force was noticeably less than the American one.

We can only speak with confidence about the nuclear charges that were on board the dead Soviet submarines. On board the K-129, which sank in 1968, there were three R-21 ballistic missiles and two nuclear torpedoes (however, some of them were raised during). On board the K-8 that sank in 1971 in the Bay of Biscay, according to various sources, there were from 4 to 6 nuclear torpedoes. The strategic missile carrier K-219, which went to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1986, had more than 30 (again, the numbers differ) warheads - mostly on R-27 ballistic missiles, but there were also several nuclear torpedoes. And finally, the K-278 Komsomolets, which died in 1989, carried two nuclear torpedoes.

Thus, a simple calculation shows that there should now be somewhere around fifty lost nuclear warheads on the seabed. Of course, given that according to current estimates, more than 125,000 nuclear weapons have been built throughout history, this figure is probably a drop in the ocean. But nevertheless, I hope that the times when an accidentally dropped nuclear bomb could fall from the sky are still forever in the past.