#Hydrogen bomb vs atomic bomb full#
"So I don't think we have anything like a full accounting." We don't really know anything about the United Kingdom or France, or Russia or China," says Lewis. "We don't know as much about other countries. 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. He explains that the full list only emerged when a summary prepared by the US Department of Defense was declassified in the 1980s. "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. 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.
In many cases, the weapons were dropped by mistake or jettisoned during an emergency, then later recovered.
There have been at least 32 so-called "broken arrow" accidents – those involving these catastrophically destructive, earth-flattening devices – since 1950. In fact, the Palomares incident is not the only time a nuclear weapon has been misplaced. Now the hunt was on to find it – along with its 1.1 megatonne warhead, with the explosive power of 1,100,000 tonnes of TNT. Three were quickly recovered on land – but one had disappeared into the sparkling blue expanse to the south east, lost to the bottom of the nearby swathe of Mediterranean Sea. "It was supposed to be a secret but my friends were telling me why I was going."įor weeks, newspapers around the globe had been reporting rumours of a terrible accident – two US military planes had collided in mid-air, scattering four B28 thermonuclear bombs across Palomares. "It was kind of embarrassing," says Meyers. When he attended a dinner party that evening and announced his mysterious trip, its intended confidentiality became something of a joke. "It was not a surprise to be called," says Meyers. However, the mission was not as covert as the military had hoped. He was told that there was a top secret emergency in Spain, and that he must report there within days. At the time, he was working as a bomb disposal officer at the Naval Air Facility Sigonella, in eastern Sicily. Body parts fell to the earth.Ī few weeks later, Philip Meyers received a message via a teleprinter – a device that could send and receive primitive emails. Within seconds, the sleepy rural idyll was shattered.
Then it slipped beneath the waves.Īt the same time, in the nearby fishing village of Palomares, locals looked up at an identical sky and witnessed a very different scene – two giant fireballs, hurtling towards them. It had something hanging beneath it, though he couldn’t make out what it was. On January 17, 1966, at around 10:30am, a Spanish shrimp fisherman watched a misshapen white parcel fall from the sky… and silently glide towards the Alboran Sea. It was a mild winter's morning at the height of the Cold War.
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