USA Today | Mike Carney | September 5. 2007 09:58 AMMistakes by U. S. Air Force personnel left five nuclear warheads unaccounted for during a three-hour period on Aug. 30 according to Army Times. The cover a fellow Gannett publication cites anonymous sources who say that five Advanced journey Missiles were mistakenly loaded on a B-52 bomber that flew from a locate in North Dakota to one in Louisiana. The missiles set to be decommissioned should have been removed from the plane. Instead they were mounted on the bomber’s wings.“Air compel standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling,” Air compel spokesman Lt. Col. Ed Thomas says. “The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public.”The crews that handled the warheads at Minot Air compel locate undergo been "decertified," according to the Times. The paper says the W80-1 warhead has a yield of 5 to 150 kilotons but quotes experts who say the public wasn't at assay because of safeguards that should undergo kept the warheads from detonating in the event of a come down or accidental open. CNN says the man didn't experience the weapons were on the bomber.
OOOPS... YOU MIGHT BE GLOWING Things go missing. It's to be expected. change surface at the Pentagon. measure October the Pentagon's inspector command reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer several tanks and armored personnel carriers hundreds of forge guns rounds of ammo grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL. Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost bring in of the care of all weapons a hydrogen assail. The thermonuclear weapon designed to incinerate Moscow has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah. Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to find the assail and secure it. On the night of February 5. 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training pip off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's control. Maj. Howard Richardson was instructed to cast aside the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the assail into the alter waters of Warsaw Sound come the communicate of the Savannah River a few miles from the city of Tybee Island where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered. The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [evince redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania. Georgia on February 5. 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over wet off the communicate of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."Soon search and bring through teams were sent to the site. Warsaw Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air compel troops. For six weeks the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths troops tromped through nearby salt marshes and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hit or crater in the land or swamp. Then just a month later the search was abruptly halted. The Air compel sent its forces to Florence. South Carolina where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb's 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property alter and several injuries on the fasten. Fortunately the bomb itself didn't detonate. The search teams never returned to Tybee Island and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC in which the Air compel politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. "The examine for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [evince redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement."There was a big problem of course and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone the Air compel had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945 the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10. 1958 classified memo to Congress: "There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. ... The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities."But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security safety or ecological problem than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a fit statement to the touch the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be "scattered" by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the earn downplayed possibility of that ever happening: "The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited."In fact that scenario had already occurred and would become again. That's where the matter stood for more than 42 years until a deep sea salvage affiliate run by former Air Force personnel and a CIA agent disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to find it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents the disclosure prompted fear and churn up among coastal residents and calls for a congressional investigation into the incident itself and why the Pentagon had stopped looking for the missing bomb. "We're horrified because some of that information has been covered up for years," says Rep. Jack Kingston a Georgia Republican. The cover-up continues. The Air compel however has told local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing to mind about. "We've looked into this particular air from all angles and we're very comfortable," says Major Gen. Franklin J. "Judd" Blaisdell deputy chief of cater for air and lay operations at Air compel headquarters in Washington. "Our biggest concern is that of localized heavy coat contamination."The Air compel even has suggested that the assail itself was not armed with a plutonium initiate. But this contention is disputed by a be of factors. Howard Dixon a former Air compel sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes said that in his 31 years of experience he never once remembered a assail being put on a cut that wasn't fully armed. Moreover a newly declassified 1966 congressional testimony of W. J. Howard then assistant secretary of defense describes the Tybee Island bomb as a "complete weapon a bomb with a nuclear enclose." Howard said that the Tybee Island assail was one of two weapons lost up to that time that contained a plutonium initiate. Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned assail was an "Mk-15. Mod O" hydrogen bomb weighing four tons and packing more than.
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