“There are still many secrets we don’t know about”

“There are still many nuclear mysteries that we don’t know about,” he said. Stephen SchwartzAuthor of Atomic Audit, a work analyzing the US nuclear program.

After World War II and in the midst of the Cold War, a nuclear race broke out, leading the US and Soviet Union to begin stockpiling nuclear arsenals. That’s when the US started the operation ‘chrome dome’, Nuclear-loaded B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers that flew day and night, always on the alert in case they needed to respond to a surprise Russian attack.

However, in some cases things did not go as planned. They range from bombs that were accidentally dropped to bombs that were released in an emergency and were never heard from again.

The US government shared reports (accessed at this link) in which he admitted that they had gone astray 11 atomic bombs: 6 in the United States and 5 in the waters of the Pacific, Mediterranean or Atlantic Oceans. In some cases they were designed to be detonated or allegedly contained no nuclear charge.

And the missions to recover them also posed risks to the region. Jaya Tiwari, a researcher at the Washington Think Tank Center for Defense Information, went so far as to say that some of these accidents were more dangerous than one might think.

Also, the lack of data makes it difficult to know exactly what environmental impact they may have caused. In case of dovecotesin Almería, is paradigmatic in Spain and has once again dominated the news after the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, agreed to meet to work on a permanent solution to clean up the virus to work Floor contaminated with plutonium from the Spanish city. But it’s not the only example.

official and unofficial

The longest lost nuclear weapon 73 years, was lost on February 3, 1950. The US Air Force’s Convair B-36 bomber was conducting an attack simulation on the Alaska-Texas route when it experienced engine problems. And to avoid crashing, he was ordered to launch his 30-kiloton Mark 4 bomb into the Pacific Ocean. The official report states that the bomb did not contain the plutonium core necessary for a nuclear detonation, but it did significant amount of uranium.

And one of the events most highlighted by experts happened in January 1968, when a B-52 bomber loaded with four nuclear bombs crashed near the military base of after an emergency landing attempt Thule, Greenland. The version of the American authorities said that the four heads were destroyed in the explosion and an operation was organized by military and civilians dispose of radioactive material from the area. At that point they already had in mind what they were doing in Palomares as a model.

However, documents obtained by the media revealed that “one of the nuclear warheads” was it had crossed the ice and landed on the seabed», the exact location of which is unknown to this day. The Danish parliament, which represents Greenland, has requested a study into the damage the accident may have caused to the region. Among other things, because the workers who took part in the cleaning at the time went before the European courts on the grounds that they had suffered serious health problems since they did this work. However, it is difficult to establish a direct link between the two issues at a legal level.

“Irrecoverably Lost”

One of the examples that gave more than speeches was what happened SavannahGeorgia, in the USA. in 1958. A US Air Force plane was returning at midnight with a hydrogen bomb on board when it collided with an airplane. “The pilot of the other plane made the rescue while the bomber planned an immediate emergency landing at Savannah Airport,” retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Duke, who resumed his search in 1998, told the media.

However, the forced landing in the middle of a runway under construction forced the pilot to decide to dump a 6,500 kg nuclear bomb off the coast of Georgia. Although the government has stated that the hydrogen bomb was not loaded with plutonium, Lt. Col. Duke doubts this based on a letter dated April 1966 written by the hydrogen bomb’s aide-de-camp Secretary of Defensedesignates the pump as a “full gun”.

And he added to the BBC that “the man who was there that night, an expert in nuclear technology, said that at that point he had never received or launched a bomb that did not contain plutonium.” According to the authorities After nine weeks of searching for it, the Luftwaffe declared the bomb “irretrievably lost”.

On the edge of the abyss

Some incidents like the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga en 1965, which affected Japan, according to documents collected B. the Washington Institute for Political Studies, were deliberately concealed by the US Navy and constituted a violation of the ban on the use of nuclear weapons in the security treaty between the two countries.

The Americans were then towing an A4E Skyhawk aircraft loaded with one hydrogen bomb to an elevator. However, the pilot did not notice that the ship was about to sink. A miscalculation led to the nuclear charge landing on the bottom of the Philippine Sea and sinking more than 130 kilometers from Japan’s Ryukyu Archipelago.

But one case occurred on the verge of a nuclear explosion Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961. A B-52 aircraft dropped two nuclear weapons on the ground. One of them broke, although most parts could be salvaged, one of them was left under 15 meters of mud. In the end, the US Air Force bought the land to prevent strangers from approaching the crime scene.

The second bomb remained intact thanks to the opening of the parachute. But in a declassified 1963 document, the US Secretary of Defense came to that conclusion «a nuclear explosion could only just be prevented.”

real science fiction

However, the United States is not alone in planting bombs. It is more difficult for other countries to access the figures, e.g Russia. The incidents have more to do with Soviet nuclear submarines. In 1970, in the Bay of Biscay, a fire spread in the air conditioning system of a nuclear submarine K-8, which sank without a trace with four nuclear torpedoes.

Even more mysterious and scripted was that of the Soviet K-129 near Hawaii carrying three nuclear missiles. The US tried to station one secret operation to get it back with the backing of a billionaire filmmaker Howard Hughes. But “Project Azorian” (available via this link) This failed because the submarine broke apart trying to lift it to the surface.

As the decade changed, they started thinking about betting on artifacts More little things and not only with nuclear-charged missiles. So it was before the US Congressional Military Committee in the 1990s Alexey Yablokov, a scientist, a former member of the National Security Council of Russia and adviser to President Boris Yeltsin. He acknowledged that Russia had developed 250 portable nuclear bombsand that the Soviet authorities did not monitor them extensively. Because of this, some experts say that Russia lost about 100 of this species.

The Spanish case

Raphael Moreno has leftProfessor at the Complutense University of Madrid and author of the book “The Secret History of the Palomares Bombs”, points out that the recent announcements about Palomares and the official petition to remove the more than 50,000 cubic meters of radioactive land are only hints that the United States are open to dialogue about a second Palomares purge, “but that doesn’t mean there’s a commitment, something similar was announced back in the Margallo era and with the Aznar government,” Moreno told ABC.

But for Moreno. In doing so, they acknowledge that the first purification of Palomares was not complete “when the opposite was sold in 1966.” It’s more what they gave Certificates to the landowners showing the land was exactly the same than before the accident, which we now know very well was not true. And they are signed by the Spanish authorities in the case of the Franco regime and the United States government.

He adds, “It appears that the steps that can be taken with the United States are related to the US military presence in Spain.” It’s curious Coincidence between the Spanish government’s acceptance of two new destroyers for Rota and at least the public declaration that they are now ready to sit down and talk about Palomares ». And he qualifies: “Spain has not declassified any documents related to Palomares, what is actually known comes from the documents declassified by the United States.”

Moreno also points out that “besides plutonium, we also have americium, which is much more volatile, and they say there will be a higher risk of floating americium by 2030.”

Moreno points out that his book seeks to explain why B-52 bombers carrying nuclear bombs flew over Almería this year and then, more casually, to ask whether that is so Spain also had a nuclear program. Spain had a project of this type, according to General Velarde, “but only according to his words, which cannot be confirmed by third parties,” adds Moreno.

And according to this general, Franco halted the nuclear program because of what happened in Palomares and because he believed it would create tension with the United States. And B-52 flights resumed just 48 hours after the Palomares crash. “There are things in the past that are not yet understood, but above all there are things in the present that are not understood.” And the subject continues to expand without a dialogue leading to it final cleaning

What we know about nuclear accidents is thanks only to that Release of documents that are generated by Dropper. But maybe Nuclear Accounting in B always cause surprises.