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The U.S. military is missing six nuclear weapons (2021)
- sujitjadhav 4y ago[flagged]
- cdiamand 4y agoDefinitely not good. You don't want this sort of thing floating around.
- melling 4y agoSeems strange that this would need to be explained to anyone.
- rhacker 4y agoIt's actually not good at all. I trust the US govt having a nuke more than a rando on the planet having a nuke.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWhy is that?
- newsclues 4y agoPlease explain your logic.
- Xeoncross 4y agoI think I've seen this movie...
- codetrotter 4y agoProbably starring Gene Hackman and that other guy
- lapcat 4y ago(2021)
- hislaziness 4y agoArticle is from 2021. And the last nuke lost was in 1968. Wondering if all the nukes lost are still viable as a weapon?
- firecall 4y agoI'm guessing the nuclear material is! The bombs themselves must be useless by now? I dont know anything whatsoever about any of it. But at a guess I'd wager the Plutonium and Uranium is still good! :-)
- gambiting 4y agoNo - both decay slowly into their less enriched isotopes which wouldn't explode. They can be re-manufactured into weapons-grade material again, but any state which has the facilities to do this has the facilities to create fresh cores.
- firecall 4y agoIsn't the shelf life of a nuclear weapon at least 100 years? Doesn't that mean the materials therein are still good?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dexterdog 4y agoI'd actually be surprised if any of them were viable as a weapon.
- gambiting 4y agoNone of them are. The material in the weapons needs to be highly enriched to work, and through physics of radioactive decay it's slowly turning itself into less enriched version which wouldn't explode. Nuclear bombs have to be serviced at least once a decade to remain functional. Not to mention that they are incredibly precise devices and any crash will have undoubtedly damaged them beyond any possible repair. The worst you could do with a recovered core is turn it into a dirty bomb(bomb which uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material around), but any group interested in doing that could surely procure radioactive material without recovering 50 year old bombs from the bottom of the ocean.
- Forestessential 4y ago[flagged]
- neverminder 4y agoIf US lost "only" 6, one has to wonder how many the Soviets may have lost. Are these bombs still usable? When they decay on some seabed for decades what happens eventually?
- shagie 4y agoIt's not the bombs that are worrisome. The Radiological Accident in Lia, Georgia (country, not state) from 2001 - https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81061875.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81... > A serious radiological accident occurred in Georgia on 2 December 2001, when three inhabitants of the village of Lia found two metal objects in the forest while collecting firewood. These objects were 90Sr sources with an activity of 1295 TBq. The three inhabitants used the objects as heaters when spending the night in the forest. The major cause of the accident was the improper and unauthorized abandonment of radiation sources in Georgia and the absence of clear labels or radiation signs on the sources warning of the potential radiation hazard. Under the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency (Assistance Convention), the Georgian authorities requested assistance from the IAEA to advise on the dose assessment, source recovery and medical management of those involved in the accident. There are some interesting things in there with some engineering challenges... but I will warn you that beyond page 36 it is NSFL. That section begins (the text isn't bad unless you know what you're reading): > 6. OVERVIEW OF THE MEDICAL ASPECTS > Following the exposure on 2 December 2001, all three patients exhibited in the first 24 h symptoms of nausea, vomiting, asthenia (weakness), headaches and dizziness, followed by cutaneous radiation syndrome (CRS). These early clinical manifestations and anamnesis of the patients strongly indicated ARS of a haematological type for the three patients. Furthermore, Patient 1-DN developed transitory oropharyngeal syndrome.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoGiven the last bomb was lost in 1968, this is just fear mongering.
- tikhonj 4y agoI rather enjoyed reading Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety which covers a few of these events in more detail, as well as the 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion[1] and some broader history about the security and management of US nuclear weapons. [1]: The missile itself exploded, not its nuclear payload. See Wikipedia for an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
- emeril 4y agoI enjoyed Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 even more!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- imwillofficial 4y agoIN SPAAAAAYCE
- throwaway742 4y agoRed Alert 2 > Red Alert 3
- jasongill 4y agohttps://cncnet.org/red-alert https://cncnet.org/red-alert You'll love the fact that you can still play Red Alert online for free!
- emeril 4y agotoo bad there was a slower paced more casual version - yellow alert or defcon 5
- amrb 4y ago> The initial explosion catapulted the 740-ton silo door away from the silo. > The W53 thermonuclear warhead landed about 100 feet (30 m) from the launch complex's entry gate. Crazy to move that much weight and Lucky to have the warhead intact.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoThe Black Vault was one of my favorite websites when I was a kid. It really opened my eyes up to how much of a joke our world is. https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/broken-arrow-incidents/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/broken-arrow-i...
- mkoubaa 4y agoCould they have been delivered to another nation in a clandestine way and reported missing to cover that loss? To me it seems viable and probably if my hypothesis is correct there's a country that became a nuclear power soon after we stopped losing them
- ddulaney 4y agoIt seems unlikely. Most of them were either lost on US soil or lost along with military personnel who died. But the more convincing logic is: why would the US want to do that? The fewer other nations have nuclear weapons, the more power the US has over them, either because it can threaten to attack them or because it can provide nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Stationing US weapons in a foreign country and getting to set up a forward base? Heck yeah. Giving up control of those weapons and maybe having them turned against you decades down the line? Not a chance.
- causality0 4y agowhy would the US want to do that? "The US" wouldn't. People in the US with great political power would.
- HyperSane 4y agoWhy?
- causality0 4y agoMaybe they were paid for it. Maybe they were threatened or blackmailed for it. Maybe they feel a political, religious, or ethnic loyalty to another country. Plenty of people in the US are more than happy to do things that run counter to the US' interests. The entire American military-industrial complex directly benefits from the US being more in danger because it means they get more money.
- xwolfi 4y ago
- leoh 4y agoClassic and apropos LRB essay https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n15/mike-kirby/diary https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n15/mike-kirby/diary
- andy_ppp 4y agoAt some point we have to assume time travellers are taking all the bombs that did start Armageddon, alternatively our luck might be extremely close to running out.
- nntwozz 4y ago[flagged]
- abeppu 4y ago> Somewhere near Goldsboro, North Carolina, a uranium core is likely buried in a field. > The United States Army Corps of Engineers purchased a 400-foot circular easement over the buried components to restrict digging. Is an easement sufficient protection? If there isn't someone around to prevent anyone from digging, then we're just relying on evildoers being afraid of violating property laws?
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoEasements are aimed less at would-be terrorists than unlucky construction crews.
- sclarisse 4y agoYou think that evildoers might not only be able to conduct an excavation so difficult that it stymied the US military, but that they’d be able to do it without attracting official attention?
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoIf the US military couldn't find it when the scene was fresh, what's the likelihood someone could establish a large and sufficient enough excavation operation to find it, and remove it, before somebody bothered to go "what's all that ruckus about" and call the US military?
- shaunn 4y agoI am now expecting to see a movie/TV series with what you described as the plot.
- ianburrell 4y agoThe site is close to main road and farmhouse. The farmer who owns the field is definitely going to notice the heavy equipment. Assuming the coordinates are right, Google Maps shows that there is a stand of trees in middle of field.
- throwaway742 4y agoWell I got clickbaited.
- dudul 4y ago"I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it."
- dudul 4y agoHaha like an idiot I left my quote before even reading the article and now I see it actually opens with it.
- robolange 4y agoMakes me wonder how many weapons the other nuclear-armed nations have lost and not recovered. Like the US, Russia has thousands of them, and had tens of thousands more during the cold war. How many of them went missing?
- ttyprintk 4y agoProbably two for every lost submarine, at least two subs with two nuclear torpedos each. The US had Operation Chrome Dome shuffling them around by air.
- desireco42 4y agoI learned with kids that everything is better is you say "Just". "US military is missing just six nuclear weapons.
- abudabi123 4y agoJust found them. They are just in Taiwan."
- saboot 4y agoWhat's scary, this article, or considering how much has been lost by other countries (Soviet Union, China, ..)
- walrus01 4y agoIf one reviews the historical total number of B-36 and B-52 crashes and their causes, the continual operation of "alert" aircraft by SAC back in the cold war era was really quite risky.
- _8j50 4y agoConspiracy: they are planted in Russiam and Chinese cities. Reality: it would make more sense to fabricate the weapon in secret and hide its existence to begin with than to document it well and use it for secret stuff.
- ianburrell 4y agoWhy would they have to fabricate in secret or use crashed bombs? The number and location of nuclear weapons is tightly held secret. There are so many that there is no way someone else could track them. Anyone in US would wonder where why bombs are at "storage facility". Also, putting nuclear bombs in foreign cities is a dumb idea. What happens when Russia or China finds one? That is an act of war. It is also unnecessary since US, and Russia and China, have hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs. Enough to survive any first strike and produce more retaliation than a few hidden bombs could. I could see people in early Cold War thinking it was a good idea, but they would worry about losing control of weapons. The one place could see hidden nukes is shipping containers. Not ship them around the world, but hold them for retaliation. Keep them in safe location away from targets and has access to untargeted port. Then send them out when shipping resumes after lose nuclear war. But that is very modern.
- _8j50 4y ago> The number and location of nuclear weapons is tightly held secret Location yeah, number no, due to treaties around proliferation and also hard to keep that secret with espionage and all. > It is also unnecessary since US, and Russia and China, have hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs Delivery is the hardest part. Pre-staging is a huge advantage for first-strike to take out enemy leadership/infra and launch missiles so when they are launching their retaliation you are already one step ahead with your second wave. For retaliation, when someone launches nukes it is likely they have good defenses against your retaliation but probably not against your trojan nuke. That element of surprise is a huge advantage. > The one place could see hidden nukes is shipping containers. Not ship them around the world They do scan containers randomly, I assume this includes radiation and chemical traces.
- 4y ago
- shagie 4y ago1950 - Plane with engine trouble dropped over Pacific Ocean so that when it might crash it wouldn't crash with a nuclear bomb on it. 1956 - B-47 ran out of gas over Mediterranean. 1958 - B-47 having difficulty to land jettisoned somewhere near Wassaw Sound near the mouth of the Savannah River so that it wouldn't crash with a nuclear bomb bon it. 1961 - B-52 crashed shortly after taking off. Most of it was dug up. (Dr. Jack ReVelle obituary from Jan 2023 - https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-broken-arrow-obituary https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-bro... ) 1965 - A-4E rolled off the deck of the USS Ticonderoga into the Pacific Ocean near Japan (Japan wasn't happy about it) 1968 - USS Scorpion attack sub sank somewhere near the Azores Islands. --- This isn't a "hey, there are a bunch of nukes out there in the hands of (more) irresponsible people."
- bnralt 4y ago> 1968 - USS Scorpion attack sub sank somewhere near the Azores Islands. Phil Ochs wrote a song about this, "The Scorpion Departs, But Never Returns"[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbiJR-bqSfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbiJR-bqSfw
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThank you. Both for the list, and for giving me a quick way to check that this is still about those six old incidents, and not some six new ones.
- GalenErso 4y agoMore recently, in 2007, six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each loaded with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, were mistakenly loaded onto a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52H heavy bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and transported to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The nuclear warheads in the missiles were supposed to have been removed before the missiles were taken from their storage bunker. The missiles with the nuclear warheads were not reported missing, and remained mounted to the aircraft at both Minot and Barksdale for 36 hours. During this period, the warheads were not protected by the various mandatory security precautions for nuclear weapons.
- andrewstuart 4y agoI put an Apple air tag on my cat and when he goes missing I can see where he is on Apple Maps.
- jjtheblunt 4y agobut (?) only if he's in range of someone's participating bluetooth, which ... transitive closure ... is network connected?
- andrewstuart 4y agoI think any Apple phone detects nearby AirTags and tells the central systems where it is.
- cirrus3 4y agoocean, ocean ocean, ocean, mud, ocean, ocean
- morninglight 4y agoDid anyone look on ebay?
- ck2 4y agoThat they will admit. But somewhere out there might be a nuclear weapon that is internet enabled under the guise of monitoring. Remember how the first few generations of military drones didn't even use encryption?
- jkravitz61 4y agoNotable to mention the Greenland Thule air base crash which effectively created a dirty bomb around the area after the B-52 crash. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_cra...
- dreamcompiler 4y agoThe Palomares Incident is a good story too. All 4 lost bombs were recovered. Three on land had exploded (in a non-nuclear manner) and scattered so much radioactive contamination that the US government had to scrape off 6000 barrels worth of Spanish topsoil and ship it back to the states. The fourth bomb fell in the ocean and was recovered through Bayesian analysis with the assistance of an observant Spanish fisherman. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash (I used to know one of the scientists who helped in this recovery. He wrote a book about it.)
- weinzierl 4y agoThe scraped soil was only a fraction of what was contaminated. As of 2023 Spain is still in negotiations with the US about removal of contaminated soil. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/06/spain-renews-call-us-remove-soil-nuclear-accident-site https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/06/spain-renews-c...
- mrlonglong 4y agoI'd worry far more about if the Russians have lost any of theirs. Their record is not good on this.
- pvaldes 4y agoEverybody seems to be counting their plutonium currently
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoEveryone check your pockets.