H-BOMB LOST IN SPAIN: January 17, 1966; Broken Arrows Incidents Reviewed

 

H-BOMB LOST IN SPAIN: January 17, 1966

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"On this day, a B-52 bomber collides with KC-135 jet tanker over Spain‘s Mediterranean coast, dropping three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs near the town of Palomares and one in the sea. It was not the first or last accident involving American nuclear bombs. As a means of maintaining first-strike capability during the Cold War, U.S. bombers laden with nuclear weapons circled the earth ceaselessly for decades. In a military operation of this magnitude, it was inevitable that accidents would occur. The Pentagon admits to more than three-dozen accidents in which bombers either crashed or caught fire on the runway, resulting in nuclear contamination from a damaged or destroyed bomb and/or the loss of a nuclear weapon. One of the only "Broken Arrows" to receive widespread publicity occurred on January 17, 1966, when a B-52 bomber crashed into a KC-135 jet tanker over Spain. The bomber was returning to its North Carolina base following a routine airborne alert mission along the southern route of the Strategic Air Command when it attempted to refuel with a jet tanker. The B-52 collided with the fueling boom of the tanker, ripping the bomber open and igniting the fuel. The KC-135 exploded, killing all four of its crew members, but four members of the seven-man B-52 crew managed to parachute to safety. None of the bombs were armed, but explosive material in two of the bombs that fell to earth exploded upon impact, forming craters and scattering radioactive plutonium over the fields of Palomares. A third bomb landed in a dry riverbed and was recovered relatively intact. The fourth bomb fell into the sea at an unknown location. Palomares, a remote fishing and farming community, was soon filled with nearly 2,000 U.S. military personnel and Spanish civil guards who rushed to clean up the debris and decontaminate the area. The U.S. personnel took precautions to prevent overexposure to the radiation, but the Spanish workers, who lived in a country that lacked experience with nuclear technology, did not. Eventually some 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation were shipped to the United States for disposal. Meanwhile, at sea, 33 U.S. Navy vessels were involved in the search for the lost hydrogen bomb. Using an IBM computer, experts tried to calculate where the bomb might have landed, but the impact area was still too large for an effective search. Finally, an eyewitness account by a Spanish fisherman led the investigators to a one-mile area. On March 15, a submarine spotted the bomb, and on April 7 it was recovered. It was damaged but intact. Studies on the effects of the nuclear accident on the people of Palomares was limited, but the United States eventually settled some 500 claims by residents whose health was adversely affected. Because the accident happened in a foreign country, it received far more publicity than did the dozen or so similar crashes that occurred within U.S. borders. As a security measure, U.S. authorities do not announce nuclear weapons accidents, and some American citizens may have unknowingly been exposed to radiation that resulted from aircraft crashes and emergency bomb jettisons. Today, two hydrogen bombs and a uranium core lie in yet undetermined locations in the Wassaw Sound off Georgia, in the Puget Sound off Washington, and in swamplands near Goldsboro, North Carolina."

 

By Bruce Kennedy, CNN Interactive. "The concept itself is terrifying, even hypothetically. A nuclear weapon, lost, stolen or accidentally destroyed — endangering thousands, perhaps millions of lives. "Broken Arrows," as the U.S. military calls such worst-case scenarios, have been plot devices in action movies and spy novels. But the reality, as reflected in today’s headlines, sometimes makes such fiction pale in comparison. Scores of accidents involving nuclear reactors and weapons have occurred worldwide since the Nuclear Age began in 1945. And an estimated 50 nuclear warheads still lie on the bottom of the world’s oceans, according to Joshua Handler, a former research coordinator for the environmental activist organization Greenpeace."…

 

By Chuck Hansen, November/December 2000 pp. 64-66 (vol. 56, no. 06), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists …"The 1981 list included accidents that fell into two categories: those that had been publicly disclosed when they occurred, and those in which radioactive fallout spread beyond the limits of a military base, either within the United States or in a foreign country. When radioactive contamination did not extend beyond a military base, the incident that caused the contamination was probably not publicly announced. Of the incidents listed in the 1981 paper, at least seven were not made public when they happened and several had not been previously disclosed. In only 14 cases had Defense revealed at the time of the incident that nuclear weapons were involved. At least a few government officials were better informed: As reported by Shaun Gregory in his 1990 book The Hidden Cost of Deterrence: Nuclear Weapons Accidents, President John F. Kennedy was briefed in 1961 on more than 60 U.S. nuclear weapons accidents that had occurred since the end of World War II, including two instances in which "nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles" were inadvertently launched. By January 1968, Defense had publicly announced only 13 major aircraft accidents between 1958 and 1968 that involved nuclear weapons. The May 1981 accident list expanded that total to 32, including 27 aircraft accidents, one loss of a submarine, three missile incidents, and one explosion at a storage facility. Still, the 1981 list, an apparently ad hoc compilation, just barely scratched the surface. Other privately generated and official government reports put the U.S. nuclear weapons accident/incident total well above 32. A 1989 Greenpeace publication lists a total of 383 nuclear weapons involved in navy incidents between 1965 and 1977, and a 1985 General Accounting Office study noted that the navy had reported 233 incidents involving nuclear weapons between 1965 and 1983. A 1973 Sandia Laboratories report, citing a then-classified army compilation, stated that between 1950 and 1968, a total of 1,250 U.S. nuclear weapons were involved in accidents or incidents of varying severity, including 272 (22 percent) in circumstances involving impacts which, in several instances, caused the detonation of the weapon’s conventional high explosives. (All percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.) Of these 272 weapons, 107 bombs or rockets were unintentionally dropped during storage, assembly, or loading (39 percent); 48 warheads mated to missiles or re-entry vehicles were involved in handling drops and accidents on pads or in silos (18 percent); 41 bombs or warheads were aboard aircraft that crashed (15 percent); 26 warheads in containers were in accidents that occurred during storage, assembly, or loading (10 percent); 24 weapons were jettisoned or inadvertently released from aircraft or ships (9 percent); 22 weapons and warhead assemblies were involved in ground transportation crashes (8 percent); and four weapons were accidentally crushed or punctured (1.5 percent). Despite these revelations, Defense has yet to update or re-issue its 1981 paper in a more complete or exhaustive form. Some Cold War weapons-handling practices were particularly accident prone. At least one procedure, a missile warhead "recycle" or "yo-yo," involved the temporary removal of a missile re-entry vehicle to allow servicing of parts in both the warhead and the missile; the two could not be serviced while they were mated. This was a more complicated and inherently more risky procedure than a simple bomb upload or download. It is probable that at least a few of the 48 missile-warhead handling accidents cited in the 1973 Sandia study occurred during "yo-yo" procedures. Since 1988, I have assembled details of 96 U.S. nuclear weapons accidents and incidents, ranging in severity from gouges in external casings to fires and high explosive detonations. While most information about accidents and incidents other than the 32 officially disclosed cases has come from recently declassified congressional documents, there are other sources–a handful of books about U.S. nuclear weapons accidents and a February 1991 Environmental Protection Agency study which listed radioactively contaminated sites, including some sites where air force bombers had crashed."…

 

Atomic Archive: Nuclear Almanac: Broken Arrows: Nuclear Weapons Accidents

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows.shtml

Wikipedia: United States military nuclear incident terminology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_incident_terminology

Global Security: Broken Arrows

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/broken-arrow.htm

CNN Interactive: Cold War: The Bomb: Broken Arrows and Bent Spears

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/experience/the.bomb/broken.arrows/intro.html

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The oops list

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=nd00hansen