- Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon.
Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's
accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel
carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and
some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were
AWOL.
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- Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling
is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons,
a hydrogen bomb. 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 locate the bomb and secure it.
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- On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber
carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight 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 pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson,
was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson
dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Warsaw Sound, near the mouth
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 [word 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 water
off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."
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- Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Warsaw
Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force 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 hole or crater in the beach or swamp.
Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force
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 damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately,
the nuke itself didn't detonate.
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- 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 Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace
the one it had lost. "The search for this weapon was discontinued
on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested
that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the
DOD as a replacement."
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- There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon
knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force 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 joint statement to the press, 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 letter 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
occur again.
-
- That's where the matter stood for more than 42 years
until a deep sea salvage company, run by former Air Force personnel and
a CIA agent, disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to locate
it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents, the
disclosure prompted fear and outrage 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.
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- The cover-up continues. The Air Force, however, has told
local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing
to worry about. "We've looked into this particular issue from all
angles and we're very comfortable," says Major Gen. Franklin J. "Judd"
Blaisdell, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations at Air Force
headquarters in Washington. "Our biggest concern is that of localized
heavy metal contamination."
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- The Air Force even has suggested that the bomb itself
was not armed with a plutonium trigger. But this contention is disputed
by a number of factors. Howard Dixon, a former Air Force sergeant who specialized
in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that in his 31 years of experience
he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane 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 capsule." Howard
said that the Tybee Island bomb was one of two weapons lost up to that
time that contained a plutonium trigger.
-
- Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned
bomb was an "Mk-15, Mod O" hydrogen bomb, weighing four tons
and packing more than 100 times the explosive punch of the one that incinerated
Hiroshima. This was the first thermonuclear weapon deployed by the Air
Force and featured the relatively primitive design created by that evil
genius Edward Teller. The only fail- safe for this weapon was the physical
separation of the plutonium capsule (or pit) from the weapon.
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- In addition to the primary nuclear capsule, the bomb
also harbored a secondary nuclear explosive, or sparkplug, designed to
make it go thermo. This is a hollow plug about an inch in diameter made
of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (the Pentagon has never
said which) that is filled with fusion fuel, most likely lithium-6 deuteride.
Lithium is highly reactive in water. The plutonium in the bomb was manufactured
at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State and would be the oldest
in the United States. That's bad news: Plutonium gets more dangerous as
it ages.In addition, the bomb would contain other radioactive materials,
such as uranium and beryllium.
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- The bomb is also charged with 400 pounds of TNT, designed
to cause the plutonium trigger to implode and thus start the nuclear explosion.
As the years go by, those high explosives are becoming flaky, brittle and
sensitive. The bomb is most likely now buried in 5 to 15 feet of sand and
slowly leaking radioactivity into the rich crabbing grounds of the Warsaw
Sound. If the Pentagon can't find the Tybee Island bomb, others might.
That's the conclusion of Bert Soleau, a former CIA officer who now works
with ASSURE, the salvage company. Soleau, a chemical engineer, says that
it wouldn't be hard for terrorists to locate the weapon and recover the
lithium, beryllium and enriched uranium, "the essential building blocks
of nuclear weapons." What to do? Coastal residents want the weapon
located and removed. "Plutonium is a nightmare and their own people
know it," says Pam O'Brien, an anti-nuke organizer from Douglassville,
Georgia. "It can get in everything--your eyes, your bones, your gonads.
You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there."
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- The situation is reminiscent of the Palomares incident.
On January 16, 1966, a B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed
while attempting to refuel in mid-air above the Spanish coast. Three of
the H-bombs landed near the coastal farming village of Palomares. One of
the bombs landed in a dry creek bed and was recovered, battered but relatively
intact. But the TNT in two of the bombs exploded, gouging 10-foot holes
in the ground and showering uranium and plutonium over a vast area. Over
the next three months, more than 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation
was scooped up, placed in barrels and, ironically enough, shipped back
to the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Lab, where it remains. The tomato
fields near the craters were burned and buried. But there's no question
that due to strong winds and other factors much of the contaminated soil
was simply left in the area. "The total extent of the spread will
never be known," concluded a 1975 report by the Defense Nuclear Agency.
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- The cleanup was a joint operation between Air Force personnel
and members of the Spanish civil guard. The U.S. workers wore protective
clothing and were monitored for radiation exposure, but similar precautions
weren't taken for their Spanish counterparts. "The Air Force was unprepared
to provide adequate detection and monitoring for personnel when an aircraft
accident occurred involving plutonium weapons in a remote area of a foreign
country," the Air Force commander in charge of the cleanup later testified
to Congress.
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- The fourth bomb landed eight miles offshore and was missing
for several months. It was eventually located by a mini-submarine in 2,850
feet of water, where it rests to this day.
-
- Two years later, on January 21, 1968, a similar accident
occurred when a B-52 caught fire in flight above Greenland and crashed
in ice-covered North Star Bay near the Thule Air Base. The impact detonated
the explosives in all four of the plane's H-bombs, which scattered uranium,
tritium and plutonium over a 2,000-foot radius. The intense fire melted
a hole in the ice, which then refroze, encapsulating much of the debris,
including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs. The recovery
operation, conducted in near total darkness at temperatures that plunged
to minus-70 degrees, was known as Project Crested Ice. But the work crews
called it "Dr. Freezelove."
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- More than 10,000 tons of snow and ice were cut away,
put into barrels and transported to Savannah River and Oak Ridge for disposal.
Other radioactive debris was simply left on site, to melt into the bay
after the spring thaws. More than 3,000 workers helped in the Thule recovery
effort, many of them Danish soldiers. As at Palomares, most of the American
workers were offered some protective gear, but not the Danes, who did much
of the most dangerous work, including filling the barrels with the debris,
often by hand. The decontamination procedures were primitive to say the
least. An Air Force report noted that they were cleansed "by simply
brushing the snow from garments and vehicles."
-
- Even though more than 38 Navy ships were called to assist
in the recovery operation, and it was an open secret that the bombs had
been lost, the Pentagon continued to lie about the situation. In one contentious
exchange with the press, a Pentagon spokesman uttered this classic bit
of military doublespeak: "I don't know of any missing bomb, but we
have not positively identified what I think you are looking for."
-
- When Danish workers at Thule began to get sick from a
slate of illnesses, ranging from rare cancers to blood disorders, the Pentagon
refused to help. Even after a 1987 epidemiological study by a Danish medical
institute showed that Thule workers were 50 percent more likely to develop
cancers than other members of the Danish military, the Pentagon still refused
to cooperate. Later that year, 200 of the workers sued the United States
under the Foreign Military Claims Act. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the
discovery process revealed thousands of pages of secret documents about
the incident, including the fact that Air Force workers at the site, unlike
the Danes, have not been subject to long-term health monitoring. Even so,
the Pentagon continues to keep most of the material on the Thule incident
secret, including any information on the extent of the radioactive (and
other toxic) contamination.
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- These recovery efforts don't inspire much confidence.
But the Tybee Island bomb presents an even touchier situation. The presence
of the unstable lithium deuteride and the deteriorating high explosives
make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition--so dangerous,
in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue
that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.
-
- In short, there aren't any easy answers. The problem
is exacerbated by the Pentagon's failure to conduct a comprehensive analysis
of the situation and reluctance to fully disclose what it knows. "I
believe the plutonium capsule is in the bomb, but that a nuclear detonation
is improbable because the neutron generators used back then were polonium-beryllium,
which has a very short half-life," says Don Moniak, a nuclear weapons
expert with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Aiken, South
Carolina. "Without neutrons, weapons grade plutonium won't blow. However,
there could be a fission or criticality event if the plutonium was somehow
put in an incorrect configuration. There could be a major inferno if the
high explosives went off and the lithium deuteride reacted as expected.
Or there could just be an explosion that scattered uranium and plutonium
all over hell."
-
-
-
- Oops, You May Be Glowing
-
- It hasn't been an easy couple of years for the Department
of Energy: contaminated workers, nuclear fuel rods misplaced (or lost),
Hanford continuing to leak its immortal poison into the Columbia River,
the Wen Ho Lee debacle, embarrassing contempt citations for the cover-up
at Colorado's Rocky Flats, campaign finance scandals, contractors screwing
things up royally then declaring bankruptcy and on and on. So for the past
few months, the agency, anxious to be at the center of the Bush nuclear
project, which runs the gamut from new nuclear power plants to another
round of underground nuclear weapons testing, has been in full image-polishing
mode.
-
- As part of this new PR rehab program, the DOE is allowing
the public and the press into places that previously had been as difficult
to access as Area 51. But when the secretive Savannah River nuclear site
opened its gates for a public tour on July 9, things didn't quite turn
out as planned.
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- Savannah River, the big DOE waste dump/weapons complex
in South Carolina, has had its own share of problems, including a massive
spill of highly radioactive tritium into the Savannah River in 1991. Plant
managers are trying to ease public anxiety enough so that the DOE can go
forward with a Clinton-era plan to build a mixed-oxide fuel fabrication
plant, a ludicrously dangerous scheme that involves the reprocessing of
36 tons of weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
-
- The 25-person tour of the site included reporters, environmentalists
and neighbors of the plant. The tour was supposed to highlight the DOE's
newly tightened operations. But it turned out to reveal just how dangerously
slipshod the agency remains. After the tour group left the site's F- Area
"tank farm," where the most highly radioactive waste is stored
in underground tanks, Savannah River workers failed to monitor the group
for radiation exposure. "This was an appalling breach of safety standards,"
says Tom Clements, head of the Nuclear Control Institute, who was on the
tour.
-
- Savannah River managers admit the mistake, but blame
it on a logistical screw-up. "We never intended for them to get off
the bus there," says Rick Ford, a spokesman for the DOE.
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- This is refreshingly candid, but far from reassuring.
-JSC
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