America’s Missing Atomic Bombs

On the morning of January 17, 1966, a B-52-bomber was heading for a rendezvous with a KC-135 Stratotanker over the Spanish village of Palomares. But as the bomber pilot was positioning his aircraft beneath the tanker, the two planes collided—fuel drenched both aircraft, and there was an explosion.

The four airmen in the tanker died along with three in the bomber. Four of the bomber crewmen managed to parachute to safety, but the wreckage of the planes that rained down on Palomares included three of the hydrogen bombs the bomber had been carrying. (The fourth fell into the Mediterranean.) Though there was no nuclear blast, conventional explosives in two of the bombs detonated, which dispersed radioactive plutonium over650 acres of land.

The intact weapons were soon recovered from the ground, but it took months to fi nd and recover the remaining bomb from the sea. Unfortunately, Palomares was not an isolated incident: Offi cially the U.S. is missing 11 nuclear weapons—which could still be detonated.

Independent experts estimate there have been up to 700 incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons. Sometimes a plane carrying atomic bombs vanishes over the sea, or a nuclear-armed submarine sinks to the bottom of the ocean, or a bomb rolls off an aircraft carrier. The military would rather not admit such incidents happen; it prefers to call them “broken arrows” and impose a news blackout.

The high number is a direct result of the Cold War: In the years leading up to the 1966 Palomares incident, the U.S. Strategic Air Command was flying bombers right to the edge of theIron Curtain. The purpose of Operation Chrome Dome was to ensure the U.S.could quickly strike or retaliate in the event of nuclear war with the SovietUnion.

At any given time there were a dozen B-52s in the air, carrying their payload of hydrogen bombs. Each of the Mark 28 thermonuclear bombs that fell on or near Palomares had 70 times the destructive power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Only after another accident over Greenland in 1968 did the U.S. Air Force end Operation Chrome Dome.The development of intercontinental missiles has made this use of B-52s obsolete. Since 1968 the U.S. has not officially admitted to losing a nuclear weapon, but no one knows how many may still be out there. “It is believed up to 50 nuclear weapons were lost during the Cold War,” says nucleararmament expert Otfried Nassauer.