The search for the 4th hydrogen bomb dropped over Palomares, Spain
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Who Do You Call When Nuclear Weapons Go Missing? Mathematicians. Here’s What You Need To Remember: With no witnesses, no debris and a search area in the least understood part of the world’s ocean, there’s little even mathematical wizards can do. But even then, few thought 50 years ago that the lost bomb of Palomares would ever turn up. National Interest, 10 May 20
When a routine Cold War operation went terribly wrong, two planes and seven men died, a village got contaminated and a hydrogen bomb disappeared.
The search and cleanup required 1,400 American and Spanish personnel, a dozen aircraft, 27 U.S. Navy ships and five submarines. It cost more than $120 million and a lot of diplomatic capital. And it made an obscure 18th-century mathematical theorem a practical solution to finding veritable needles in haystacks. Around 10 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1966, two B-52Gs of the 31st Bomb Squadron based out of North Carolina approached two KC-135 tankers over the Spanish coast southwest of Cartagena.
The bombers each carried four 1.5-megaton B-28 hydrogen bombs as part of Operation Chrome Dome, a U.S. deterrence mission that placed nuclear-armed bombers on the Soviet Union’s doorsteps. The resulting breakup destroyed the tanker in a fireball of blazing jet fuel. All four crew on board the tanker died. One hundred tons of flaming wreckage fell upon the arid hamlet of Palomares, near the Mediterranean Sea.
Three of the four H-bombs aboard the bomber fell there, too. Within 24 hours, a U.S. Air Force disaster team arrived from Torrejon Air Base near Madrid. Specialists from the Los Alamos and Sandia weapons labs — and Air Force logistics units — descended on the tiny rural town.
The search teams found the three H-bombs within a day. One landed on a soft slope, its casing relatively intact. The high explosives within the other two bombs detonated on impact, blowing 100-foot-wide craters in the dry soil and scattering plutonium, uranium and tritium across the landscape. The region’s long history of human habitation complicated the land search. Almeria, the province where Palomares sits, hosted a mining industry for more than 5,000 years. Countless mine shafts, diggings and depressions pepper its dry landscape made famous by the spaghetti westerns filmed there. ,,,,,,, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/who-do-you-call-when-nuclear-weapons-go-missing-152441
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