MISSING NUCLEAR BOMB

The Missing Nuclear Bomb That No One Could Find

Nuclear Bomb

It is a cold morning during the height of the Cold War. It was around 10:30 AM on January 17, 1966. Some Spanish fishermen saw a white parcel falling from the sky, moving silently towards the Mediterranean Sea. There was something strange under it. They didn't understand what it was. Then the parcel got lost in the sea waves.

In a nearby village called Palomaris, locals noticed something different in the sky. Two large fireballs were heading towards them. Within seconds, the area was destroyed. Buildings shook, the ground collapsed from the blast, and bodies fell.

A few weeks later Philip Myers received a message on the teleprinter (a fax-like machine used to send and receive messages). He was working as a bomb disposal officer at a naval air base in eastern Sicily. He was told that there was a top secret emergency in Spain and he had to be there in three days.

However, the mission was not as secretive as the soldier expected. "It was no surprise to be called," says Myers. "The common community knew what was going on."

When he mentioned this mysterious visit at a party, the message of a top secret operation became a joke. It was embarrassing. It was intended to be a secret but my friends were telling me where I was going.

For several weeks, newspapers around the world were reporting this tragic incident. Two US military aircraft had collided in the air, dropping debris from four B28 thermonuclear bombs on Palomares. They were soon seized on the ground, but one of the bombs went missing in the southeast Mediterranean.

An unknown number

In fact, this is not the only incident in which a nuclear weapon has gone missing. Since the 1950s, there have been at least 32 'Broken Arrow' incidents in which destructive weapons were reported missing.

In many cases, these weapons are accidentally dropped or thrown during an emergency. Later most of them were found. But a total of three American bombs have gone missing. They are still missing today, hiding somewhere in the ground or water.

"We are aware of most of the American cases," says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation in California. .

Many nuclear weapons went missing during the Cold War when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were at their peak. From 1960 to 1968, there were nuclear-armed aircraft in the air at all times. It was named Operation Dome.

"We don't know about other countries," says Lewis. We know nothing about Britain, France, Russia or China. I don't think it has been fully accounted for.

The Soviet Union's nuclear history is particularly dark. By 1986, it had amassed 45,000 nuclear weapons. Several cases have come to light in which a country has lost nuclear bombs and later found them. But in the case of America, all the incidents happened on submarines and even if it was difficult to reach them, their location was known.

On April 8, 1970, the air-conditioning system of the nuclear-powered Soviet submarine K-8 caught fire. The submarine was passing through the Bay of Biscay, which is a very dangerous part of the coast of the North-East Atlantic Ocean touching Spain and France. The area is notorious for severe storms and many ships have met their end here. The said submarine was loaded with four nuclear torpedoes and when it sank, this radioactive substance also went to the bottom of the sea with it.

However, these submarines or ships did not always stay where they sank. In 1974, a Soviet K-129 sank in the Pacific Northwest of Hawaii, carrying three nuclear missiles. The United States soon found out and made a secret attempt to obtain the nuclear prize, Lewis says, 'which in itself was a story of true insanity.'