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+- The Mystery of the Lost US Nuclear Bomb on Monday November 10 2008, @08:17PM Hugh Pickens
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Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that the United States abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a Nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base in 1968. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below and the high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been "destroyed" and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons as investigators found that "something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary." A search by a Star III submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was eventually abandoned since it was not possible to search the entire area where debris from the crash had spread. The view was that no-one else would be able covertly to acquire the sensitive pieces and that the radioactive material would dissolve in such a large body of water, making it harmless. "There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components," said William H Chambers, a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. "It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.""
When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
-- Winston Churchill, on formal declarations of war
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