The U.S. military is missing six nuclear weapons (2021)

I enjoyed Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 even more!

> The initial explosion catapulted the 740-ton silo door away from the silo.

> The W53 thermonuclear warhead landed about 100 feet (30 m) from the launch complex's entry gate.

Crazy to move that much weight and Lucky to have the warhead intact.

Was 9 years old and living in Little Rock at the time. Just 20 or 30 miles away. Remember the news reports and my proto-survivalist mom going into action. Telling me everything we’d have to do if the nuke went off.

Had relatives who lived not too far off from Damascus. I remember driving that way past the silos. Even as a kid, you could easily pick out the silos. They were hidden behind foliage with no identifying signs. But each and every one had the exact same driveway and culverts. Very different than the farm entrances and dirt roads. It was a weird time. Driving past a bunch of possible world-enders on the way to see Aunt Gloria.

That scene in The Day After, when the ICBMs were launched from the silos based out of a farm, hit me particularly hard. That’s what rural central Arkansas would have looked like.

Looking up broken arrow incidents is pretty horrifying. Wikipedia's "military nuclear accidents" list isn't even a full list - just notable ones - and it's still absurdly long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

July 28, 1957, two nukes jettisoned from airplane into the Atlantic, never recovered. February 5, 1958, bomber collides mid-air, jettisons nuke off coast of Georgia, never recovered. July 6, 1959, cargo plane crashes on takeoff, explosives do not go off in the fire. January 24, 1961, bomber catches fire while in air, two hydrogen bombs dropped over North Carolina, one comes close to detonation.

And on, and on, and on. America in the Cold War kept nuclear weapons continuously aloft along the Soviet border, but the program experienced so many crashes that it had to be scuttled. In the final one, the nuclear payload ruptured: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash

Thanks for the recommendations!

I concur, Command and Control is a very interesting book. Also, while the Damascus Titan missile explosion is well known, there was also a horrific fire in a Titan silo in 1965 that killed 53 workers. (Weirdly, the missile present at the time was the same one in the Damascus explosion, although it wasn't armed with a nuclear bomb in the first incident.) On the topic of Titan, the Titan Missile Museum near Tucson is worth a visit if you're in the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Searcy_missile_silo_fire

Your link sent me down a two-hour rabbithole involving the Vela Incident and the treatment of Mordechai Vanunu.

> 1968 - USS Scorpion attack sub sank somewhere near the Azores Islands.

Phil Ochs wrote a song about this, "The Scorpion Departs, But Never Returns"[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbiJR-bqSfw

Thank you. Both for the list, and for giving me a quick way to check that this is still about those six old incidents, and not some six new ones.

Also the Scorpion wreck has been surveyed twice and imaging shows the nuclear weapons are still there in the wreck. Wreck is ~3k meters deep, so no one is going down there to get themselves a 1960s vintage nuke whose only value is the fissile material.

An entity capable of executing that recovery operation is capable of making their own, buying one from a less savory nation state, etc.

Prior to 1968 we lost a nuke on average once every 3 years. Then miraculously after ramping up production not a single one was lost over the next 50...

If you were to find one of these, would it be easy to set it off?

Wow I just looked up the second last one, what a crazy event.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Philippine_Sea_A-4_incide...

"The attack jet fell over the side during a training exercise while being rolled from the number 2 hangar bay to the number 2 elevator. The pilot, the aircraft, and the B43 nuclear bomb were never recovered from the 16,000 ft depth."

> 1968 - USS Scorpion attack sub sank somewhere near the Azores Islands.

Hadn't really know about that, and I thought I knew lots of stuff about the Cold War.

Also, the Kursk incident that happened ~30 years later and which resulted in approximately the same number of victims (118 vs 99 for the Scorpion) was presented by the Western press as this cataclysmic event for Russia, an event that was proving that the Russian State was of no good, structurally speaking. For comparison, apparently the only thing that the West managed to create about the Scorpion sinking was a song, not even a Hollywood B movie.

Jagdstaffel 66 - Pilot Was Killed

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R0aww_EzOCk

It seems unlikely. Most of them were either lost on US soil or lost along with military personnel who died.

But the more convincing logic is: why would the US want to do that? The fewer other nations have nuclear weapons, the more power the US has over them, either because it can threaten to attack them or because it can provide nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Stationing US weapons in a foreign country and getting to set up a forward base? Heck yeah. Giving up control of those weapons and maybe having them turned against you decades down the line? Not a chance.

Everything is possible. But please, don't abuse the word "hypothesis". This is reserved for things that are not proven yet but there are some strongly supporting facts and there exists, at least hypothetically, a way to test it.

> Could they have been delivered to another nation in a clandestine way and reported missing to cover that loss?

If you assume an very slow conspiracy that started in 1950 when the US was denying nuclear technology to the UK despite them helping to develop it during WWII, lasted nearly twenty years to transfer 6 weapons, and involved staging a bunch of accidents and murdering US servicemembers to give it plausibility, sure.

But, realistically, no, this is bad even as conspiracy theories go.

> To me it seems viable and probably if my hypothesis is correct there's a country that became a nuclear power soon after we stopped losing them

The nearest after that would be India, and its not particularly close.

are we just making things up now?

That's a plot element in "The Sum of All Fears"...how the US delivered weapons-grade plutonium to Israel in 1968.

Poor inventory practices/ mistake seems most likely compared to a conspiracy that really doesn’t make much sense.

Seems like it would be pretty easy to just claim it was damaged or otherwise remove it from inventory in a way that it doesn’t appear missing…. let alone all sorts of other questions.

If you want to give another nation nuclear capabilities, you give them plans and documents. You don't give them a live bomb and say, "You figure it out"

PS

I assume you are referring to Israel. Just come out and say it.

Nuclear weapons have a shelf life, typically around 10 years, and will need to be remanufactured when they expire.

So surreptitiously gifting them isn't a permanent solution.

It's known that the United States provided secret aid to the French nuclear weapons program (seemingly) without actually delivering France a bomb. Seems unlikely that they would have gone further with another country.

I'm guessing the nuclear material is!

The bombs themselves must be useless by now?

I dont know anything whatsoever about any of it.

But at a guess I'd wager the Plutonium and Uranium is still good! :-)

I'd actually be surprised if any of them were viable as a weapon.

None of them are. The material in the weapons needs to be highly enriched to work, and through physics of radioactive decay it's slowly turning itself into less enriched version which wouldn't explode. Nuclear bombs have to be serviced at least once a decade to remain functional. Not to mention that they are incredibly precise devices and any crash will have undoubtedly damaged them beyond any possible repair. The worst you could do with a recovered core is turn it into a dirty bomb(bomb which uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material around), but any group interested in doing that could surely procure radioactive material without recovering 50 year old bombs from the bottom of the ocean.

That was my thought too, most of these happened in the early days of nukes. Hopefully the rate of losses has truly gone to zero post 1968, though I wonder if such a loss would be reported today if it happened.

It depends. If I remember some bombs would use tritium (half life 12 years) to introduce neutrons to ensure chain reaction at right time. As to the fissile material itself, those all have long half lives and should be viable for tens of thousands of years.

Actually I am wondering it the number of missing nukes is even higher...

How long do these incidents take to be declassified?

There could be more recent accidents that aren’t publicly known.

Probably two for every lost submarine, at least two subs with two nuclear torpedos each.

The US had Operation Chrome Dome shuffling them around by air.

It's not the bombs that are worrisome.

The Radiological Accident in Lia, Georgia (country, not state) from 2001 - https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1660web-81...

> A serious radiological accident occurred in Georgia on 2 December 2001, when three inhabitants of the village of Lia found two metal objects in the forest while collecting firewood. These objects were 90Sr sources with an activity of 1295 TBq. The three inhabitants used the objects as heaters when spending the night in the forest. The major cause of the accident was the improper and unauthorized abandonment of radiation sources in Georgia and the absence of clear labels or radiation signs on the sources warning of the potential radiation hazard. Under the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency (Assistance Convention), the Georgian authorities requested assistance from the IAEA to advise on the dose assessment, source recovery and medical management of those involved in the accident.

There are some interesting things in there with some engineering challenges... but I will warn you that beyond page 36 it is NSFL. That section begins (the text isn't bad unless you know what you're reading):

> 6. OVERVIEW OF THE MEDICAL ASPECTS

> Following the exposure on 2 December 2001, all three patients exhibited in the first 24 h symptoms of nausea, vomiting, asthenia (weakness), headaches and dizziness, followed by cutaneous radiation syndrome (CRS). These early clinical manifestations and anamnesis of the patients strongly indicated ARS of a haematological type for the three patients. Furthermore, Patient 1-DN developed transitory oropharyngeal syndrome.

Haha like an idiot I left my quote before even reading the article and now I see it actually opens with it.

Just found them. They are just in Taiwan."

Easements are aimed less at would-be terrorists than unlucky construction crews.

You think that evildoers might not only be able to conduct an excavation so difficult that it stymied the US military, but that they’d be able to do it without attracting official attention?

If the US military couldn't find it when the scene was fresh, what's the likelihood someone could establish a large and sufficient enough excavation operation to find it, and remove it, before somebody bothered to go "what's all that ruckus about" and call the US military?

The site is close to main road and farmhouse. The farmer who owns the field is definitely going to notice the heavy equipment. Assuming the coordinates are right, Google Maps shows that there is a stand of trees in middle of field.

but (?) only if he's in range of someone's participating bluetooth, which ... transitive closure ... is network connected?

The scraped soil was only a fraction of what was contaminated. As of 2023 Spain is still in negotiations with the US about removal of contaminated soil.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/06/spain-renews-c...

Why would they have to fabricate in secret or use crashed bombs? The number and location of nuclear weapons is tightly held secret. There are so many that there is no way someone else could track them. Anyone in US would wonder where why bombs are at "storage facility".

Also, putting nuclear bombs in foreign cities is a dumb idea. What happens when Russia or China finds one? That is an act of war. It is also unnecessary since US, and Russia and China, have hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs. Enough to survive any first strike and produce more retaliation than a few hidden bombs could. I could see people in early Cold War thinking it was a good idea, but they would worry about losing control of weapons.

The one place could see hidden nukes is shipping containers. Not ship them around the world, but hold them for retaliation. Keep them in safe location away from targets and has access to untargeted port. Then send them out when shipping resumes after lose nuclear war. But that is very modern.

Probably starring Gene Hackman and that other guy