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Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

1950 - Plane with engine trouble dropped over Pacific Ocean so that when it might crash it wouldn't crash with a nuclear bomb on it.

1956 - B-47 ran out of gas over Mediterranean.

1958 - B-47 having difficulty to land jettisoned somewhere near Wassaw Sound near the mouth of the Savannah River so that it wouldn't crash with a nuclear bomb bon it.

1961 - B-52 crashed shortly after taking off. Most of it was dug up. (Dr. Jack ReVelle obituary from Jan 2023 - https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-bro... )

1965 - A-4E rolled off the deck of the USS Ticonderoga into the Pacific Ocean near Japan (Japan wasn't happy about it)

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

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This isn't a "hey, there are a bunch of nukes out there in the hands of (more) irresponsible people."

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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.

I would hope even small nation states have greater resources than James Cameron.

If you think about it, the actual disposable wealth of a lot of small nations is probably less than what Cameron himself could marshal and spend if he wanted to. A nation in the best case needs to get the buy in of its people and administrators in order to spend a large sum of money on an expensive project. The budget for that project has to compete with all of the other expenses and ambitions that the nation has.

The difference is that for James Cameron's projects could rely on buying existing expertise from contractors. A small nation has to build that themselves in secret.

One would, but well he is James Cameron.

Any determined nation could take that.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone hasn't already taken it, and left a dummy weapon in its place.

Sure, deep sea exploration by humans is hard... But using unmanned craft, they're mostly impervious to pressure.

They could be nice honeypot locations for the US to continuously monitor, to see who turns up with robotic submersibles. An early warning system for identifying actors with nuclear aspirations.

Why bother? You could get uranium much more easily from other sources.

It's already enriched and comes with a working design.

For a non-nuclear nation, that would be all they'd need to become a nuclear nation.

Then blow it up in a test explosion to show the world, and then they could work slowly on making another bomb while bluffing that they have lots ready to go.

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."

Wait, they train with live nukes? Why? Just in case the US needs to nuke North Korea? A military exercise is taking place as we speak, all while Kim Jong Um is launching ICBMs and issuing threats to show off.

Probably because the only real way to know you can fly with real nukes is to fly with real nukes. Anyone who has done integration testing with mocked stuff knows you never have a perfect analog.

Imagine if the practice nukes armed with an “ARM” command, but the real ones expect “ARM\n”… that kinda stuff.

Or "arm, please"... nuclear weapons demand respect :)

"That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point."

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.

More recently, in 2007, six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each loaded with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, were mistakenly loaded onto a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52H heavy bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and transported to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The nuclear warheads in the missiles were supposed to have been removed before the missiles were taken from their storage bunker. The missiles with the nuclear warheads were not reported missing, and remained mounted to the aircraft at both Minot and Barksdale for 36 hours. During this period, the warheads were not protected by the various mandatory security precautions for nuclear weapons.

What you refer to is different from the conversation about missing weapons that have not been recovered.

> 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

> 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.

What I thought was excruciating about the Kursk, beyond Russia refusing foreign assistance for almost two days, is if it had been stood on end where it sank, the hull would have breached the surface of the water by over 170ft (sank in 330ft of water, hull length 505.2ft). fwiw, Arnaud Jerald holds the world record depth reached by a free diver, 367.5 feet.

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...

The change was that in 1968, the Air Force stopped flying active patrols with nuclear armed bombers. They had bombers continuously in the air carrying live nuclear weapons. A lot of the nuclear accidents were really bomber accidents.

Two in this list were from accidents on aircraft and submarine with tactical nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons weren't removed until later.

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

In short, no.

Most of them are in deep water so recovery alone would be a nigh insurmountable task, they all have been sitting in salt water corroding for 65+ years, and they all have been radioactively decaying for the same period. You'd be remanufacturing them from scratch essentially, and probably could have come by the materials with the same budget that the recovery operation would cost.

Regardless of security, and recovery, and repair expertise, the nuclear explosion point would not work anymore.

Asking for a friend?

Jagdstaffel 66 - Pilot Was Killed

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

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