Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast? 820
securitas writes "Both CNN and ABC News report that a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 may have been found. The 'Mark 15, Mod 0' nuclear bomb was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean off Savannah after a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter collided in mid-air. 'The 7,600-pound, 12-foot-long thermonuclear bomb contained 400 pounds of high explosives as well as uranium' and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke,, who said that radiation levels were from seven to 10 times higher than normal. If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
The Sum Of All Fears (Score:5, Informative)
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Simon
Re:Clearly a job for A.L.V.I.N. (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Boom? (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't know in detail how a hydrogen bomb is constructed, but roughly the process goes like:
Igniting conventional high-explosives (400 pounds here) compresses uranium enough to trigger a (relatively small, but what's small in this context) thermonuclear explosion. That thermonuclear explosion in turn causes 'heavy water' to go into a far more powerful (secondary) nuclear explosion.
It's not easy to cause this whole sequence. So don't worry, any such event won't happen by accident. Being underwater for a couple of decades, only helps to make it less likely.
North Carolina lost bomb (Score:5, Informative)
Not a new finding (Score:2, Informative)
As for radiation leakage, that might be a legitimate separate concern.
Re:No worrys. (Score:5, Informative)
Steaming pile of bullshit. I swear, if the subject has the word "nuclear" in it, Slashdot's about as reliable as the Weekly World News.
The isotope of plutonium used in nuclear weapons is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. After 5 years, almost all of the Pu-239 in a nuclear weapon will still be Pu-239.
In addition the Mark 15 Mod 0's an odd bomb.
Modern thermonuclear weapons are three-stage devices. There's a small fission trigger, whose yield is boosted by tritium injection. The radiation from the trigger ignites fusion in a second stage of lithium deuteride. Then the neutrons coming off of the fusion stage can be used to fission the bomb's tamper, made of uranium-238. U-238 won't sustain a chain reaction, but it'll fission merrily if you bombard it with fast neutrons. So, basically the boosted primary accounts for a minority of the weapon's yield, and the second stage, the fusion segment, accounts for the majority. But you can design things so that the majority of the yield comes from fission of the U-238 tamper.
The Mark 15's kind of an inversion of this. It was an early fusion bomb, back when they were still using liquid deuterium in some designs. In the Mark 15 Mod 0, the third stage is the bomb's casing, which is made of highly-enriched uranium, almost pure U-235.
Yes, the bomb's casing is almost-weapons-grade uranium. By making the case out of HEU, they didn't need to worry so much about efficient compression of the fusion stage, because the fissioning of that huge amount of HEU would send the whole thing thermonyclear. Inefficient, sure, but they hadn't quite figured everything out yet.
That's why this bomb's a concern. According to the Air Force, the primary, the 'pit,' wasn't placed in the bomb, so the primary can't detonate. Even if they're bullshitting, the twin traumas of impact and age have probably so screwed up the internals of the bomb that the only detonation possible would be low-order, a fizzle, biggest problem would be the environmental effects of scattering that much radioactive material into the river.
So that's not the concern. The concern is that whoever recovers it now has his hands on well over a ton of weapons-grade uranium, easily enough to make not one, but several crude Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs. I mean, this was a bomb that had a total yield of 1.7 megatons, and 1.3 megatons of that came from fission. That's a lot of U-235.
This was the device tested as Castle Nectar.
Re: Boom? (Score:2, Informative)
Besides, according to my sources, this bomb lacked the fissionable trigger. It may still make a moderate conventional boom if disturbed.
Re:WTF (Score:1, Informative)
Big Concern (Score:5, Informative)
It should be retrieved. If this were a modern fission-fusion-fission bomb, it wouldn't be a concern. The Air Force says it doesn't have the fission trigger installed, so with a modern device that means you don't have a bomb. You need a fission bomb to ignite the lithium deuteride in the fusion stage, and you need the neutrons from the fusion stage to fission the U-238 jacket. So, again, no primary, no bomb. Leave it there, rivers already feed natural uranium into the oceans at a rate of 3.2x10^4 tons every year.
But this isn't a modern bomb, it was a transitional device between the earliest, liquid-dueterium monsters and modern three-stage designs. They weren't yet sure how to achieve efficient compression of the fusion stage, so they wrapped the bomb in highly-enriched uranium to be sure the fusion stage would light off. The bomb had a design yield of 1.7 megatons, and something like 1.3 megatons of that would be due to the fission of the U-235 jacket.
That means that this bomb contains a lot of almost-weapons-grade uranium. Again, 1.3 megatons of yield from the fission of uranium. The largest pure-fission bomb we ever detonated was the 500-kiloton Mark 18 prototype, and that used about 60 kilograms of HEU. Assuming linear scaling, that means we're looking at upwards of 156 kilograms of HEU in this bomb. Critical mass of uranium's about 16 kilograms. Double that to overengineer a bomb, and that means whoever gets their mitts on this thing could build 4 or 5 crude Hiroshima-type bombs, each with a yield of several kilotons.
That's bad. They need to retrive this thing, even if there's a risk they blow it up in situ. I'd rather have some of this stuff scattered in an unusable form offshore than have Mohammed and his band of Merry Pranksters get their hands on 4 or 5 cities' worth of U-235.
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:3, Informative)
Trust me when I say that most of the ocean floor is deep enough that once you get beyond the continental shelf, it would take a major government to retrieve anything from the ocean floor. Mainly cause that is over a mile down.
the treasure hunt is on! (Score:5, Informative)
WEAPONS LOST/MISSING
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean - somewhere between Dover Air Force Base (Delaware) and Atlantic City, New Jersey
February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia (this story)
September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island [southwhidbey.com], Washington. Since this is slashdot, I feel obligated to point out that this is about 30 miles from Redmond [microsoft.com].
January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina [ibiblio.org]
December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean (only miles from the Japanese island chain of Ryukyu)
Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean - 400-500 miles southwest of the Azores.
Any slashdotters have a geiger counter, a boat, and some free time?
Re:Can't help but wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
It's been known for a long time that it's been missing...like, since the plane carrying it dropped it. The problem has always been that they were never able to locate it; granted the Government only searched for it for 9 weeks immediately after the incident. You'd think with our current technology the military would have been able to find it now. In 2001, the Air Force conducted a study where they claim the safest thing to do with it is leave it where it's at. Whether or not that report is actually accurate...I won't speculate.
Plutonium Trigger (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No worrys. (Score:3, Informative)
Bad estimate. In Ivy King, 60 kilograms of HEU yielded 500 kilotons, so this one's probably around 150, 200 kilograms. Something like that.
Re:OT: yes, islam is nirvana (Score:1, Informative)
Its like telling jews to stop harping about their problems.
Im from Greece and Islam has been hell in the region for over a thousand years, it spreads like a virus.
U dont like that? Tough.
Its easy to be PC when your people havent had to live with Islam. In mu life Ive witnessed the Cyprus affair, my lebanese wifes parents fleeing a country where christians have been dwindled down to few. Bosnia with its heavy US/Al Alquaeda influence, Kosovo; american sponsored ethnic cleansing of 1 million christians, 100,000 jews, 250,000 gypsies in less than 3 decades, and now the macedonia crisis (again us sponsered). YOU might not have a problem with islam but thats because the numbers are very low.
Come back to me in 50 years and tell me how France and Britain will fare when the demography catches up with them (I lived in England and I know how the Hindu and Sikh and even black communities outdistance the islamic groups).
Within 20 years, both countries will have serious problems and when the muslims become 40% of the population, you will start seeing open violence.
If you think Im exxagerating, tell me the real name of Constatinople, which was the seat of christianity for one and a half millenia?
The US southwest will have serious demographic problems within 20 years but nothing in mexican history can lead anyone to think that there could be even anything remotely resembling islamic expansionism.
theo
Re:No worrys. (Score:5, Informative)
Dirty Bomb (Score:3, Informative)
Then again, some people believe in the Tooth Fairy, so what are you going to do?
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:5, Informative)
Re:RIGHT - Err. Slightly wrong on the Neutron Bomb (Score:1, Informative)
Thus killing everyone, but leaving buildings standing and infrastructure intact and able to be used.
The reduction in fission products (fallout) was a secondary requirement.
Re:RIGHT (Score:5, Informative)
Close, very close, but not quite right. The trigger is a single fission bomb; the radiation it produces is redirected cleverly so as to compress the fusion charge (a concept referred to as a "Hohlraum"). In some designs there are more than two "stages" where fission triggers fusion, which then is used to trigger more fission or, in some cases, another fusion stage (the Soviet "Tsar Bomba" was a multistage fusion device of 60-120 Mtons. Check out the Nuclear Weapons FAQ [virtualschool.edu] for more info.
The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.
Not the neutron bomb I'm familiar with. It was a very low-yield fission-triggered device that had a fusion stage. There has long been a dream at LLNL to figure out how to initiate fusion with a conventional high-explosive trigger, but to my knowledge, no such weapon has ever been tested or fielded. The neutron bomb of the 80's would have created plenty of fallout and radioactivity; the point was it created less blast damage and so didn't sound as bad (the fallout was sort-of ignored).
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride,....Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero.
I think there is a small mis-understanding here. A fusion weapon of this type uses tritium to boost the yield of the fission trigger, NOT as a component in the fusion main stage fuel. The fusion stage creates the tritum needed at the time of explosion by neutron-spallation of the Lithium. So, after 4 half-lives the fission trigger yield will be greatly reduced - probably enough to prevent any significant second-stage fusion. This means that if it exploded, the yield would be in the 10-kiloton range, not the megaton range. However, if the fusion stage were to ignite, it would do so with as much yield as ever.
Complete list of nuclear accidents (Score:3, Informative)
List here [wikipedia.org]
I especially like the one they dropped in a farmers field but they couldn't dig it up so they bought the field.
Also kinda scary that Rocky Flats [wikipedia.org] which has had it's share of disasters is pretty much in my backyard.
-Mikey P
Re:Big Concern (Score:3, Informative)
You could have mentioned Basque extremists and IRA, but those are not very active. Red Brigades are gone for decades. Unabomber sits in jail. So pretty much the grandparent is right, 99% of modern terrorism is perpetrated by Islamists.
Re:The Sum Of All Fears (Score:5, Informative)
That would have been the Glomar Explorer, built and financed by Howard Hughes as a front for the CIA. It was designed for only one mission, to recover a Soviet Golf-class(?) early ballistic missile submarine. The sub had sank in water deep enough that it was considered unrecoverable. The Soviets felt that it was reliably in deep enough water that they could forget about it, it could never fall in US hands any more than they could recover it.
Enter the CIA. (Motto: nothing is impossible if you throw enough money at it) Enter Howard Hughes (Motto: nothing too crazy to throw money at) They had all the time in the world to locate the sub, design and build the Glomar Explorer. The Explorer looked innocent enough, but it had a giant claw that could be lowered from the keel of the ship to grasp a very large object very deep. Beyond Top Secret stuff, even now it sounds like something out of a James Bond movie (inspiration for The Spy Who Loved Me?). Once word finally leaked out, as it always does, the US admitted trying but said they couldn't get the sub. It is now pretty much universally accepted AFAIK, that they did get it.
The Golf sub is incredibly crude by todays standards. It carried very large, equally crude ballistic missiles so tall that they stood upright all the way to the top of the rather large sail. Still, for it's time it was quite an acheivement, and I'm sure quite a bit was learned from it.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
All that information is openly available in books and science magazines. The real secret is in exact knowledge of how to do things, not in the principle how things should be working. For example, the physicists knew how to make the bomb before the Manhattan Project started; and it took years and billions of dollars to actually make it work.
I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
Probably everyone could do so. The real question would be "how close to the optimum yield you will get?" - because the easiest way to make a bomb would be to take two pieces of uranium in two hands, and to bring them together as fast as you can. This will result in -some- explosion, but not very powerful one. The secret is in how you assemble the critical mass in under microseconds, and those who know won't tell.
Hey I just saw this on the Discovery Channel! (Score:5, Informative)
When Nixon was elected he was told about the sub and authorized raising it. The Glomar Explorer lifted the entire sub, but then the lifting contraption broke and 2/3 of the sub fell back to the floor. They got the front third and recovered six bodies (which they buried at sea in a russian-style ceremony), and they recoverd some code information (though I doubt codes from 1950's were much use in 1974!).
The Russians completely covered up the fact that they lost the sub, and the Americans did not say they had found it, so when the story about the Glomar Explorer leaked out, it was also the first anybody had heard about the sub sinking!
Text for those without yahoo club access (Score:2, Informative)
So? They were warned. (Score:5, Informative)
On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, 'Fundamental Policy to be Followed hensceforth in the Conduct of the War,' which asserted 'we shall
They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. The Allied commanders assumed that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese would lives would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already experienced, it would be in the range of 10-20 million.
The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion became unavoidable. On 1 August, 820 B29's unloaded 6,600 tons of explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America's one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan's eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be 'obliterated' had been dropped two days before . No notice was taken..."
-- Johnson, Paul: Modern Times
Read your history.
Re:Hmm... (Score:1, Informative)
It's Plutonium that needs to be compressed quickly (in a few microseconds), and even that presents no particular engineering challenge. The Indians were able to do so in 1974.
Re:Civilian population? (Score:2, Informative)
And finally, industrial or not, they were still civilians.