[SPEAKER_00]: morning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. [SPEAKER_00]: The most destructive devices humanity has ever created are nuclear bombs. [SPEAKER_00]: They're so destructive that many believe intelligent beings from the cosmos began visiting Earth after their use in World War II. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, imagine losing one.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not just a plot from novels and movies, but incredibly, there have been real incidents where nuclear bombs went missing. [SPEAKER_00]: There's even a term for it, and if you're a fan of John Wu, you know what that is. [SPEAKER_00]: broken era. [SPEAKER_00]: Defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons, the result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating theft or loss of the weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out of all the things we find frightening, a missing nuke should be at the top of the list. [SPEAKER_00]: It's surprising that these stories are not more well-known. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of strange. [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the show, I'm your host Michael May, lover of all things strange unusual and unsolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Truth be told, this week's episode, I originally researched and wrote a first draft of a few years ago right when I started the podcast, I set it aside thinking it's not a strange enough for the show, [SPEAKER_00]: But I had a scheduling change this week with an interview, so I pulled this back out, and I wanted to do it because it's terrifying.
[SPEAKER_00]: It might be this scariest subject I've ever covered on the show, at least to me, and I'd love to know what you think about it, so feel free to give me a message after you listen. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm gonna cover three true stories of missing nuclear weapons, and I'm gonna begin with probably the most well-known out of all of these, and that's the lost bomb of Tybee Island.
[SPEAKER_00]: On February 4, 1958, late in the evening, there was a routine training mission over the southeast United States. [SPEAKER_00]: Air Force Colonel Howard Richardson was piloting a B-47 strategy at bomber carrying a 7600 pound mark 15 hydrogen bomb. [SPEAKER_00]: This was part of a simulated bombing run and the mission was a success, so Richardson turned around and headed to base.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, there was another training mission going on, and this included three fighter jets including an F-86 Saber, flown by Lieutenant Clarence Stort. [SPEAKER_00]: A few hours after midnight on February 5th, with each pilot unaware of the other's mission or position, Stort collided midair with Richardson's bomber. [SPEAKER_00]: The impact sheared off the fighter's wing and badly damaged the bomber.
[SPEAKER_00]: Richardson's B-47 remained airborne, but with its fuselage wounded and a nuclear bomb in its bay, he faced an agonizing dilemma, attempt an emergency landing with a bomb on board, or jettison it into the sea to avoid the risk of detonation on impact. [SPEAKER_00]: Richardson chose to drop the bomb into the dark waters around Wassau Sound near Tybee Island, Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thermonuclear device was roughly 12 feet long plummeted from about 7200 feet and disappeared into the shallow coastal sea. [SPEAKER_00]: The B-47 managed to limp back and land safely at Hunter Air Force Base, the crisis, however, was only beginning. [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere off Tybee Island, [SPEAKER_00]: Interesting side story here. [SPEAKER_00]: Stuart, who was the pilot of the jet that went down. [SPEAKER_00]: He was able to eject and land in the wilderness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a PJ Jones and a Sun Sidney found him. [SPEAKER_00]: However, they were African-American and apparently they were not welcome in the area they were hunting in because of their race. [SPEAKER_00]: So they asked a white neighbor to take care of the pilot until someone could come get them. [SPEAKER_00]: The neighbor was asked to take credit for finding the pilot, which he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's an interesting side story that I won't go down any further, but that, you know, paints a picture of the time in the area of the country for sure. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, teams of Navy divers and Air Force personnel spring into action. [SPEAKER_00]: For over two months, they swept a three-square mile area using handheld sonar and cables.
[SPEAKER_00]: and locals began to refer to the weapon as the Taipei bomb, and these locals had an unimaginable feeling of dread and fear as they should. [SPEAKER_00]: By April 16, 1958 after exhaustive efforts, the search was called off, and the bomb could not be found. [SPEAKER_00]: It was presumed to be buried under 5 to 15 feet of mud [SPEAKER_00]: and there it remains to this day. [SPEAKER_00]: But how dangerous is this lost nuke?
[SPEAKER_00]: Initially the Air Force claimed the bomb was not capable of a nuclear blast, they said it's plutonium pit, which is the core needed to ignite a nuclear explosion, had been removed and replaced with a dummy 150-pound lead plug, this assurance was widely accepted for decades. [SPEAKER_00]: Then in 1994, declassified 1966 congressional testimony came to light, [SPEAKER_00]: that the weapon was in fact a complete functional bomb with its plutonium core installed.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that is true, the stakes of this bomb are terrifying. [SPEAKER_00]: A fully armed bark 15 has an explosive yield of up to 3.8 megatons, roughly 190 times more powerful than the [SPEAKER_00]: Had it detonated, it could have produced a fireball over a mile wide and lethal thermal radiation extending over a dozen miles, and that's not even calculating in the effect of the fallout.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, the bomb was not in an armed state, and multiple safety mechanisms would have needed to fail for a nuclear explosion to occur, but still, the conventional explosives inside the bomb alone could have caused a devastating blast or spread radioactive material if detonated. [SPEAKER_00]: The U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: Department of Energy believes it is safest, left untouched. [SPEAKER_00]: As long as it remains buried, it poses little, immediate hazard as disturbing as that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: A 2001 Air Force report concluded that if the bomb is still intact, its high explosive might pose a serious risk to recovery crews and the environment if it's mishandled. [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, let's sleep in nuclear dogs lie. [SPEAKER_00]: Over the years, occasional treasure hunters and concerned citizens have tried to locate the Tybee bomb.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2004, a retired Air Force officer Derek Duke claimed to have detected unusual radiation readings offshore, but subsequent investigations determined the readings came from natural sources in the sediment. [SPEAKER_00]: There were even rumors that perhaps the Soviets had secretly snatched the Tybee bomb in the late 1950s, [SPEAKER_00]: but there's no evidence to support that theory. [SPEAKER_00]: And even though catastrophe was inverted, this 3.8 Megaton weapon is still out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: The missing suitcase nuke of the Soviet Union. [SPEAKER_00]: This story goes into a more speculative, post-cold war rumors territory. [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially, it's a tale that is plausible, but it's unconfirmed. [SPEAKER_00]: In it begins with a startling claim by a Russian general in the 1990s that the Soviet Union had built miniaturized suit-case nuclear bombs, and that dozens of them were missing.
[SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1997, General Alexander Lebed, a former Russian national security advisor and respected army commander dropped a bombshell, pun intended. [SPEAKER_00]: On U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: television, appearing on CBS's 60 minutes, Lebed claimed more than a hundred portable nuclear devices from the Soviet arsenal were unaccounted for.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were said to be small, self-contained nuclear bombs, each roughly the size of a suitcase or backpack capable of causing devastation on an order of one kiloton equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT, let it describe them in detail. [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't require launch codes or elaborate control systems. [SPEAKER_00]: A single soldier could carry one arm it in 30 minutes and produce a blast that might kill 50,000 to 100,000 people.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were weapons of terror that could be inconspicuously transported anywhere by a single individual. [SPEAKER_00]: intended originally for Soviet special forces to so chaos behind enemy lines in case of war or so lebed alleged. [SPEAKER_00]: Now his credibility made this allegation is specially alarming. [SPEAKER_00]: Just the year before in 1996, he had been in charge of Russia's security council and had initiated an inventory of the country's nuclear weapons.
[SPEAKER_00]: On 60 minutes, [SPEAKER_00]: LeBad said that during that effort he could only allocate 48 out of a supposed 132 portable nuclear devices. [SPEAKER_00]: By his later estimate, the Soviet Union and manufactured around 250 of these many nukes, and more than 100 were missing. [SPEAKER_00]: Whereabouts unknown. [SPEAKER_00]: Even more disturbing was his speculation about where they might be.
[SPEAKER_00]: He hinted that they could have been hidden in breakaway former Soviet republics like Ukraine, Georgia or the Baltic states, or worse, stolen or sold to rogue actors. [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, some of these suitcase nukes might now be in the hands of terrorists. [SPEAKER_00]: Russian government officials immediately denied everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: President Boris Yeltsin spoke person, accused Lebed of fabricating this scandal for political attention and insisted all Russian nuclear weapons are under reliable control. [SPEAKER_00]: One general ego or volume can argue that making true suitcase nukes would be possible in theory. [SPEAKER_00]: But very expensive and ineffective, implying that the Soviets would not waste effort on these, they would never have built these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, Predcrums exist, that LeBed might not be spinning wild tales. [SPEAKER_00]: A former advisor to Yeltson publicly confirmed that, yes, the Soviet Union did develop suitcase size nuclear bombs in the 1970s, [SPEAKER_00]: Though he attributed them to KGB Special Operations, rather than the Army.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another of Lebed's deputies, Vladimir Denisov, recalled that all such devices were in storage in Russia, but he conceded, they couldn't be sure none of them had secretly been deployed outside the country during Soviet time. [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, they didn't find any. [SPEAKER_00]: known missing nuclear weapons, but some of them may have been squirled away transferred somewhere or sold.
[SPEAKER_00]: To quote from nonproliferation.org, despite a coordinated campaign by Russian officials designed to discredit Lebed, technical inaccuracies and inconsistencies, [SPEAKER_00]: Undermon the credibility of the official Russian denials, in addition, the current controversy is not the first public discussion of whether Soviet ADMs are under adequate control in Russia.
[SPEAKER_00]: During 1995, a flurry of Russian media reports claim that Chechen separatist fighters had obtained such weapons. [SPEAKER_00]: And in January 1996, the Monterey Institute Center for Non-Proliferation Studies received information from a Russian presidential advisor that an unspecified number of small ADMs had been manufactured. [SPEAKER_00]: from Washington's perspective. [SPEAKER_00]: Lebed's accusations were taken very seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: intelligence in the 1990s had long worried about loose nukes in the chaos following the Soviet collapse. [SPEAKER_00]: In 1997 and 1998, U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: congressional hearings discussed Lebed's claims. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, some American experts have been skeptical about these claims because no concrete evidence of missing devices has turned up. [SPEAKER_00]: So, what is the truth?
[SPEAKER_00]: To this day, no missing Soviet suitcase nukes have ever been definitively found or used, thankfully. [SPEAKER_00]: Lebed passed away in 2002, he never retracted his story, and the Russian government has consistently maintained that all nuclear weapons are accounted for, yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. [SPEAKER_00]: The story persists because it is absolutely plausible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And true or not, Lebed's warnings spurred greater cooperation to secure Russia's stockpiles. [SPEAKER_00]: Our final story is the Philippines C-A-4-E incident. [SPEAKER_00]: December 5, 1965. [SPEAKER_00]: The Cold War is well-intrenched. [SPEAKER_00]: The U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: Navy is operating across the Pacific, projecting power, running training missions, maintaining forward presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: On that day, the aircraft carrier USS Tycon Deroga is operating in the Philippine Sea, part of the carrier division of Air Wing 5. [SPEAKER_00]: The ship is conducting routine operations out of [SPEAKER_00]: And on the ship, our Douglas A4E Skyhawk attack plane, small carrier-borne jets used for strike missions, including nuclear-capable missions. [SPEAKER_00]: One of them, a VA 56 Skyhawk, is loaded with a B43 nuclear bomb.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the B43 is a high-yield variable output thermonuclear bomb. [SPEAKER_00]: The pilot was Lieutenant Douglas M. Webster. [SPEAKER_00]: The mission. [SPEAKER_00]: Moving the aircraft from storage or hang your deck to an elevator, number two elevator, to bring the aircraft up to the flight deck presumably for takeoff or to reposition.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a combat mission, but it involves a nuclear bomb and pre-flight configuration at some point during this movement, while the A4E is being rolled from the hangar bay to the elevator. [SPEAKER_00]: The aircraft is improperly secured, and in that process, it goes over the edge. [SPEAKER_00]: The aircraft, the pilot, and the nuclear bomb all just slip off the side of the carrier and crash into the deep waters of the Pacific.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither the skyhawk, the pilot nor the bomb were recovered. [SPEAKER_00]: The depth here is substantial. [SPEAKER_00]: It's about 16,000 feet. [SPEAKER_00]: The location given is approximately 68 miles from Kikai Island, Kigo Shima prefecture, Japan, which means that this is relatively close to Japanese territory and deep ocean waters. [SPEAKER_00]: This incident, [SPEAKER_00]: Why did they remain classified or unacknowledged for many years?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only in 1989 that the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: Department of Defense formally confirmed details of the loss, including that the aircraft had carried a one-megaton B43 bomb, and that all parties were lost. [SPEAKER_00]: As you can imagine, the revelation prompted inquiries from the Japanese government. [SPEAKER_00]: This lost bomb was a live nuclear warhead, and it could not be retrieved due to the depth of 16,000 feet beyond typical salvage operations, especially back in the 60s.
[SPEAKER_00]: The weapon remains somewhere on the ocean floor, possibly intact. [SPEAKER_00]: There is no known radioactivity or hazard reported from that location since the loss [SPEAKER_00]: But there is risk of corrosion, radiation leakage, environmental damage, though protections of water depth and pressure likely mitigate against accidental detonation. [SPEAKER_00]: Nuclear weapons are designed with safety interlocks and potential risks are low, but they are real.
[SPEAKER_00]: And politically, the fact that this occurred near Japanese territory and was hidden for many years caused tension once it was revealed. [SPEAKER_00]: For Japan, which has strict anti-nuclear and non-proliferation sentiments, the delay in secrecy of this admission damaged trust between the two nations, and as with other nuclear weapons. [SPEAKER_00]: The mystery forces us to grasp this sheer fragility of the system's meant to control such terrible power.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite all the planning, engineering, safety protocols, and oversight accidents do happen. [SPEAKER_00]: In once they do, the abandonment, sometimes because recovery is impossible or too risky, [SPEAKER_00]: The secrecy, the delayed revelations, they all contribute to uncertainty and fear that the world's worst nightmares could yet come true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, if you've been intrigued by these stories today and you'd like to read about things that are terrifying, real or imagined, like I do, there are many other stories of nuclear accidents and missing nuclear weapons, plenty of books and articles and research out there to consume. [SPEAKER_00]: The US has lost reportedly six nuclear weapons, and during the Cold War era, the Soviets apparently lost a lot more.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know how many, and who knows what has happened since then. [SPEAKER_00]: It makes me feel like I'm leaving the show on a down note that is not my intention. [SPEAKER_00]: These things are fascinating and they are, they are indeed frightening. [SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like the more we know, the better off we'll be.
[SPEAKER_00]: you've just listened to a study of strange, consider helping us keep the lantern lit, illuminated, the unexplained, by subscribing to our sub-stack, just head to the support tab at a study of strange.com. [SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.