THE MISSING "SPARK PLUG" or YOU CAN'T HAVE UN-NICE THINGS
- 5 days ago
- 12 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
There’s been a lot of discussion about Greenland the last few weeks. Other than the Norse arriving there and going on to Canada a thousand years ago and Greenland’s melting ice sheets dumping tremendous volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic and disrupting thermohaline convection, I know almost nothing about the world’s [second] largest island. (I don’t know why we pretend Australia is not an island…) My favourite story from my recent readings is about a hydrogen bomb that went missing up there. (Or not?)
At the end of the Second World War the US failed in an attempt to purchase Greenland from Denmark and secure this strategically significant island for themselves, one which lies roughly half way between Moscow and DC, that seemed a likely transit zone for Soviet missiles or a fleet of nuclear submarines, and would push America's first line of defence on the Atlantic coast almost 4,000km north. After Denmark joined NATO in 1949, the Danes stopped trying to keep the foreigners out and permitted America to place bases, assets, and early warning systems on the island and man those sites ad systems with Greenlandic, Danish, Canadian, and American forces.
THE CRASH
At the height of the Cold War, on January 21st, 1968, things got interesting over Greenland. An American B-52G Stratofortress (callsign HOBO 28), from the 380th Strategic Aerospace Wing at Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York, was on a secret airborne nuclear alert mission as part of Operation Chrome Dome. The operation was part of the mutually assured destruction strategy and saw nuclear bombers armed and circling friendly territory most of the way to Russia 24/7, as a show of force to deter any attempt at neutralizing other US assets or a potential nuclear first strike.
The official story is that at some point during the flight a crew member had stuffed seat cushions up against a heating vent in the navigator’s compartment. At altitude in the frigid north the crew found themselves freezing and cranked the heat. Somewhere far out over Baffin Bay, five hours into their mission. The crew smelled burning rubber but couldn't source the problem. Eventually a fire was discovered behind a metal box in a lower compartment. Though two extinguishers were spent attempting to douse the flames, the crew was unable to put out the fire. The captain requested permission to make an emergency landing at the nearest air field, at Thule Air Base (known today as Pituffik Space Base), on the northwestern tip of Greenland and still 140kms away from the troubled aircraft. Before they could reach the landing site the plane lost all electrical power and the crew was forced to eject. Six crew members parachuted to safety before their bomber (and its four Mk-28F1 hydrogen bombs) slammed into a frozen fjord roughly 12kms out to sea, west of the air strip.
Crazily, almost the same thing had happened just two years earlier, only across the ocean in Spain. For more on that incident, check out 'We thought it was the end of the world': How the US dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966. Even more wild, both events came in the immediate aftermath of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, one of the most important satires of all time, in which a rogue US general orders B-52 Stratofortresses armed with hydrogen bombs to conduct pre-emptive strikes on the USSR (for, as the mad general insists, the crime of having secretly fluoridated America's water supply)...
THE FALLOUT
What happened after the crash in Greenland is still being debated as most details remain classified. However, we do have some details. A memo declassified in 2015 shows what arrived on the desk of US president Johnson on the night of the crash:
The three metre-thick ice over the fjord was shattered at the point of impact, with cracks radiating out to a distance of roughly 100 metres in all directions. At the very least, the crash and resulting fires sent radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium across a vast debris field, causing a significant immediate environmental problem along with a potential threat to human life. And no one could say whether a broader nuclear catastrophe was pending or what was going on under the ice.
The US immediately dispatched a PR team to Copenhagen and an ordinance disposal team to oversee the handling of the nuclear weapons and fallout at the site of the crash. Among the emergency response team was a plutonium expert, Wright Lanham, and nuclear weapons designer, William Chambers, from Los Alamos and from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory a nuclear weapons engineer Nathan Benedict and physicist Joseph Tinney. The team brought with them a newly developed portable scintillation counter designed to rapidly survey large areas for radiation and 1,500lbs of raw horsemeat for the sled dogs needed to conduct their operations.
Aside from the immediate disaster and loss of life, a political controversy erupted as Denmark had declared its status as “nuclear-free” back in 1957 and officially maintained prohibitions against nuclear weapons for all Danish territories. What the public didn't know at the time, and only came to light in a review of internal government documents in 1995, was that the Danish Prime Minister, H.C. Hansen, had, at least tacitly, approved the United States flying nuclear weapons over and into Greenland for the purposes of legitimate NATO efforts during the Cold War. While earnestly attempting to assuage their public's anxieties in the nuclear era, the government of Denmark was never trying to inhibit the actions of their allies across the world in the North American tetartosphere.
As the events transpired there was also disagreement between the US and Denmark about how to deal with the debris and contamination. Aside from the crashed and exploded aircraft and scattering of radioactive material, there was also a major oil slick formed by the tremendous amount of spilled jet fuel from a massive jet that, just prior to the onboard fire, had completed in-flight refueling and taken on more than 128,000 litres (or almost 34,000 gallons) of mixed gasoline and kerosene. Danish scientists sought a “zero contamination” policy which would see immediate oil clean-up, waste removal, and decontamination of the entire area. They wanted desperately to avoid oil-covered and plutonium-contaminated ice melting into sea around North Star Bay, where hundreds of local families hunted for birds, fish, and sea mammals. Their US counterparts just wanted the lot to sink to the bottom of the sea with the rest of the debris or to otherwise entomb it all in containment units in the permafrost nearby. Not wanting to harm relations with their hosts, the Americans decided they would remove the contaminated aircraft debris and the surrounding snow and ice — an estimated 10,000 cubic meters, or roughly 10,000 tonnes, of material — for storage and removal to a facility in South Carolina in what would be called Operation Crested Ice.
CLEAN-UP AND RETRIEVAL
Collecting the debris and cleaning up the area would be a massive undertaking. A review of events printed in a US Air Force publication on nuclear safety from 1970 recalled:
The requirements were researched, located, made available, and promptly dispatched to Thule. The list reached staggering proportions and "things you never heard of before" were rounded up from the far corners of the earth. Army amphibious vehicles and prefabricated arctic buildings from Alaska, arctic ice specialists from the US Army Terrestrial Sciences Center, Hanover, New Hampshire, atomic scientists and supporting technicians and officials from the United States and Denmark, and sophisticated radiological equipment from New Mexico, California, and Ohio, disaster kits from Texas and Europe, oceanographers from Navy resources, and people with a thousand talents from everywhere.
Officially, more than 700 Danish civilians and US military personnel participated in the recovery and clean-up project. They worked under terribly hazardous conditions, the least of which being the almost perpetual dark and fierce ice storms of the Arctic winter. In their search for the wreckage, airmen walking 50 abreast are said to have scoured the sea ice for debris for miles around the crash zone. Sites of radioactive contamination were identified with various radiation survey meters and contaminated wreckage and ice was loaded into sealed tanks and removed.
Later, it was reported that a special submersible, named STAR III, and three submarine pilots were brought in to sweep the ocean floor for any remaining wreckage. We were told eleven diving operations took place over a period of weeks, mostly below 180m (600ft). It was explained that:
There were areas of concentrated wreckage, but usually the concentration was light, the pieces widely scattered, and small; often only a few square inches of surface area or a long slender piece of debris. There were small pieces of crumpled sheet metal, stringers, dynamotors, and pieces of wiring, tubing, and tires. As expected, the aircraft debris was stable and well fixed. ... The successful underwater survey helped to confirm previous joint scientific findings that there was no radiological hazard from the limited aircraft debris on the ocean floor below the point of the crash.
And that was that. All neat and tidy.
DECLASSIFICATION
More than 20 years later, in September of 1994, new information was released by US authorities. After reviewing those files and conducting several interviews, an investigative reporter from the BBC published claims that the US recovery team had been unable to account for significant components of one of the hydrogen bombs. They explained how:
The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been "destroyed". This may be technically true, since the bombs were no longer complete, but declassified documents obtained by the BBC under the US Freedom of Information Act, parts of which remain classified, reveal a much darker story, which has been confirmed by individuals involved in the clear-up and those who have had access to details since.
The documents revealed that the whole time the US was searching for missing bomb materials, that not all locations within the debris field were able to be searched, and that their actions and all pertinent details, even that they were conducting a search for a lost weapon component, were deliberately kept from their Danish counterparts. More than that, the BBC spoke with key emergency responders, including Chambers from Los Alamos, who helped conduct the accident response. In no uncertain terms, the BBC shared the evaluation of this weapons expert that, folks were disappointed in their "failure to return all of the components." And they noted that "Other officials who have seen classified files on the accident confirmed the abandonment of a weapon."
The missing piece was a nuclear fuel section of one of the hydrogen bombs. It was this secondary stage cylinder containing uranium and lithium deuteride, termed the “spark plug”, that was not found by clean-up crews above the ice and required the submersible to be brought in. This component, however, was nothing like a "spark plug" nor was it presumed to exist only as in a few scattered chunks of shrapnel. In these second generation thermonuclear weapons, a Hiroshima-style fission reaction is used to precipitate a much larger, orders of magnitude larger, fusion reaction. So that beer keg-sized, Little Boy-like segment of this, one of the most highly classified and destructive weapons in history, was what the Americans were desperately in search of and not wanting others to come upon or secret away.
But, as Chambers told it, the decision to abandon the mission was made after months of failed searching. The author of the article concludes by insisting the Americans justified walking away after determining their adversaries would incapable of stumbling upon the sensitive material if they themselves had been unable with such a serious and lasting search. They also reasoned that it surely could not be retrieved by covert means right under their noses and, moreover, that the radioactive elements would dissolve relatively quickly in the briny sea, rendering the weapon part benign.
REBUTTAL AND FURTHER DENIAL
A Danish review of the same declassified documentation aimed to refute the assertions presented by the BBC. That report explicitly stated that:
We have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that all four weapons broke up in the crash and became nonoperational: they did not exist as weapons after the crash. This is an indisputable fact already because the deuterium/tritium reservoirs in the tail sections of the four weapons broke off on impact and were recovered close to the impact point. We can provide a clear answer: there is no bomb, there was no bomb, and the Americans were not looking for a bomb.
I don't think that comes close to differing from the BBC version of events or contradicting Chambers. The Danish then claimed that the missing mass was probably disbursed in the initial explosions and fires and that, though 94% of the mass of three nuclear weapons was retrieved, the likelihood is that this absent weight represents the most significant portions of all four weapons and that the remainder was very likely some portion of all the weapons blown into small fragments or even finer particulate and eventually found a resting place in the rocks and silt on the sea floor. They reiterate:
To repeat, the Americans were not looking for a bomb but for a weapons component, almost certainly a uranium 235 fissile core from the secondary stage of a weapon. They were probably not at all sure if it had actually fallen to the bottom and in what state, nor whether it still existed. Crumbling of uranium metal in water has been observed in many studies. If there were something to be found, they did not find it in the last days of August 1968.
So they were missing material equivalent to one bomb, but not any particular bomb and merely the triggering mechanism and its nuclear fission components comprised of radioactive uranium and the critical fuel precursor of lithium deuteride making the most dangerous weapons in existence possible. Okay.
Though many of the details of the accident are still classified to this day, almost 60 years after the events, the US Department of Defense also maintains, like the Danes and unlike the specialist responsible for the emergency response, that all four weapons were destroyed in the initial crash and fires.
OOPS!
Though we know little about what has taken place over the decades with the arsenals of other nuclear nations, the United States has been responsible for at least 32 "broken arrow" incidents, so-called, like those in Greenland and Spain involving the world's most unimaginably destructive weapons. Together, the US and Russia were responsible for six such events that resulted in missing weapons that have never been recovered. Whoopsies.
For a sense of scale, the second generation nuclear weapons like the one that may or may not have gone missing near Thule, Greenland are one to two orders of magnitude more powerful than those dropped on Japan. One thing I read explained the difference in magnitude by noticing that Little Boy, the first nuke dropped on Japan at Hiroshima, if dropped on the Capital Building in Washington DC, would not destroy the White House, just a little more than two kilometres away. (Or, in the case of Vancouver, if detonated in the middle of Stanley Park would leave the Lonsdale Quay and Canada Place standing.) By contrast, these only slightly more modern devices, built in the 1960s, would eliminate the whole region. Barf.
And, of course, the largest device tested (at only half its yield, by the way: 50 Megatons, not it's maximum 100Mt) was Russia's experimental/psychological weapon the Tsar Bomba (Emperor of Bombs), officially known as "product 602", codenamed "Ivan". As tested, the bomb was something like 50 times the yield of the hydrogen bombs that went down in Greenland or something like 3,000 times the power of that used on Hiroshima. When tested in the Arctic Ocean over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, houses hundreds of kilometres away were destroyed. More than 900 kilometres away in Finland and Norway, the explosion was said to have broken windows there. The flash was said to have been visible at that distance and the mushroom cloud that followed towered nearly 70kms high (or eight times the height of Mount Everest). The blast wave caused a jolt in atmospheric pressure all over the planet and, as recorded in New Zealand, was felt three times over three days as the pressure wave continued circling the globe. Double-barf.
Dozens of such devices and other military nuclear reactors have been dropped from planes by accident, ejected deliberately during emergencies, rolled off the decks of aircraft carriers along with the airplanes they were attached to, gone down with submarines, and been ditched from all sorts of damaged ships, and, well, every other zany scenario you can imagine. It's a lot. It's... a lot... And these incidents, just the one's we know about, have taken place all over the globe.
The first took place in 1950, when a US jet was on a simulated combat mission from Alaska when an emergency ensued. The pilot, struggling to keep altitude, flew out over the sea and jettisoned the nuke he was carrying. The crew bailed out over Princess Royal Island, east of Haida Gwaii, and the airplane eventually washed up on Vancouver Island. Four more incidents of this sort happened that same year, in California, New Mexico, Ohio, and in Quebec.
Since then, unintended accidents involving nuclear weapons have occurred in every corner of the US, occasionally many times in at least 17 states. Those include the above three, plus: Washington, South Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, New Jersey, and Maryland. Oh, and a Soviet sub carrying three nuclear missiles and a bunch of nuclear torpedoes famously went down off of Oahu, Hawaii. Along with Greenland, Spain, and Canada, significant nuclear accidents have taken place in Great Britain, Italy, and Russia. Warheads and nuclear reactors (that we know of) positively cover the world's seas. The White, Barents, and Kara Seas north of Russia are full of them. The North Sea, between the UK and Norway, and the Mediterranean also have some. And both the Pacific and Atlantic have plenty. So, obviously, you can't have nice things — and you most certainly can't have un-nice things.
RESOURCES AND SUCH
BBC, 2008 - Mystery of lost US nuclear bomb
Danish Institute for International Studies, 2009 - Conclusions of the DIIS report ”The marshal’s baton. There is no bomb, there was no bomb, and they were not looking for a bomb”
National Security Archive, 2025 - “Crested Ice” excerpt from: Strategic Air Command Semi-Annual Film Report February to July 1968
National Security Archive, 2025 - The United States and Greenland: Episodes in Nuclear History, 1957-1968
United States Air Force, 1970 - USAF Nuclear Safety - Special Edition: Project Crested Ice
BBC, 2022 - The lost nuclear bombs that no one can find
Atomic Archive, 2024 - Broken Arrows: Nuclear Weapons Accidents
Radiolab, 2019 - Neither Confirm Nor Deny
