6 nuclear bombs still missing, US concerns grow

Iran is carrying out a series of attacks with Israel and US troops, which have already taken a serious shape. Amid tensions in the Middle East, the country has new concerns about the 6 missing nuclear warheads of the United States. The United States is concerned that if these missing nuclear warheads fall into the hands of an enemy country, a terrible situation could arise. British newspaper Daily Mirror reported this information in a report on Tuesday (March 10).
The report said that there have been at least 6 accidents in the past few decades where US nuclear weapons have been lost. Even today, no trace of them has been found. Anyone can now find them. In US military terminology, such nuclear accidents are called ‘Broken Arrows’. That is, incidents where nuclear weapons are accidentally lost or go out of control. The US position is that if they do not find these missing bombs, their opponents will not be able to find them easily either.
Of the 32 ‘Broken Arrow’ incidents recorded in the United States, at least six nuclear warheads have yet to be found. The most publicized incident of this kind occurred in 1958. That year, two US fighter jets collided in the sky near Tybee Island. A B-47 Stratojet bomber was carrying a fully armed Mark-15 nuclear bomb. The situation became dangerous after the collision. The damaged plane caused the pilot to fear that the bomb might explode. As a result, he made an emergency decision and dropped the bomb in the waters of Wausau Sound off the coast of Georgia.
Weighing about 7,600 pounds, this Mark-15 hydrogen bomb had an explosive power of about 3.8 megatons. In comparison, it was about 190 times more powerful than the Fat Man used in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in World War II.
Despite numerous searches after the accident, the atomic bomb has not been recovered to this day. As a result, it is still considered one of the United States’ lost nuclear weapons. The US Air Force had told the public that the bomb’s plutonium warhead had been removed before takeoff and replaced with a lead substitute. However, decades later, in 1994, documents released from 1966 congressional testimony revealed that the Tybee Mark 15 was in fact an intact nuclear weapon.
In 1966, a B-26 thermonuclear bomber was lost in the Mediterranean Sea after a collision between two US military aircraft, and its warhead is still missing. Meanwhile, the US strike and previous US-Israeli strikes on targets appear to have significantly damaged Iran’s nuclear program. Some fear that it is only a matter of time before they rebuild their capabilities.
“If this attack does not succeed in removing a regime, there are thousands of people in Iran who are capable of rebuilding such a program,” said security expert Jeffrey Lewis. “The technology itself is decades old, and a vengeful Iran would likely come to the same conclusion as North Korea. It’s a dangerous world with the United States and it’s better to be nuclear,” he added.