![]() ![]() He explains that the full list only emerged when a summary prepared by the US Department of Defense was declassified in the 1980s. "We mostly know about the American cases," says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-proliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies, California. But three US bombs have gone missing altogether – they're still out there to this day, lurking in swamps, fields and oceans across the planet. In many cases, the weapons were dropped by mistake or jettisoned during an emergency, then later recovered. There have been at least 32 so-called "broken arrow" accidents – those involving these catastrophically destructive, earth-flattening devices – since 1950. In fact, the Palomares incident is not the only time a nuclear weapon has been misplaced. Now the hunt was on to find it – along with its 1.1 megatonne warhead, with the explosive power of 1,100,000 tonnes of TNT. Three were quickly recovered on land – but one had disappeared into the sparkling blue expanse to the south east, lost to the bottom of the nearby swathe of Mediterranean Sea. "It was supposed to be a secret but my friends were telling me why I was going."įor weeks, newspapers around the globe had been reporting rumours of a terrible accident – two US military planes had collided in mid-air, scattering four B28 thermonuclear bombs across Palomares. "It was kind of embarrassing," says Meyers. When he attended a dinner party that evening and announced his mysterious trip, its intended confidentiality became something of a joke. ![]() "It was not a surprise to be called," says Meyers. However, the mission was not as covert as the military had hoped. He was told that there was a top secret emergency in Spain, and that he must report there within days. At the time, he was working as a bomb disposal officer at the Naval Air Facility Sigonella, in eastern Sicily. A few weeks later, Philip Meyers received a message via a teleprinter – a device that could send and receive primitive emails. ![]()
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