officials acknowledged that they never recovered the strays:ġ956 A B-47 flying from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida toward a base in Morocco vanishes. In the case of at least seven weapons, U.S. Some weapons that were jettisoned at sea, mostly in deep water, so many years ago that, by now, who knows what’s down there?” “There have been midair collisions, there have been planes destroyed in terrible weather the planes just came apart, and the bombs went on down. “A couple of weapons were accidentally dropped from aircraft,” Jackson said. The United States has acknowledged 32 such accidents, the first in 1950 and the latest in 1980. Jackson, former public affairs officer for the U.S. “There always is the possibility of an accident,” said David G. This event was neither the first nor the last time that American forces suffered “Empty Quiver” or “Broken Arrow” incidents-military code words describing the accidental firing, seizure, theft or loss of nuclear weapons. government kept the incident confidential until 1989. But Webster, his plane and the nuclear weapon were never found. One other important detail: Webster’s jet was carrying a one-megaton B-43 thermonuclear bomb, with a yield 70 times larger than the weapon detonated on Hiroshima, Japan, 20 years earlier.Ĭrews from the Ticonderoga and its escort ships spent hours searching. When the ship was 70 miles east of Okinawa, Webster’s Skyhawk accidentally rolled off the deck and plunged into the Pacific. The Ticonderoga was en route from duty along the Vietnamese coast to a port call in Japan. The plane was an A-4E Skyhawk, on board the uss Ticonderoga aircraft carrier. Webster climbed into his aircraft as he prepared to take part in a round of United States Navy training exercises.
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