Diver may have found 'lost nuke' missing since cold war off Canada coast

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Diver may have found 'lost nuke' missing since cold war off Canada coast

Sean Smyrichinsky thought he saw a UFO when he encountered
object that may have been abandoned by an American bomber
before crash in British Columbia

Ashifa Kassam in Toronto
Friday 4 November 2016 17.39 GMT

The Canadian navy will be heading to the coast of British Columbia to investigate claims that a diver may have come across “the lost nuke” – a Mark IV bomb that went missing after an American B-36 bomber crashed in the region during the cold war.

Diver Sean Smyrichinsky was wrapping up a day of diving near Haida Gwaii, an archipelago 80km west of the coast of British Columbia, when he stumbled across what may be the remains of the world’s first known “broken arrow” – the code name for accidents involving American nuclear weapons.

“I was just looking for fish for the next day. I figured I would do a little reconnaissance dive looking around and on my dive I got pretty far from my boat,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “And then I found something that I had never, ever seen before.”

The object was huge, he said, measuring around 12 feet long. “It resembled a bagel cut in half, and then around the circle of the bagel these bolts all molded into it, like half spheres. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/04/canada-lost-nuke-found-cold-war-bomb


[font size=1]A Mark IV "Fat Man" bomb, an improved postwar mass-production version of the plutonium bomb design used during World War II. (Wikimedia Commons)[/font]

[Kilgore]

1. Thought tne bomb was an actual nuke

From the article,

"According to the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, the intercontinental bomber had left an air base in Alaska for a mission that included a simulated drop on San Francisco when three of the plane’s six engines caught fire.

The crew was forced to abandon the bomber but US air force reports said they first jettisoned the bomb over the Pacific. The US military said the lost bomb was a dummy capsule – packed with lead rather than the plutonium core needed for an atomic explosion."