The first nuclear device lost at sea may have been found, as reported in ScienceAlert:
The bomb in question belonged to US Air Force flight 44–92075, which originally was meant to simulate a bombing run over California on 13 February 1950 before landing in Texas.
For the purposes of the simulation, the ‘dummy’ Mark 4 nuclear bomb was not actually loaded with plutonium, but contained a mixture of lead, natural (not enriched) uranium, and TNT. As such, it was capable of a conventional TNT-based explosion, but not a nuclear detonation.
That payload could still have posed a huge risk to anybody on the ground if the bomb were to impact with the surface, so once the B–36’s crew ran into engine trouble after taking off from Alaska, they jettisoned the dummy weapon off the coast of British Columbia and detonated it in mid-air. …
There’s no official confirmation yet that what Smyrichinsky found is a remnant of this famous bomb, but after he researched the B–36 story and found images of the Mark 4 online, he’s convinced they’re a match.
“The picture I found has the bomb in sections, they’ve got it taken apart,” Smyrichinsky told the Vancouver Sun. “And in the middle, there’s a great big thing that looks just like what I found.”
“The Mark IV bomb uses these things called pit balls,” he added. “These pit balls have the explosives in them, and they’re quite large, bigger than basketballs. So what I think I found was the housing that holds these pit balls.”
Seems a bit overhyped, but still interesting as a bit of Cold War trivia. My Dad flew as a navigational officer on Air Force cargo planes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and had stories about losing at least one friend whose plane crashed during the scramble to get everything airborne, along with other stories of B-52s falling apart in mid-air.
