Amanda Follett Hosgood is The Tyee’s journalist and representative in northern British Columbia. It lives in Wet’suwet’en territory. Find her on Twitter @amandajfollett.
It’s not every day that the U. S. Air Force is a source of action. The U. S. Navy loses a nuclear warhead, but it’s the first time that’s happened anywhere in northwestern British Columbia.
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On a freezing afternoon and the B-36 bomber had taken off from an Army air base near Fairbanks, Alaska. It is 1950, at the beginning of the Cold War, and aircraft training on the Alaska-Columbia route Británica. De the coast to San Francisco and finally Texas.
The pilot was given strict orders not to enter Canadian airspace, but when three of the B-36’s six engines ignited somewhere over Hecate Sound, east of Haida Gwaii, he turned inland, giving the 17-person crew a chance to enter. the desert of the B. C. coast, instead of the icy Pacific Ocean.
Shortly before, on February 14, 1950, the team parachuted over remote Princess Royal Island, southwest of Kitimat. A dozen survived and were rescued in the following days.
Some team members described watching the burning plane pass by before making what was believed to be its last descent into the sea somewhere on the west coast.
But the abdominal part of the plane also kept a secret. It would take the U. S. government 30 years to admit that the plane was carrying a Mark Four atomic bomb, known as the “Fat Man” and similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
Officially, the bomb was unarmed. The Pentagon maintains that it contained a more “fictitious” core than the plutonium needed for a nuclear explosion. It says that when it was launched and destroyed just before the accident, using traditional explosives, only a relatively small amount of radiation was scattered from its uranium envelope. towards the ocean.
Seventy years later, many major points about Broken Arrow No. 1 – a reference to the U. S. code for nuclear weapons incidents – remain classified.
One of the biggest mysteries revolves around how the B-36 came to land on the upper slopes of Mount Kologet, just about 2,000 meters above sea level and more than three hundred kilometers in the opposite direction to where it was last seen, about to dive into the sea.
Should the U. S. Air Force Do you hide something?
“Well, that’s the full story,” Joy Allen scolds from her home in the Kispiox Valley. “Who knows? It’s very intriguing.
“An engine on fire. Contemplating the ditch’
Mount Kologet is located in the Kispiox Mountains, which are larger north of Hazelton. Cold, desolate and inaccessible, the resting position of Broken Arrow No. 1 is now protected by the British Columbia Heritage Conservation Act.
In comparison, the Kispiox Valley is lush and green at this time of year. This is where Joy Allen and her husband Gene grew up, raised their family, and continue to operate a fly fishing lodge on the banks of the Kispiox River, approximately 50 kilometers south of the site of the twist of fate.
Joy remembers first hearing about the B-36 and its chances of housing a missing nuclear weapon when she gathered around her in-laws’ table decades ago.
“I just ask questions,” he says. It piqued my interest because no one had very smart answers. “
The bomber took off from Eielson Air Force Base on February 13, 1950, with enough fuel to spend 24 hours in the air. But after about six hours of flight, he began to experience engine problems. Temperatures dropped to -40°C and the bomber was trapped in the ice. Shortly before midnight, a local radio amateur reported hearing the pilot’s distress call.
“An engine on fire. Looking at a ditch in Queen Charlotte Sound,” he said. “Watch out for flares or debris. “
The $6 million plane was “sinking like a stone,” Captain Harold Barry later told the Vancouver Sun, dropping 3,000 meters in just 10 minutes. He testified in a U. S. Air Force investigation. The U. S. Navy took the bomber over the water and ordered the co-pilot to press the transfer that would open the bomb bay doors.
At first they did open. He tried again. This time, they were released. Crew members reported seeing a flash of light as Mark Four exploded 1,500 meters above the ocean. Barry then sounded the alarm and told the team to evacuate.
“I’m the last one out and I’m sure everyone on board parachuted. After landing, I heard the plane above me heading north. I had set the controls for a slow right turn back to sea and lost altitude,” Barry told The Sun.
But none of those things happened. More than 3 years later, on September 3, 1953, the Royal Canadian Air Force discovered the actual crash site while searching for some other lost aircraft north of Smithers.
The U. S. Air Force He joined the U. S. military in August 1954. They were guided on horseback through Gene Allen’s uncles, Jack Lee and Bill Love. Planes departing from Smithers dropped materials for the top-secret mission, adding a Geiger counter to measure radioactivity and explosives to destroy. the B-36 and bury the debris.
It’s unclear exactly what the team discovered once there. Non-military visitors, such as guides Lee and Love, were required to stay away.
“They were not allowed to enter the place of the turn of destiny. They had to stay with the horses and one of the guys stayed with them to make sure they didn’t get in,” says Joy Allen.
“Maybe it’s for his own protection. “
To date, the U. S. government has said little about the recovery mission, but human remains and the bomb’s plutonium core are among the items that some say may have been removed from the site.
For many, the only credible explanation for the B-36’s landing, largely intact, on a snowfield just below the top of Mount Kologet is that someone was piloting it.
A missing gunsmith
Captain Ted Schreier was one of five team members who never discovered the extensive aerial and ground searches that followed the incident. He was the third pilot, able to fly this large aircraft and, as a gunsmith, was guilty of the atomic bomb. According to aviation historian Dirk Septer, author of Lost Nuke, conflicting testimonies from survivors later demonstrated confusion about when Schreier actually exited the plane.
“If Schreier had stayed on board, what did he want to save?Why endanger his life?” writes Septer. The plane, of course, does not; There had to be something more.
While official reports claim no bodies were discovered at the crash site, Septer reports that a declassified document describes “the structure of a team member among the rubble. “
In a letter to the Vancouver Sun in March 1987, D. G. Bell-Irving, the commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force wing that led the initial search in February 1950, also maintained that a user did not jump. “His body was discovered in the wreckage of the plane, several years later and at a great distance inland,” he wrote.
“In 1950, we were briefed on the armament of the B-36,” Bell-Irving added. “The reluctance of the U. S. government. The U. S. at that time is now understandable. (They didn’t even say thank you. ) »
It wasn’t until 1981 that the U. S. government revealed the presence of nuclear weapons aboard B-36s.
It published the data in a summary of nuclear weapons incidents that occurred between 1950 and 1980, beginning with the No. 1 bomber, the lost bomber that was on a “simulated combat profile mission” off British Columbia.
But why this secret? To some, the apparent explanation is that B-36 still carries a highly radioactive plutonium core the size of a baseball, a component of the chain reaction that would cause a nuclear explosion.
In August 1997, considerations about possible radiation led Canada’s Department of National Defence and Environment to make a stopover at the site. This is the first stop since a Geological Survey of Canada expedition stumbled upon the wreck in 1956. The team discovered massive amounts of unused remains munitions and explosives, both from the original remains and from the 1954 expedition, to conceal it literally, but reported no maximum degrees of radiation.
They opened the site to looting.
When a team of researchers visited in August 2003 to film the documentary Lost Nuke, the snowfield surrounding the B-36 had receded, leaving more debris exposed. Most of what was on top of the snow in 1954 had been destroyed by the U. S. Air Force, i. e. the compartment containing the Mark 4. The bomb bay was reduced to “a pool of aluminum droplets,” wrote Canadian nuclear historian John. Clear water.
Many exhibits were taken. In an online newspaper, Clearwater described his grief at finding the town stripped of its cultural heritage.
“No one before my team was licensed to possess artifacts from this crash site,” he wrote. “Before that, it was all theft. Even the Canadian forces had taken things. “
In an email to The Tyee, B. C. The Ministry of Forestry demonstrated that the Broken Arrow site, like all aircraft and wreckage older than two years, is automatically under the Heritage Conservation Act. Therefore, it is illegal to modify it without a permit.
The only permit ever issued for him is the Clearwater permit, he adds.
In addition to adjustments to the control of herbal resources a decade ago, which gave the province more authority to enforce the Heritage Conservation Act, the ministry says efforts are underway to update the law for the first time since the mid-1990s. Initiated in 2019, the adjustments focus largely on aligning the law with the Indigenous Peoples’ Bill of Rights Act.
“Looting is a serious challenge and can be incredibly complicated to present and prosecute,” a spokesperson wrote. They referred questions related to the robbery at Broken Arrow to the RCMP.
One group, from Terrace, formed the Broken Arrow Aircraft Society in 1998 with the aim of legitimizing their rescue expeditions. With the help of the city council, they imagined a permanent exhibition. But no museum saw the light of day and the company was dissolved. in 2005.
The items were scattered throughout the region. Some are housed in the Stewart Historical Society and the Bulkley Valley Museum in Smithers. Others remain in personal collections, while some have reportedly been sold online.
At least one artifact has returned to the United States.
The “bird cage,” a lead casing for the plutonium core, was phased out in 1998. According to Septer, “Not only is it illegal to remove this vital atomic artifact, but it is also unclear at that time whether the one involved could still involve a fatal plutonium nucleus.
The disappearance of the cage is documented in a 2004 Geological Survey of Canada article by Jim Roddick, who led the investigation team that fell into it in 1956. Roddick had returned to the American Scott Deaver and the team loaded the cage into a helicopter and flew him.
“We were a little afraid that the helicopter pilot would ask us about our cargo,” Roddick wrote. But the team managed to remove the device and Deaver drove it across the U. S. border, describing it to customs officials as “a piece of airplane wreckage. “destined for a museum. “
Once at his home in Connecticut, Deaver opened the box. He discovered it “inside shiny and pristine, empty,” according to Roddick.
The mysteries remain
If the content of Broken Arrow No. 1 has persisted, so has the secrecy surrounding it.
In the late 1990s, Joy Allen’s interest led her to plan what would have been a grueling week at the site. But when she started asking about her location, she was “blocked,” first by the Canadian government and then by the U. S. Air Force.
When he asked a military friend in Texas for help, the government showed up at his door and it wasn’t easy to learn of his interest in the site, he said.
“No one wanted to give us the tactile information,” Joy says. “It’s a most sensible secret. “
Finally, he abandoned the trip.
Broken Arrow No. 1 is only the first of a dozen incidents involving nuclear weapons.
While some major points about the night it crashed remain classified, one thing is certain: If the B-36 carried the plutonium core, and if Captain Schreier had kept the plane to check and protect it, the Pentagon is unlikely to communicate about it.
Read more: Transport
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