Is anyone else concerned about the possibility of nuclear terrorist attacks? No, I don't mean what you usually hear on the news about dirty bombs or Iran/North Korea. I mean an actual terrorists with an actual nuclear bomb. There are a suprising number of nuclear weapons on the bottom of the ocean. Has it occured to anyone that someone with enough funding and determination could actually retrieve one of them. Maybe they already have?
In its campaign to discredit General Lebed’s revelations, the Russian government insisted that the loss of a nuclear weapon was unthinkable. No responsible party could lose something so important. But to the contrary, we know that not only the Soviet Union, but also the United States, lost numbers of nuclear weapons. At least four Soviet submarines, armed with a total of 40 nuclear weapons, sank during the Cold War. According to press reports, one of these was partially recovered from the Pacific Ocean floor by a unique deep-water submarine, the Glomar Explorer, owned by the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Three nuclear missiles and two nuclear torpedoes were recovered. The Department of Defense has acknowledged a number of what it calls “Broken Arrows” (nuclear weapons lost by U.S. forces), although it has never said how many. The confirmed reports include a 1965 case where an aircraft loaded with a B43 nuclear bomb rolled off a carrier stationed near Japan. Neither the aircraft nor the weapon was ever recovered. A year later, the U.S. Air Force accidentally dropped a 20-megaton nuclear bomb in the Mediterranean Sea during a high-altitude refueling mission near Palomares, Spain. After three months of frantic searching, it was found. Given the sensitivity of such events, it is reasonable to infer that the few official confirmations are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Notice that many of the incidents mentioned at your link don't involve nuclear bombs at all: many involve leaks at research facilities and power stations. Here's a chronological list of radiation incidents that caused injury from the start of the 20th century onwards. The vast majority don't involve nuclear bombs.
Historically, unless you were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you would have been less likely to die from a nuclear bombing than you would have been to die from a radiation leak, picking up a lost radioactive source without recognizing it (or living wit...
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