Stuff You Should Know - Are broken arrows a problem?

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

Are broken arrows are a problem? After all, they are incidents and accidents involving nuclear warheads. Like, sometimes they go missing. But it hasn't happened much since the 50s and 60s. OR HAS IT? Learn all about them today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. San Francisco, we're comin' to see you soon. Yeah, we're gonna be there on Saturday, January 18th, Chuck, and since it's San Francisco, we're gonna be wearing nothing but appropriately placed clumps of rhizoroni. It is the San Francisco treat.

Yes, and we're the San Francisco treat, too, whenever we're in town, so everybody should come see us. That's right, it's part of SketchFest. As always, we love performing there. You can go to sysklive.com for details, or sfsketchfest.com, and if you're around Sunday night, you can come see me do Movie Crush Live in a very small, fun venue where you can shake my hand.

Very nice, so come see us, everybody. You won't regret it. We're pretty sure that's correct. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright,

and there's guest producer Lowell over there. And that makes this stuff we should know. Featuring Chuck is John Travolta, and me is Christian Slater. Why do I always gotta be Travolta? Lowell is Frank Whaley. Was he in that? Yep, he had the great line.

Are you ready for it? Sure. I don't know what's scarier. Losing a nuclear bomb? He didn't say this with this much reservation. He really delivered the line. He also didn't comment on his own line while he was giving it.

Or that it happens so often, there's a name for it. Yeah, that's a good line. It's a great line. It's a long, clumsy line, but he delivered it really well. You know, I don't know that I ever saw Broken Arrow. Oh, I didn't either. I was just alive in the 90s, so I was cognizant of it. Yeah, I thought at first you were talking

about Saturday Night Fever. With Christian Slater. Sure. He was great. No, no, I wasn't. Do you remember we talked about Saturday Night Fever? Must've been in the Disco episode where it turns out that the article it was based on

was this totally fabricated member. That's right. That's such a great soundtrack, man. Maybe one of the all-time best. It's great. Yep. But we're here to talk about Broken Arrows. Yeah.

And I got this idea, this was one of my commissions, was because I had someone on Movie Crush then we did Doctor Strange Love. Nice. The great, great movie from Stanley Kubrick, which factors in to this stuff some. And he brought in a stack of papers and just said, here, for your desk.

And it was a list of all the Broken Arrow incidents. Wow. And there were a lot more than 30 of them. So I don't know what all was included. We'll get into some of the terminology of what kind of falls under the banner of a broken arrow. But a broken, well, we should just go and tell everyone what a broken arrow is.

Yeah, we should. As defined by the Department of Defense and a little bit from the Air Force, is an accident involving a nuclear weapon or warhead or nuclear component or an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that could result in accidental or unauthorized launching, firing, what else? Detonation.

Yeah, jettisoning them, jettisoning them, damage to them, accidentally dropping them. And I mean, I've got to say, I don't know what's worse, accidentally dropping a nuclear bomb or that it happens so frequently, there's a name for it. Thank you, Mr. Whaley. Sure. You can go to your trailer now.

So that's a, I mean, that's a broken arrow. And like there's a, if you've seen that movie, Broken Arrow, it's about Christian Slater foiling John Travolta after he steals a nuclear bomb. That's actually technically not a broken arrow. From what we know, that's called an empty quiver, which works with a broken arrow. But I thought it had to do with a stolen nuclear bomb,

which led me to think like, hey man, we've basically already done this one. We did how easy is it to steal a nuclear bomb? Remember that? That's right. Okay, this is really very much different. This is basically when a US military personnel screws up big time as far as a nuclear bomb is concerned,

or there's some terrible accident with a nuclear bomb, but it's not something that's going to lead to war, right? It's not like an accidental launch of a nuclear weapon against the Soviet Union back in the Cold War. It's dropping a nuclear bomb on your toe. That's a broken arrow, basically. Yeah, and I've always thought broken arrow, I was wrong.

I thought it kind of only meant that you lose a nuclear warhead somehow. Well, that's what Travolta's lies. I know. He's the father of lies. That's what he teaches us. Yeah. We've been misled by Travolta.

Yeah, have you seen him? He's gone bald now. Have you seen him? Good for him, man, has he? Yeah, he finally just ripped off the old rug, said, this is me, and he's got a great bean. He looks fantastic. Oh, I'm sure, I'm happy for him.

That's good, because he's been hiding that for decades. So we should talk about a few other points of terminology that might pop up. There's something called a pinnacle-level incident, and that basically means that any kind of incident where it's so big that it really goes up all the way up the military chain to the very top. Yeah, it's a big deal, in other words.

It's a big deal, as Travolta would say. And there's a few more incident codes that I think are pretty interesting. There's one called a nuke flash, and that means an accident or incident that could be the precursor to the trigger of nuclear war. That's a big one. Yeah, that's the one where there's like,

somebody accidentally sets off a intercontinental ballistic missile toward Russia. That is like one that can lead to nuclear war. And did you read that as nuke flash? Yes, I read it as nuke flash. That's funny. Thanks. What about front burner?

Yeah, front burner is triggered by any hostile, it is pinnacle-level, and it's triggered by any hostile attack against US forces, and it's not necessarily a nuclear incident. No, but it can lead to a nuclear war, so it's kind of considered part of that whole family of nuclear jargon. Yeah, and I also don't think I said it's a hostile attack

by someone that we're not already at war with. Oh, that is a big caveat, because I guess if you're already at war, front burner is everywhere. It's front burner. Front burner. There's another front burner. Yeah.

Yes, that's a good point to make, dude. There's also empty quiver, which that's the name that should have been given to the Travolta Slater movie. Correct. That's where the nuclear weapon is stolen. And I gotta say, I don't know what's scarier that a nuclear weapon can be stolen,

or that it happens often enough that there's a name for it. Did we go for bent spear yet? No, not to be confused with burning spear. No, a bent spear is a nuclear incident that's a big deal, but it's not pinnacle-level, and this is like if someone violated a regulation or a procedure or something when you're storing or transporting a nuclear weapon.

Like it's like a three stuges level type of nuclear accident. Okay. Where nothing really bad results from it. It's just somebody screwed up, and Ed gave this example. I had not heard of this one, but apparently in 2007, there was a burning spear,

I'm sorry, that was genuine. There was a bent spear incident, where six armed nuclear warheads were loaded on a B-52, and they walked away, slapping the dust off of their hands and turned in for a good night's rest and did not leave a guard. These six armed nuclear warheads were left aboard a B-52 that was unguarded overnight.

And the next morning, they flew them across the country as scheduled. Okay, so nothing happened. No, it's like one of those ones where you find that you've bitten down to your cuticles. You're right. Because you're just so mortified at the idea of how bad things could have gone,

but we just narrowly averted crisis. All right, are there any of these other terms that matter to you? No. Okay. None at all. All right, well, we'll talk about, we'll go over some broken arrows later and some actual incidences.

But we should talk a little bit just about nuclear weapons. They are very much classified as to where they are. And the upper brass basically has an exception to that where if there's an incident and it presents a hazard to the public, like, boy, we need to get people out of there and we actually need to cop to this thing, then that is an exception where you can reveal

that they're like, surprise, you're living near some nuclear warheads. He didn't realize it, but over there in that silo, it is not wheat. I get the impression also where 750 soldiers suddenly converge on a farm field where a plane went down. It's usually kind of already old news to the locals that there's a nuclear bomb somewhere in play,

especially if this happens to take place during the 50s or the 60s, which were the worst decades in American history for near-miss nuclear accidents. Yeah, and it's interesting, I never really, I kind of just thought like, oh, it's because of technology. And that's sort of true in that in the 50s and 60s, if you wanted to drop a nuclear bomb,

that's why they say drop a nuclear bomb, because you were literally doing that. It was not attached to some missile on some base. It was in the belly of a plane and you flew over a site and opened doors and dropped a bomb. Yes, that's the only way to do it. That's how you delivered, right, that's how you delivered a nuclear bomb.

And so because planes were so intimately connected with delivering a nuclear bomb early on in the Cold War, there was a guy who took over strategic air command in I think 1957 and he was an old bomber pilot and he said, look, man, here's our new strategy. We're going to keep bombers loaded with nuclear bombs in the air at all times. There will always be multiple B-52s flying around

with loaded nuclear weapons all the time, ready within striking distance of Russia. And so this thing was called Operation Chromedome, where pairs of B-52s would take off for 24-hour missions. They would refuel in the air, there would be multiple pilots aboard so that they could trade off shifts because they would stale off for 24 hours.

And then before they came back to base to land at the end of 24 hours, another pair would have taken off. And from what I saw, at the minimum of Operation Chromedome, there were always at least four B-52s in the air flying these routes like near Russia. Usually there was 12 in the air. And then during the Cuban Missile Crisis

at the height of Operation Chromedome, there were 75 B-52s in the air with nuclear weapons ready to strike at any given time. And because there were so many planes taking off and landing constantly with nuclear bombs, the chances of an accident with one of these nuclear bombs escalated tremendously.

And that was the decades that Operation Chromedome lasted when these nuclear weapon problems, what we call broken arrows, really kind of stepped up. Yeah, and I mean, that's, if you've seen Dr. Strangelove, that's what that, you know, there's kind of three parts to the story. And one part is up in the air

in one of these bomber planes. And that's what Slim Pickens and James Earl Jones are doing up there. They are just manning a flight that is flying close to the Soviet border and hoping that they just land and take off again the next day and fly and it's boring and they land again.

And like I said, the idea is you do this over and over and over and nothing ever happens. But of course in Strangelove, things go wrong. But that, yeah, that's what they were doing up there. Yeah, so that's Operation Chromedome. Eventually, we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those ones that you talked about, like in the ground in a base,

they were capable of striking Moscow from Kansas. When we developed those in the 60s, we said, okay, we don't need this chromedome strategy any longer. But also because there were so many accidents and because the accidents were so colossally bad and yet still just near misses from a nuclear explosion, the idea of this chromedome strategy was like, we can't do this anymore.

This is just too risky, basically. All right, should we take a break? I believe so, Charles. All right, we're gonna take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how a nuclear bomb works right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts

or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like a Joshua Chuck. All right, Chuck, so if you're, I think we should do a nuclear bomb episode someday. Yeah, where did we go over this? Was it during the meltdowns episode? Yeah, it must have been. On like a fission reaction?

Yeah, cause it does seem pretty, pretty familiar, doesn't it? Yeah, cause, you know, what a nuclear bomb is, is detonating and instigating or causing a fission reaction. Well, that was the early ones, right? Yeah, yeah, so how this works is a nuclear reaction is plutonium and uranium being compressed and smashing into other plutonium and uranium

to get a nuclear fission reaction going. Right. And the early, I guess, H bombs is what they called them initially, right? Hydrogen bombs. Well, atomic bombs, I think initially. Yeah, atomic bombs. They were very rudimentary, wow.

Yeah, they tried to dress them up by adding an extra syllable, but they were still rudimentary. They were rudimentary. And in fact, the very first bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima actually fired a gun type mechanism to set off this reaction. Right.

It was like, yeah, they would shoot uranium at uranium and that would set off the fission reaction. And like, you can produce a pretty substantial explosion, like they did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? And, but compared to the other way that they later quickly figured out, I believe in the 50s, they moved over, I think those were the hydrogen bombs,

thermonuclear bombs, where they used fusion, where it was an implosion that pressed the material, the plutonium or the uranium together to create this nuclear reaction. That's when you got something in the yield of megatons, millions and millions of tons worth of TNT explosive power, where the one in Hiroshima was like 15 kilotons, like 15,000 tons of TNT.

Yeah, and thank God they hadn't figured that out at that point. Yeah, because those earliest broken arrow ones were like, dude, if this had been like a fusion bomb, who knows what would have happened. Although, I can't tell if one was safer than the other. And Ed rightly points out, the reason all of these were near misses

was because along the way, scientists thought, we need to include some fail safes here, so that if something does go wrong, a cascading string of multiple failures have to happen in a certain order for this thing to actually go off. Or you have to make it so it purposefully happens in this order for it to actually go off.

And that if one thing doesn't happen in this cascade, then the thing won't actually have a nuclear detonation. And the fact that the scientists worked in these safety mechanisms, that's what kept South Carolina and North Carolina from having entire towns leveled the nuclear explosions accidentally. That's right, because what happens now with this implosion,

it is this nuclear material is packed and surrounded by high explosives, just regular conventional explosives. And this is, these things go off and they create a big boom in and of themselves that is very dangerous. But like you said, there are so many safety features built in and unless you have that exact implosion pattern

that you need, it might be scary, but these high explosive going off don't necessarily mean that there will be that fusion reaction. And if it gets shot, like let's say somebody bombs your bomb, that doesn't necessarily mean, and probably means it won't happen. It will again be a big boom, but it will break apart that nuclear material

and just scatter it around. It's not gonna compress it in the way you need to create that fission reaction. No, and that's what a dirty bomb is. It's where you're not creating a nuclear explosion, but your explosion is spreading radioactive material that contaminates an area, which is bad enough, but it's not nearly as bad

as an actual sustained nuclear explosion. And because the nuclear bombs were made in such a way, like you said, that explosive pattern has to happen, exactly just so, you're probably not going to get that same pattern if those explosives go off from hitting the ground after being dropped 15,000 feet or burning in a jet fuel fire from a crashed jet. They'll still explode, like you were saying,

but it's not going to create that nuclear explosion. But it still will make you bite your fingernails to the cuticle though. Yeah, it'll go up that pinnacle chain. I'm also not sure about how bombs are now, but I know that for a while, and maybe that's still the case, they're just physically distanced.

Like those explosives are not right next to the nuclear capsule, and that distance can actually help prevent those nuclear explosions. Yeah, or there's like an electronic circuit that has to be completed for the detonator to go off. And so even if it's exposed to flames or impact, it's still not going to go off

because it's detonated electronically. There's like more safety systems that they worked in. But initially, one of the earliest ones they had with those imploding H bombs was that they just simply wouldn't put the core of the nuclear material that was to be imploded in the bomb. It'd really just be like a 5,000 or 20,000 ton bomb of high yield explosives, of high explosives,

but the nuclear core wasn't plugged into the center. So it might be on the same plane, but it wasn't plugged in at least some cases. In other cases, and the military used that, the core wasn't inserted into the bomb at the time, excuse very frequently to basically say there was really no chance of this becoming a nuclear explosion.

But there's a lot of debate about just how true that is in some of these instances where some of these were fully armed nuclear bombs that just so happened, we lucked out that the pattern of explosion with the high explosives didn't follow the right pattern to set off that nuclear reaction. Yeah, and again, these protocols came about

in the 60s and 70s, which is why most of these, almost all of these broken aero incidences were in the 50s and 60s. In the 1990s, I think in 1990, there was a technical report on the safety of our arsenal conducted independently by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and this is great for the general public in dum-dums like us.

They just gave it a school rating, like A through F basically, on all the weapons that we've used from 1950 to 76, and I don't know, I guess up until the 90s. But every weapon from 50 to 76 received a D, except for one, and that one was the Minuteman II and it got a C plus. A C plus, C plus, which is pretty nice,

especially among Ds. But everything else got a D for 26 years. Right, that just goes to show you like just how poorly these things were safety mechanized, I guess. Yeah. But even despite, they still went to some extent to make them safer, but they just hadn't gone far enough,

and yet despite that, we still didn't manage to accidentally blow ourselves up with a nuclear bomb, despite all the broken arrows that we have gone through, which we'll now go through. Should we take a break and then go through some of these or do something and take a break? Just want to get that little word play in. No, no, we'll take a break.

We'll take a break, right? Yeah, we'll be right back with Broken Arrows. We'll be right back with Broken Arrows. We'll be right back with Broken Arrows. We'll be right back with Broken Arrows. We'll be right back with Broken Arrows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

They are inside me, Joshua Chuck. OK, Chuck. So we, um, we, as far as we know, the military will cop to 32 broken arrows in the history of the atomic age. As far as the United States goes, um, other countries have their own, and apparently the Soviet Union had at least as many, if not more than we did. They copped to you, which, yeah, if you've seen Chernobyl,

you know that there were probably like hundreds more. Yeah, yeah, and, and possibly the same for us. It makes a really good point that, you know, the, once the intercontinental ballistic missiles came along and we didn't need Operation Chromedome anymore, broken arrows all but vanished, but it's also possible that the military just decided like, we're just not going to publicly

announce these things any longer. Yeah. Which is entirely possible. Who knows, but as far as it goes officially, there have been 32 broken arrow pinnacle incidents that have happened in the nation's history and some of them are just absolute doozies. Yeah, so we'll go over some of these.

I guess we can start with the first one just for nostalgia's sake. This is February 13th, 1950, a B-36B peacemaker bomber set flight from Alaska. And this is just a training mission where they want to simulate a nuclear strike against Russia. Right. But they did have a big bomb on board.

It was a 5,000 pound bomb with just the conventional explosives. It wasn't, or at least the Department of Defense and the Air Force say, and we're going to be caveatting all these. Cause, you know, we can only say what they told us, but they said that there was no plutonium core on the plane. But this is one of the planes that took off, had engine trouble, the crew bailed out

and set off the bomb in the air and then bailed out of the plane. And the bomb luckily went off over the ocean. Right. And this kind of strikes at the core of a lot of these accidents, like whenever you hear about, like, or whenever you think about why haven't we been obliterated by a meteor or something.

It seems like the world is just full of people, but there is way more empty land and water still than there are massive amounts of people. So the fact that we haven't been hit by the big asteroid or a lot of these bombs go off in places where there are no people, it is lucky, but the stats are also in our favor. Yeah, it's either that or we're living

in a computer simulation, one of the two. Exactly, we're in the matrix. So that was the first one, that was in 1950. And the fact that the government says there was, there was only like a, what did you call it? Like what was the kind of flight it was on? Just like a training mission. Training, yes.

So there's a training plug inside of the thing. It's made of lead rather than plutonium. And that actually probably holds up to scrutiny because in the early 50s, that's the kind that they were using, they were small enough that you could send one of the pilots or one of the co-pilots or somebody to the back to actually arm the nuclear weapon with the plug.

And if they were on a training mission, there really wouldn't be much use for that. So that probably was a non-nuclear bomb that went off. But by the late 50s, the government had moved on to much bigger bombs. And because they decided that they needed to be hair trigger ready, they were armed. Despite what the government says,

these type of bombs that they moved to are called sealed pit weapons where that core was inserted and then the bomb was sealed. And then it was loaded onto the plane. So the plane was flying around with a fully active, ready to go nuclear bomb. So anything starting in the late 50s onward is suspicious if the government's saying

that it wasn't an active nuclear bomb. That's right, very true. Here's another one. And we're just kind of picking through these. I think Ed gave us like 17 or 18 to choose from. Well, I thought like all 32 were on here. No, no, just seem that way. This one in March, and this represents sort of one

that's happened a few times, which is where a plane and the bomb in the plane will just vanish, never to be heard from again. And that happened on March 10th, 1956, the B-47 Stratojet. It was supposed to refuel in midair over the Mediterranean Sea, but the plane never showed up for that dinner date.

And they never found the plane. And it had two nuclear capsules, and they were never found either. And that was, I think, 1956, you said? Yeah. If you fast forward a little bit to 1958, that was a really, really bad year for broken arrow incidents. I mean, if you're a fan of broken arrow incidents,

it's a great year, but for the rest of us, it was a bad year. From January 31st to March 11th, there were three. So in less than six weeks, there were three broken arrow incidents, two of which were among the most famous broken arrow incidents ever to take place. The first one produced what's known as the Tybee Bomb.

You've heard of the Tybee Bomb? Oh, yeah. Okay, so there was a B-47 that was on a training flight. And since this is 1958, it's entirely possible that it was a fully active nuclear weapon that it was flying around with. The government says no, other people say it absolutely was. But on the training mission, the B-47 came in contact

with a fighter jet that was also training and pretending to attack it. And they accidentally knocked itself out and knocked the B-47 out. The B-47 crew ejected, they jettisoned the bomb, and for weeks afterward, they looked around Tybee Island to find this bomb, and they still to this day haven't found it.

Yeah, Tybee Island, which is off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. And you said that the F-86 was pretending to attack. It was just like a training thing? Yeah, yeah, and it got too close. And I think took its own wing off and crippled the B-47. You think that's because the pilot was going pew, pew, pew the whole time? Yeah, basically.

He wasn't paying attention. It was a Mark 36 bomb too. This is really important. It was a four ton hydrogen bomb that may have been fully active and is just somewhere off, like right off of the coast of Tybee Island somewhere. And if you've ever been to Tybee Island,

this explains quite a bit about Tybee Island, that there's a four ton hydrogen bomb just sitting right off the coast. Now, what does that mean? Are you knocking Tybee? No, I love it. I think Jerry Vacation's here. I think Jerry Vacation's here, what it is.

Yeah, Jerry loves Tybee. It's a great place. It's its own place, and I love it for that. It's also super-duper weird. Well, what I can't figure out is why they can't find this thing. That just seems, it just seems impossible to me that you can't find this,

given that Tybee is not the huge displays. No, I agree. I think it's just one of those needle in the haystack things. By now, it's probably been covered with so much like silt and sediment. They may never find it, but I read this really interesting article, and there's been a lot of articles written about the search.

There's a guy who I think is a former Air Force commander. I can't remember what he did in the Air Force or the military, but he got interested in the idea of chasing down these lost broken arrows. And he searched for the Tybee bomb, and he claimed to have found it at one point. Yeah. But I'm not sure what happened with that,

but this article called The Saga of the Tybee Bomb, it was by Roger Pinkney in Gardening Gun magazine. Yeah, I think I read that. And oh, he really played up the Southern thing that he and his writing. Oh my God. But it was good. It was a good article.

But he interviewed a shrimp boat captain, or no, he interviewed the nephew of a friend of a shrimp boat captain who on his deathbed says that he found the bomb and said exactly where he trawled it to, and then cut it loose when he realized it was a bomb, and never told anybody, or he did try to tell somebody and they ignored him. But he kind of left this legacy

of potentially where the bomb is. And he said it was right off of the dock of the Coast Guard post on Tybee Island. Well, maybe they never found it because it was after his long list of shrimp recipes. It's possible, shrimp Newberg. Shrimp Newberg. That was a great, great movie.

Was it? Was it not? I don't think so. I don't think Forrest Gump has aged well. Oh really, I'll have to go see it then again. Yeah. I thought it was a sweet movie. Yeah, all right.

Oh, okay, okay. We'll take that up later. All right. Well, let's go with another one in 1958, another very famous one on March 11th when the United States Air Force, it was the B-47 going to Britain. And it had an issue with the locking pin

on the Bombay doors. There's a story supposedly that one of the co-pilots went to fix it movie style by hitting the fault light with the butt of his gun. It's like right out of a movie. The planes captain just like, and this may have been a big inspiration for Dr. Strangelove,

because if you remember in that movie, Slim Pickens, there's an issue with the Bombay doors. And he basically rides the bomb and very famously at the ending, wearing his cowboy hat right out of the Bombay door. But the planes captain climbed into that Bombay to go check things out and accidentally pulled the emergency release lever

or pushed a button that he shouldn't have pushed, depending on who you're asking. The bomb dropped. These doors were closed, remember, but this is a four ton bomb. So it just smashed right through those doors, fell 15,000 feet and blew up a farm in South Carolina. Yeah, like they bombed South Carolina

with a nuclear bomb and just by the grace of the nature goddess, there was no nuclear explosion. That's right. I mean. But a big boom. Yes, a huge boom. And it actually ruined the farm of the Gregg family, the Walter Gregg family.

And he lived bitterly the rest of his life because he finally sued and got like 36 grand or something like that, which even at the time wasn't enough for him to rebuild his house and his farm. And no one died. That was just miraculous. But several members of his family were injured and had to go to the hospital.

But it was a big deal. It left a crater that's still there. It's in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, which is not too far from Florence. But it was something like five miles from Florence, something like that. And had this thing gone off, it would have wiped Florence right off of the map.

Wow. Yeah. It would have been a really big deal. And this was just in a nuclear accident where somebody accidentally dropped a bomb on a farm in South Carolina. This other one in 1958, and you are right. There were a lot in 1958.

But this one in November was pretty bad. It was a B-47 crashed. It just seems like there were nuclear planes crashing all over the place. Because there were so many nuclear flights taking off and landing every single day. I guess so. Yeah.

And they were moving the bombs like from one place to another constantly too. Well, this one crashed in Texas. And it was carrying a nuclear weapon. And the Air Force kept this one classified for a long time. But it had enriched uranium. So they figure it was a sealed pit weapon that was armed. And the high explosive did detonate.

But there was no nuclear explosion again. Hopefully because of these fail safes. But the kicker here is there was an environmental cleanup. This was in 1958 in the Air Force. Said, you know what? We should go in there and clean this stuff up. Because it's 2011. Right.

That's how long they waited to clean this site up. Yeah. And apparently they grew grain and fed cattle that grain on this land. That was a nuclear disaster site. Because again, like the bomb, the nuclear bomb might not actually go off. But those high explosives are blowing the nuclear material

all over the place and just totally contaminating the area. And they didn't do anything about it for what, 53 years. While they were feeding cattle grown on the land there. That's crazy. What else we got? So there were two incidents that kind of brought the Operation Chromedome era to an end. Remember we said the intercontinental ballistic missile

development really put an end to it. But also the idea like, this is just too risky. And they knew it going into it. They were like, you know, we're gonna be flying around with armed nuclear weapons. It's far riskier, but it's a great strategy. In case the USSR strikes us, we'll be able to strike back. So it's worth the trade off.

They knew going into it. But after all of these accidents, they finally were like, okay, it's not worth the trade off anymore. And the last two that really did it in were in January of 1968, I believe. And the last two that really did Chromedome in, both happened in January, but two years apart,

January 66 and January 68. And I think one of the reasons it really hastened the end of Chromedome is because they happened on foreign soil where we had Air Force bases, but we're guests of the country and the country that this happened in, the countries that happened in,

we're not very happy with us for allowing these nuclear accidents to take place. Yeah, there was one in January, it was another midair collision during refueling, which if you've ever seen those midair refuelings, it's a tricky thing. So you can see how that would happen. And that's of course how Strangelove opens

over the opening credits, very famously with the refueling scene shot in a very sexual nature on purpose, of course, because it was Stanley Kubrick. But this one was near Palomadas, Spain. Nice. Is that right? Yeah, I think that's good enough. All right, and there was, like I said,

the two planes crashed into each other and four bombs were on board. Four. One fell into the ocean, one fell on land, and the other two fell on land and detonated the high explosives. One went to market. I knew you were gonna say that. So yeah, one of them, one went off, I think,

and blew up, you said? Out of the four, that's actually pretty lucky. No, no, no, one of the three that fell on land, two actually detonated the high explosives. Okay, gotcha, gotcha. And then the one that went in the ocean, like they looked for that for weeks and they finally managed to find it,

which, based on these broken arrow reports, is really rare to actually find the bomb. But they found this one in Spain and then they actually cleaned up the site because this was in Spain, it wasn't just in Texas. Right. So they went to the trouble of cleaning up the site and they removed 1,400 tons of contaminated soil

from the crash site, where this radioactive material had been scattered by the explosion. Amazing. So that was two years before Chromedome ended. The last one, the one that really brought about the end of Chromedome was in Greenland, the incident at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland

in January of 1968. This one happened in literally, from what I read, the next day Operation Chromedome was ended. Oh, really? So this was a B-52 crash, crashed onto sea ice, and apparently they had to get rid of 237,000 cubic meters of snow, ice, water, and plane junk. Yeah, they removed it to the United States

because it was contaminated with radioactivity. So the fact that it happened in Greenland was bad enough, but Greenland was a territory of Denmark at the time and Denmark had a no nuke policy. So they were really unhappy with this. But what's cool is Denmark forced the US to conduct an environmental estimate and study this stuff to make sure

that there were no prolonged effects and they found that there weren't. And that's good. That's what the study turned up. But yeah, but this was back in the 60s and they're doing this kind of thing. So way to go, Denmark. I think we should talk about the one over North Carolina too,

even though it jumps back in time, is that all right? Yeah, I'm fine with jumping back in time. January 24th, 1961, a B-52 got a fuel leak, starts getting out of control. And it's trying to get back to its base. The crew ejects, the plane breaks apart and crashes near Goldsboro, North Carolina. And there were two nuclear bombs on board here

that separated from the plane and fell to the ground. One of them was fully armed hydrogen bomb, had nuclear material, everything was there for a 3.8 megaton explosion. And it crashed to the ground at high speed and disintegrated without either the high explosive or the nuclear explosion going off into sort of a swamp. And what happened to the other one?

It actually fell gently to earth. It's parachute deployed and it just went do-do-do-do-do-do. It's like a movie. It got stuck in a tree. Yeah. And they got it out. A hydrogen bomb stuck in a tree with tons of high explosives attached to it, just hanging out, but they managed to get that one back.

It's amazing when you read through some of these, it looks like, and I know it's not the case, of course, our military does a great job, but it looks at times like it's a Three Stooges episode. Yeah. Like there was one plane that was pushed off an aircraft carrier that had a nuclear bomb, just sort of pushed off the side of the carrier.

Off the coast of Japan, and it's still down there from what they, from what we understand. Here's something horrific, Chuck. The pilot was in the plane at the time. Oh, really? They've never recovered the plane, the pilot or the bomb is just down there in like 12,000 feet of water, I believe.

Yeah, I imagine you sink pretty fast. Oh, God, man, that's just terrible. There was one where a, this was a missile stored ready and armed at an air force base in New Jersey when a helium tank burst. I guess they were blowing up birthday party balloons. And this did not have a high explosive detonation,

but the missile's fuel tank ruptured. And there was a big fire, a bunch of these, there were fires, like big fires where they thought, you know, is it gonna happen or is it not? Yeah. And luckily it did not. No, and I'm sure that was a consideration every single time, like is this thing going to blow up into a nuclear explosion?

I mean, some of these are just, which just would have been massive. The one in Goldsboro, North Carolina, we were talking about, had they gone off, it would have been 253 times larger than the Hiroshima blast. Wow. Yeah, it would have been enormous. I mean, look what that one 15 kiloton bomb did

to Hiroshima. Imagine 253 times worse over North Carolina. Oh, I'm sure that, that would have been Georgia, it would have been South Carolina, as far as fallout goes. It would have been massive and enormous. And the fact that we didn't ever, for every single one of these,

not once did a nuclear explosion go off. It's really a testament to the scientists who designed this thing to be as safe as humanly possible. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You got any other ones? Yeah, I mean, there's some others, like the USS Scorpion nuclear sub went down,

it had a nuclear reactor aboard and a couple of nuclear torpedoes. Like if you go through this list, there's a substantial number of nuclear bombs, like out there in the Sea of the Philippines, off the Azores, off of Tybee Island, just hanging out, waiting around, hopefully indefinitely or forever and never going off.

But I remember that was like, one of the big concerns among the people living on Tybee is like, this high explosives are aging, what's gonna happen when they reach a certain age? Are they gonna become, are they just gonna blow up? And is somebody's boat gonna be over the area at the time? Like what are we doing here?

And the official thing is like it's just gone and it's safer to just leave it wherever it is and try to move it at this point. Yeah, the other, I think funny thing, Ed included here toward the end was, he says there are hundreds of other incidences that would be classified as bent spears, like dropping fully armed nukes onto the concrete.

He said, more so many times I lost count. Or just like dropping off the wing of an aircraft onto the ground when they were doing something. Isn't that a movie? Wasn't that in a movie? I don't know. That happened in a movie. And it's like, oh, it's just so cringy.

It's like a top secret or something. Hot shots. Maybe. Maybe. Can only help thank the Zuckers brothers. I went and watched a loaded weapon. Was that good? It is, it's good for what it is for sure, yes. Now was that the Zuckers?

Yeah, I believe it was one of the Zuckers if not both of them. But Emilio Estevez, he's great. You're a big fan of him. I love it. He's a good actor. Don't you always champion the sanitation worker movie? Uh-huh, men at work.

Yeah, men at work. It's such a good movie. I still haven't seen that one. You got to see that one. It's got a real plot to it and everything. Oh yeah? Yeah. And I mean, it's Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.

When else are you going to see those two together? Agreed. Thanksgiving maybe. Yeah, that's right. Christmas time. Maybe Easter, depending. I mean, they're brothers. I know they are.

That's why you'd see them together. That's right. Were you telling me that or were you telling the listeners that? Oh, I don't know. I'm just talking to the ether. Okay, good. Well, since we started talking about Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, I think it's time for a listener name.

And Charles, this episode comes out. It so happens on the 31st, I believe. That's New Year's Eve. That's right. I was trying to get you to say it and you did. So a couple of things. We want to wish everyone a Happy New Year first, of course. And also, I want to wish a happy birthday

to my dear, sweet wife, Yumi. Happy birthday, Yums. Thanks, man. So Happy New Year, everybody. We hope that it is a spectacular 2020 for you. It's the future now. That's right. So let's all kind of shape up and act right for it.

Let's do. Okay, so Happy New Year, everyone. And now it's time for a listener name. Yeah, we're going to share a dream here. We don't usually do this because, let's face it, listening to someone's dreams is the worst. But this was kind of funny. It's from Cassie.

She wrote it at 5.30 a.m. right off the bat after having this dream. She said the dream was I won some random drawing and the prize was to sit down on recording of a podcast while you were in my area. So you guys come to my cabin, which I don't have in real life. You explain that you want to record the podcast in bed.

And so there we are, all three in bed together, wearing button-up jammies that no one really wears in real life. And you guys are, you have your microphones and everything and you're doing your stuff you should know thing and I'm just sitting there watching and laughing and learning. When you decide that you're done and it's time to go to sleep.

So we go to sleep in the same bed that you recorded from. Josh is in the middle and Chuck and I are on opposite ends. I was extremely self-aware that I roll around in my sleep and there's no way you guys are going to be able to sleep. And sure enough, after a while, Josh gets up and says, I'm going to go watch TV, I can't sleep. So I was mortified that I kept them up and then Chuck rolls over and wraps his arm around me

and spoons me. And I said, what the heck are you doing? And Chuck says, oh, no, no, no, this isn't a sexual thing. I'm happily married, as you know. But Emily knows that I have to hold on to someone in order to fall asleep, so it's okay. So, and he says, normally it's Josh when we do these overnighters, but you know.

So I usually spoon you, apparently. Well, sure, everybody knows that. So now there is no way I'm falling asleep. I told Chuck I was going to go watch TV with Josh and Chuck says, I can't sleep either and asked for Pepto Bismol and winks at me like it's code for something. So Chuck starts laughing and says,

no, don't worry about the Pepto Bismol. So then there we are, all three watching TV on the couch and you guys are asking for snacks. I open my fridge and I have tons of expired snacks and I'm embarrassed and realize that the snacks are expired and I never even fed you dinner. You guys- That is pretty embarrassing.

You guys awkwardly pretend to be okay, not eating while we're sitting on the couch and your stomachs are literally rumbling extremely loud. And finally, we all fall asleep on the couch. The next day you were doing a live show and apparently you're great friends with my pharmacist and my pharmacist posted selfies with Josh lifting weights at the gym

before you guys went to do your live show. Isn't it crazy where these dreams go? They go all over the place, man. All over the place. I don't know how they knew that your pre-show routine was lifting weights. You like to buff up before the show. Sure.

Anyway, I'm still laughing now and I'm definitely going to have a great day because of this dream. Thank you, I'm sorry and you're welcome. That is from Cassie. Thanks a lot, Cassie. Much appreciated. Yeah, we'll just move on from that one.

That's right. If you want to get in touch with us like Cassie did, you can go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com. You can check out our social links there and you can send us an email. Send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. StuffYouShouldKnow is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.