[imagesource: Official US Navy photograph]

During the height of the Cold War between the US and the USSR or Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear strike was regularly spoken about.

Residents of New York City might say they can relate after the Emergency Management Department released a 90-second public service announcement last month with information on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.

In the 1960s, US pilots were on 24-hour alert and the aim was to ensure the country could launch a retaliatory strike in 15 minutes flat.

During that decade, reports VICE, many nukes were lost but only of them was armed. It’s quite a story and is made all the more interesting by the fact that it’s never been recovered.

On December 5, 1965, U.S. Navy Lt. Douglas Webster was supposed take an A-4E Skyhawk loaded with a nuclear bomb into the sky. On the USS Ticonderoga aircraft carrier [pictured above], stationed in the Philippine Sea about 70 miles from Okinawa, Japan, the crew loaded the weapon onto the vehicle and Webster got into the cockpit. The crew then pushed the plane to an elevator that would bring it up to the flight deck.

Webster was going to take flight with the bomb and then return to the carrier for it to be unloaded as part of the practice drill.

However, the Skyhawk began to roll out of the elevator and the crew were unable to get Webster’s attention.

Because he failed to break, the crew could only watch as the Skyhawk headed for the edge of the aircraft carrier:

 It hit the netting on the side of the elevator, broke through it, and fell into the ocean. The nuke was armed.

Image: US Navy photo

“We never saw Lieutenant Webster after he climbed into the cockpit or knew what efforts he might have attempted to get out of the Skyhawk, but we were stunned to witness a plane, pilot, and nuclear weapon fall into the ocean,” [Chief Petty Officer Delbert] Mitchell said.

The image above shows a Skyhawk landing on the USS Ticonderoga in January 1963.

Mitchell was onboard that day and detailed his experience in an essay for Naval History Magazine in 2019. He called it “horrifying to watch a human being die before our very eyes, powerless to save him”.

The Skyhawk sank rapidly and despite immediate efforts to aid Webster and recover the bomb, no sign of the missing nuke or plane was ever uncovered.

All that was found was Webster’s helmet.

The Navy did its best to keep the incident under wraps and it only became public knowledge in 1989. At the time, a spokesman said that the environmental impact of the nuke was “expected to be nil”.

That might be true but it’s ultimately hard to know what will happen to an active nuclear weapon at the bottom of the ocean.

[source:vice]