Mystery object off Haida Gwaii may be old nuclear bomb

Sean Smyrichinsky may have found lost nuclear weapon that was packed with lead when it was dumped off B.C. in 1950.

An American B-36 bomber en route from Alaska to Texas during a training exercise lost power in three engines and began losing altitude. To lighten the aircraft the crew jettisoned its cargo, a 30-kiloton Mark 4 (Fat Man) nuclear bomb, into the Pacific Ocean.

The Mark IV was a giant bomb, It was similar to the atomic bomb that killed 39,000 to 80,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan.

“Without a real bomb the support systems could not be tested,” explained one of the plane’s co-pilots in an interview you can find online.

“There were some dummy bombs made of concrete that were used for load testing, but we weren’t carrying one of those. This mission was to be as real as it gets short of war.”

The pilot said the bomb aboard the B-36 had lead in its core instead of plutonium, so it wasn’t a functional atomic bomb. But the crew decided to jettison it over water before abandoning the plane.

“I suggested to Capt. Barry that we must dump the bomb at sea because we were unsure of our position relative to inhabited areas on the ground and he agreed,” said the co-pilot.

“The large amount of TNT in the bomb could have caused major damage where it would have impacted.”

Agencies/Canadajournal