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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
From 1961 to 1968, the U.S. flew strategic bombers loaded with nuclear bombs as part of a nuclear deterrence strategy known as Operation Chrome Dome.Although the operation experienced risky accidents over the years, it wasn’t until a B-52 bomber crashed in Greenland in January of 1968 that the program came to a halt.During those seven years, the U.S. had accidentally dropped bombs in North Carolina, California, Maryland, and Spain—though, thankfully, none of the weapons ever detonated.
The best way to describe the U.S.’s stance regarding the Soviet Union throughout the 1960s—especially following the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962—was one of maximum vigilance, and a major feature of that high-alert strategy was Operation Chrome Dome. As part of America’s nuclear triad (along with land-based missile silos and deep-sea submarines), the Pentagon decided to constantly fly strategic B-52 bombers loaded with enormously powerful thermonuclear weapons around the world on a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week-mission. At any given time, nuclear bombs were flying around the world ready to strike the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice.
The plan would have made sense in a world with perfect operational efficiency. But when humans, planes, and thermonuclear bombs are involved, perfect isn’t always possible. That became evident nearly from the outset of the operation, when a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress broke up in mid-air and dropped two 3.8-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs on Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 24, 1961. Thankfully, neither detonated, thanks in one case to the very last line of technical defense against accidental detonation: a cheap, low-voltage fail-safe switch.
Despite that close brush with nuclear devastation—and despite similar accidents in California and Maryland—Operation Chrome Dome continued. In 1966, five years into the operation, the U.S. accidentally dropped four thermonuclear bombs over Palomares, Spain, when a B-52 collided with a KC-135 tanker in mid-air. Still, the mission continued for two more years until a final accident shut down the program for good.
Operation Chrome Dome included three primary bomber routes: one over Alaska and the Western Pacific, a southern route near the Mediterranean Sea, and a northern route over Canada and Greenland. On January 21, 1968, a B-52 took off on what was known as a “Hard Head” mission on the northern route—also called a “Thule Monitor Mission”—carrying four B28FI 70-megaton thermonuclear bombs. But its primary purpose was to fly a figure-eight holding pattern above U.S.’s Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base), 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to visually confirm that the base’s Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar was still operational. If the communication link between the base and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was ever severed, the B-52 crew overhead could determine whether the interruption was caused by a Soviet attack or merely a technical failure. As Eric Schlosser noted in his 2013 book Command and Control, “Nobody expected the Thule monitor to destroy Thule.” But that’s very nearly what happened.
The B-52 Thule monitor left Plattsburgh Air Force Base in New York and was flying its holding pattern over Baffin Bay in Greenland when a fire broke out inside the aircraft. The fire spread rapidly, forcing the evacuation of the nuclear bomb-laden plane before it could make an emergency landing at Thule Air Base. Instead, the bomber crashed onto the sea ice of North Star Bay, igniting its conventional ordnance and contaminating the area with nuclear debris.
According to political scientist Scott Sagan, who analyzed “Broken Arrow” incidents in the 1993 book Limits of Safety, the crash was a “normal accident waiting to happen.” One of the co-pilots had stuffed foam-rubber cushions beneath a navigator’s seat to make it less uncomfortable during long missions. But when the heating system on the bomber failed, the co-pilot turned on an auxiliary heating system that pulled in hot air from the engine through a vent near the foam cushions. This caused the cushions under the seat (which was in a space just beneath the main flight deck) to catch fire. While six of the crew safely ejected from the aircraft, co-pilot Leonard Svitenko died while trying to bail out.
The accident immediately initiated operation Crested Ice, in which nuclear clean-up crews from the U.S. descended upon the area. Like all previous loose-nuke incidents, none of the nuclear bombs detonated, but the accident proved to be one too many for planners at the U.S. Department of Defense, who put a halt to the seven-years-long Operation Chrome Dome the following day.
Within hours of the accident being reported to the general public, groups of protesters formed outside the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark—since Greenland is a territory within the Kingdom of Denmark—a mere 2 days before general elections were held in the country, according to The New York Times.
The U.S.-friendly Danish politician Jens Otto Krag eventually lost.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.