How foam rubber cushions caused a nuclear catastrophe

January 19, 8:30UTC + 3

Precisely half a century ago, four US nuclear bombs fell to Greenland.How this could happen and what the consequences led to - in the TASS material

Cold winter of 1968. The Bay of the North Star in the north of Greenland is covered with a thick layer of ice. Over a nearby US Air Force base, Thule, a bombed strategic bomber Boeing B-52 sweeps , then falls into the bay and goes under the ice. On board the aircraft were seven crew members and four B28 thermonuclear bombs with an aggregate capacity of almost 300 "Little ones" (the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima).

Pillows made of foam rubber

At the height of the Cold War, in June 1961, the United States launched Operation Chromium Dome, which presupposed the B-52 military patrol with nuclear bombs on various routes from Alaska to the Mediterranean.Each of the aircraft had a list of targets in the USSR, to which these bombs had to be dropped upon receipt of an appropriate order.

One of the tasks foreseen in the Chromede dome was patrolling around the US Air Force Base Thule with the aim of constantly observing the ballistic missile early detection system based on this base.

It was precisely this task - Hard Head - that was performed by the crew of the B-52 bomber of the 380th Bombardment Wing of the Strategic Command of the US Air Force on January 21, 1968. The plane had all the chances for a successful mission. If it were not for the pillows made of foam rubber.

 

Trying to keep warm

Before the departure of the B-52 crew member and reserve pilot Major Alfred D'Amario made irreparable - put under the seat foam cushions, blocking the ventilation outlet of the heating system. This would not be the cause of the disaster, if the spare pilot did not decide to warm himself and his comrades by raising the temperature on board.

The third pilot let air into the heating system from the air path of the engine. But the heating system was faulty: the air became too hot and caused a fire in the pillows placed under the seat.

The fire extinguishers that were present on board did not cope with their task, and the fire spread quickly through the salon. The crew decided to catapult, and only one of its members failed to do it - the second pilot Svitenko suffered a fatal head injury and could not get out of the burning B-52.

The last day of the "dome"

The plane went under the water of the Gulf on January 21, 1968, and the operation "Chromed Dome" was canceled the day after that - on January 22nd. There were at least two good reasons for that.

Firstly, the plane crash above Tula was not the first incident of this kind. The US Air Force already had time to "excel" in the sky over Spain. In 1966, an American B-52 collided in the air with a Boeing KC-135 fueler. On board the bomber there are four such thermonuclear bombs.

Unfortunately, in two of them, in a collision with the surface, a conventional (non-nuclear) explosive detonated and the bombs themselves were destroyed. In the area of the fall there was a radioactive contamination - both in the town of Palomares, and in the Mediterranean, where one of the bombs was carried away.

The costly cleaning and decontamination of the area took two and a half months, and the United States pledged to no longer carry out flights with nuclear bombs onboard the Chromed Dome. True, the promise extended only to Europe.

Secondly, the same happened in Greenland.

"Dr. Frieslav"

This case was very much disturbed by the Danish government (Greenland is the autonomous territory of the Danish kingdom). To clean the waters near Greenland from radioactive substances, Copenhagen and Washington urgently launched Operation Crested Ice ("Crested Ice").

Unofficially, the name of the operation - "Dr. Frieslav" - was a reference to the famous film Stanley Kubrick in 1964 "Dr. Strangelove, or How I stopped being afraid and loved the bomb." The film was shot under the impression of the scarcely completed Caribbean crisis, and in its last minutes the US Air Force Major, riding a nuclear bomb, jumps over the territory of the USSR from the B-52 bomber.

During the operation, which lasted six months, nearly 7 thousand cubic meters of contaminated ice and snow were collected. And one of the four drowned b