On Jan. 21 , 1968 , a plane with carrying nuclear bomb came go down down to the glacial sea frappe of western Greenland . A huge B-52 G Stratofortress made an emergency landing place near Thule Air Base in this icy sphere of the cosmos as part of a protective measure in casing the United States on the spur of the moment total under attack from the Soviet Union .
The wreck could have – and credibly should have – been much , much worse than it actually was .
A B-52 G Stratofortress , interchangeable to the one that crashed in Greenland .
A B-52G Stratofortress, similar to the one that crashed in Greenland.
Themission originate routinely enoughfor Air Force Capt . John Haug and his crew . The monolithic plane take off from Plattsburgh Air Base in upstate New York as an attempt to keep a lower limit of 12 man B-52 planes in the atmosphere at all times . The idea was to have the power to reply to any Soviet threats quickly . This escape was part of that larger operation .
Haug and his crew had direct together several times . There was an redundant pilot on dining table to give the main crew a opportunity to sleep during their 24 - hour mission . The Air Force begin Operation Chromedome in 1961 , and a vast majority of missions flew without incident .
Five hours into the Greenland commission , Haug ordered his co - pilot program to get some sleep while the extra pilot get along on duty . worry started a few second later .
Wikimedia Commons/Rescuing Staff Sgt. Calvin Snapp (center) after he parachuted safely to the ground.
Temperatures in the cabin got too insensate . The gang reply by turning up the heater on the plane . Then they smelled smoking and a small firing broke out .
Haug regularize the crew to don oxygen mask . He radioed Thule Air Base and take for license to stage an emergency landing . The carpenter’s plane was about90 mile in the south of the base . The crew depleted all of its flaming asphyxiator and roll of tobacco continued to replete the cabin to the point where no one could read their instruments .
Haug realize the plane could n’t make an exigency landing if no one could see . He was able to determine the carpenter’s plane was over land , and he could see the lights of Thule . All of the gang parachuted out . Six men made it to the ground safely . The co - pilot who perish to take his cat sleep , Leonard Svitenko , died from head trauma he suffered while try out to bail out from a lower hatch .
Wikimedia Commons/Thule Air Base as seen from the air. In Jan.1968, the water was completely covered in ice.
The plane ride out aloft for another 7.5 miles before crashing into sea methamphetamine hydrochloride . exigency crews rescued the survivors from the bitterly cold temperature that reached down to -18 and -25 degrees Fahrenheit .
Wikimedia Commons / Rescuing Staff Sgt . Calvin Snapp ( center ) after he parachute safely to the ground .
The flack from the clash was seen for miles . The problem was that search crews could n’t locate the four nuclear weapon on add-in . These were n’t Hiroshima - character turkey . The entire load of four H bombs was just about 239 metre more powerful than the fission bomb calorimeter dropped on Hiroshima .
To make matters worse , the temperature that night go down to -75 degrees . The wreck site exposed water underneath the sea water ice , and hazard were estimable that the four hydrogen bombs sink to the bottom of the sea . radiation therapy levels at the clang site spiked , and recovery efforts would be cramp by the total dark . On Jan. 28 , a week after the crash , the military reported it had recovered parts of all four nuclear bomb .
The crash could have been bad . An passing red-hot fire from the jet fuel could have melted through the bombs and actuate them . It was pure happenstance that the B-52 crash into deoxyephedrine address the sea rather than land . The military recovered the radioactive textile despite the weather condition .
Controversies began shortly after the incident and remained for closely 50 years . The Danish governing , the superintendent of Greenland , expressly forbade nuclear material over and on the island when it signed an correspondence with the United States to let Thule Air Base exist in the first place . Denmark was furious .
Wikimedia Commons / Thule Air Base as seen from the air . In Jan.1968 , the water supply was completely cover in ice .
In 2008 , the BBC challenged the idea that all four atomic bombs were recover safely . The media retail store ’s investigation said that one bomb stayed missing . Both the U.S. and Danish governments strongly refute the BBC report .
This atomic fortuity and external incident was totally avertable . The cause of the fire onboard the B-52 was due to the work party stacking four foam seat cushions on top of a heating plant vent . The volcano was in the back of the plane in the work party compartment , underneath the teacher navigator ’s seat .
It ’s dreadful to conceive that four froth seat cushion could have caused a nuclear Armageddon that finish civilization as we get it on it .
Next , see the townfrozen in prison term by a nuclear meltdown . Then watch an surreptitious atomic explosionmelt the Earth ’s surface .
