{"id":621067,"date":"2026-09-11T04:40:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T04:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/621067\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T04:40:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T04:40:18","slug":"crews-searched-3-square-miles-of-sea-ice-in-greenland-by-walking-shoulder-to-shoulder-in-a-line-and-scraping-up-everything-black-but-the-second-stage-of-one-weapon-has-never-been-accounted-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/621067\/","title":{"rendered":"Crews searched 3 square miles of sea ice in Greenland by walking shoulder to shoulder in a line and scraping up everything black, but the second stage of one weapon has never been accounted for"},"content":{"rendered":"

A nuclear weapon torn apart by fire and impact does not go off.<\/p>\n

That sounds like luck. It is design, and it was designed in deliberately.<\/p>\n

The package only works if a precise sequence happens in a precise order, and almost any departure from it produces\u00a0no yield at all.<\/p>\n

What it does produce instead is a mess, and a very persistent one.<\/p>\n

The conventional explosive packed around the core still fires, and metal that was solid a moment earlier\u00a0leaves as dust.<\/p>\n

Then the wind takes it.<\/p>\n

Why the surface was the problem and never the blast<\/p>\n

A weapon of this kind is built so it cannot assemble itself by accident.<\/p>\n

The core sits inside a shell of shaped explosive that has to fire everywhere at once, within millionths of a second, to squeeze the metal evenly from all sides.<\/p>\n

Set it off from one side, or set off only part of it, and the core is\u00a0pushed sideways\u00a0and broken instead.<\/p>\n

Nothing follows. The design requirement is that one accidental detonation point cannot produce a meaningful yield, and on that morning it held four times out of four.<\/p>\n

What it cannot prevent is the rest. Plutonium ignites in air on its own, and burning jet fuel supplies as much air and heat as that needs.<\/p>\n

The metal turns to a fine oxide powder, the powder rides the smoke, and it comes down wherever the smoke went.<\/p>\n

So the job that followed was not an engineering problem. It was\u00a0a surface problem, and the surface was ice.<\/p>\n

The bay, the dark and the lid on the water<\/p>\n

The site was a bay in northwest Greenland, a few miles from an air base wedged on rock between the ice sheet and the sea.<\/p>\n

In January there is no daylight there. The sun does not clear the horizon for months, so every hour of the work happened under\u00a0portable lamps.<\/p>\n

The bay was frozen across, which was the only thing that made a search possible at all.<\/p>\n

Under that lid the water runs deep, and anything that went through was effectively gone.<\/p>\n

The contamination lay in a strip roughly one mile by three, easy to see because burning fuel had melted down into the ice and refrozen black.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Tugboats<\/p>\n

Other top storyEach of the 89 concrete boxes being cast beside a Danish harbor is 712 feet long and gets towed to sea by tugboats, while the box itself very nearly floats and is sunk on purpose with water pumped into it<\/a><\/p>\n

Black on white was\u00a0the one advantage\u00a0anybody had.<\/p>\n

What the record says about that winter<\/p>\n

The aircraft came down on January 21 of 1968 with four weapons aboard, each rated a little above a megaton.<\/p>\n

Six of the seven men aboard got out of it before it came apart.<\/p>\n

The recovery ran from that week into September and averaged 40 below zero, dropping at times to 76 below.<\/p>\n

Crews worked a marked grid in line, lifting contaminated ice, snow and wreckage into containers, and more than 550,000 gallons of it went back to the United States in\u00a030 tanks.<\/p>\n

The general in charge put the share of contaminated material removed at 93 percent.<\/p>\n

Analysis of the recovered weapon parts accounted for 85 percent of the uranium and 94 percent by weight of three secondaries. Of the fourth,\u00a0nothing was identified.<\/p>\n

What the tidy version leaves out<\/p>\n

The temperature gets used carelessly. An extreme reading is not a working condition, and the gap between an average of 40 below and an occasional 76 below is the gap between hard and impossible.<\/p>\n

The missing part is the second thing. A small submarine searched the seabed that August, found nothing, and the effort was\u00a0dropped rather than finished.<\/p>\n

Whether that component went through the ice, burned, or was carried off has never been stated publicly, and those are three different answers.<\/p>\n

The health claims are the third. Hundreds of workers later sued, a Danish survey found a raised cancer count among those sampled, and official inquiries disputed the link, in the way that arguments around\u00a0a Cold War machine<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0a heavy lift<\/a>\u00a0tend to\u00a0outlast the event.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Gantry<\/p>\n

Other top storyTwo gantry cranes going up over a dry dock in Dalian span 840 feet between their legs and hoist a load 328 feet into the air, which is a span no shipyard crane anywhere has matched<\/a><\/p>\n

The diplomatic side is separate again, and the documents behind it stayed sealed for decades, as\u00a0the declassified file<\/a>\u00a0now shows.<\/p>\n

What the accident actually changed<\/p>\n

Two things came out of that winter in the end, and only one of them was quick.<\/p>\n

Armed bombers stopped flying standing patrols within weeks of the accident. That practice simply ended and never came back.<\/p>\n

The second took eleven years. Designers went after the explosive itself and produced a formulation that burns instead of detonating when it is struck, crushed or dropped.<\/p>\n

It is less powerful and you need more of it, and that was accepted as the price of not repeating this, as\u00a0the assembled account<\/a>\u00a0of the accident sets out.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0second stage\u00a0nobody found is the part the record cannot close.<\/p>\n

Everything else about that winter is\u00a0on paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A nuclear weapon torn apart by fire and impact does not go off. That sounds like luck. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-621067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}