Rational fears?

“SAVANNAH, Ga. — Despite heightened concern since Sept. 11, the U.S. Air Force said it is not losing sleep over a nuclear bomb lost off the coast of Georgia during the height of the Cold War.


The nuke was lost during a 1958 training exercise, when an F-86 fighter plane collided with a B-47 bomber. The pilot of the crippled B-47 released a "Mark-15" bomb over water to reduce the risk of an explosion during the emergency landing.

A nine-week search following the accident found no sign of the missing bomb, and the Air Force deemed the Mark-15 "irretrievably lost."

For more than four decades, the bomb has presumably remained embedded somewhere in the seabed — invisible to the world and, for the most part, ignored.

But Derek Duke, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, fears the bomb may fall into the wrong hands and wants the government to renew efforts to find it.

"This bomb is about 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb," Duke said.”

“Obviously it was a dud. It didn't go off”

“Rational: Fear of getting a head freezee wilst drinking my hard lemondade”

“Brain freeze sucks!

8|”

“Biz, isnt the point of hard lemonade to get a brain freeze?”

“Biz...most ordinance won't go off unless armed, or it meets certain conditions. Drop in altitude, impact force, remote detonation. For the nuke you can almost bet it was in no way armed, or going to be”

“Even if the bomb were still submerged, after this long sitting is sea water, the majority of the rocket is probably gone. So even if a country did what the US Navy couldn't do and find the bomb, they would still have to do extensive repairs to the circuitry and mount it to a ICBM body, especiall considering that it was a bomb (aka no propulsion) and that there is no way in hell a foreign bomber could make it over the US. Factor in that the key countries in question lack the technology for a trans-antlantic ICBM platform and definatly a sub-based platform (or the means to salvage it at all) and I feel pretty safe about the whole deal. The only concern would be China or India, but they have their own Nukes and probably wouldn't bother with a 44 year old bomb sitting at the bottom of the ocean.”

“The most likely delivery option for that type of a bomb would be a container of freight, IMO.”

“I didn't know that”

“Don't need a nuclear detonation.

Just take the plutonium from the warhead and wrap it around a few sticks of dynamite. Carry it to the top of any tall building in a briefcase, and detonate.

The wind will carry the radioactive plutonium dust over the rest of the city, rendering the economic heart of a large metropolitan area uninhabitable for several months or years (until cleaned up at a cost of $billions). Several thousand people will eventually get cancer too.

Missiles from some other country is not the big worry. Radioactive contamination is a bigger threat.

A crude low yield nuclear device detonated at the right place would cause far more worldwide impact than a missile lobbed on a city.

Consider the worldwide economic shockwaves if someone blew up the Panama or Suez Canal, or St. Lawrence seaway, Straits of Bosporous, or any other transportation chokepoint.”