DocJax

Declassified record · U.S. Department of Energy

Broken Arrow - Radiation Picked Up at Thule Crash Site (Journal Herald, January 24, 1968) (Accident 30, B-52 Thule, Greenland)

Dated
Jan 24, 1968
Document type
Newspaper article
Length
1 page
Open the original scanArchive record OSTI ID 1085042 · public domain

Document text

Machine-read from the scan, so expect some errors. Lines that couldn’t be read are left out.

Page 1

Not Lethal Unless Inhaled « JOURNAL HERALD 7 Wednesday, January 24, 1968 Dayton, Ohio, Radiation Picked Up At Thule Crash Site radiation has been picked up at. the. B-!j2 crash site near 1,liat at least one of the four , hydrogen bombs being carried by Ihe bomber split open when the piane hit the ice Sunday ■the radiation detected out on the ice of North Star bay was alpha radiation, which is not lethal Just how the alpha rays were found was not immediately cer tain, though one source sug gested it was 'from the shoes of search teams out on the ice. The Pentagon insisted last night that search teams had not found the missing plane wreck age or any parts of the four bombs it; was carrying. One theory had the bombs tumbling out of the plane and into twofoot snowbanks covering the seven feet of ice that covers all the Arctic this time of year. The other theory is the wrecked plane, its bombs still inside the bomb bay, had plunged through the ice to the bottom of North Star bay, as much as 900 feet beneath the While the Pentagon has yet to disclose the number and size of the bombs on board the bomber, it is understood the plane carried four hydrogen bombs of the 1.1 megaton type, with a total explosive force equal to more than 4.4 million tons of dynamite—a force 300 times greater than that which struck Hiroshima in World Meanwhile, it was also under stood that the one crew mem ber who died in the B-52 crash Sunday was killed when his parachute either failed to open or opened only partially. He was Capt. Leonard Svitenko, 36, of West Springfield, Mass., the The six’other crew members all bailed out safely from the burning plane and were recov ered by dogsled rescue teams. Whether the missing bombs were in the snow or beneath the ice, the Pentagon continued to emphasize there was “no danger of a nuclear explosion” because the bombs were un