And You Thought You Were Safe
One of the main problems with nuclear weapons, aside from their existence, is that they have to be monitored and handled by human beings. Part of the human condition, of course, is that we make mistakes, and even when mistakes are unacceptable, they will happen. It is a given.
The Cold War was defined in large part by the U.S. and the Soviet’s mutually assured destruction via a great arsenal of nuclear weapons that were deployed on a large variety of launch platforms -- submarines, underground silos, towed trailer launchers, aboard surface ships, and of course on aircraft -- all systems which, to varying degrees, are complicated and breakdown prone, and all, of course, operated by error-prone human beings.
Take aircraft, for instance. There is no such thing as a safe aircraft. You can do your best, but sometimes planes fall from the sky. And when they happen to be loaded with nukes, those accidents are far from just the tragedy of human lives lost or injuries sustained, but contain the possibility of terrible things potentially happening.
Submarines go down, too. The U.S. has lost the Thresher in 1963 and the Scorpion in 1968. As for the Soviets, they suffered some terrible accidents in the course of their nation’s nuclear age, and more than one submarine hull now serves as a tomb in waters so deep, light doesn’t penetrate from the surface. Very recently, the Russian Navy lost the boomer Kurske that suffered internal explosions and sunk in the Barents Sea. Along with the Kurske went the lives of over 100 men and numerous weapons of mass destruction. The chances of recovery are almost nil -- no one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully raised a downed submarine, including the ill-conceived and ultimately failed attempt by the CIA to raise a Soviet Golf-class nuclear submarine during the Nixon administration.
No one, I think, will really know how many nuclear warheads have been lost over the years. Many, many of them sit on the bottom of various ocean floors and, in one instance, even somewhere on a tract of swampy farmland. One, a Navy weapon, is somewhere on the bottom of Seattle’s Puget Sound, not a terribly deep body of water. These are now very much time bombs -- not in the sense of being ready to accidentally explode, but rather, because of leakage as corrosive water continues to eat away at them.
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