In Northwest BC, the Case of the Missing Nuke

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In Northwest BC, the Case of the Missing Nuke

[ https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/08/25/Nort ... ign=250823 ]

Secrecy hangs around the site of a 1950 plane crash in the Kispiox Mountains. Who is it protecting?

Amanda Follett Hosgood The Tyee August 25, 2023

Amanda Follett Hosgood is The Tyee’s northern B.C. reporter. She lives in Wet’suwet’en territory. Find her on Twitter @amandajfollett.

In the top left, the front page of the Vancouver Daily Province shows a black and white image of 10 men along with the headline, “Twelve airmen saved from B-36.” Below it is a black and white image of an egg-shaped bomb. Two other newspaper clipping headlines read “U.S. erred in reports on nuclear mishaps” and “Pentagon doesn’t know where A-bomb was lost.”

A shroud of mystery encompasses the B-36 bomber that was discovered 70 years ago on a mountain, more than 300 kilometres north of where it was thought to have plunged into the ocean — whilst carrying a nuclear weapon. Newspaper clippings from the Vancouver Daily Province and Vancouver Sun. Collage by The Tyee.

It’s not every day the U.S. Air Force loses a nuclear warhead. But the first time it happened was somewhere over northwest B.C.

The night was bitterly cold and the B-36 bomber had taken off from a military airbase near Fairbanks, Alaska. It was 1950, the early days of the Cold War, and the aircraft was on a training run down the Alaska-B.C. coastline to San Francisco and eventually Texas.

The pilot had strict instructions not to enter Canadian airspace. But when three of the B-36’s six engines burst into flames somewhere over Hecate Strait, to the east of Haida Gwaii, he turned the vessel inland, giving the 17-person crew a chance to survive in the wilds of coastal B.C. rather than the frigid Pacific Ocean.

Just before midnight on Feb. 14, 1950, the crew bailed out, parachuting over the remote Princess Royal Island, southwest of Kitimat. A dozen survived and were rescued in the days that followed. . . .

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