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1965 Philippine Sea A-4 incident

Nuclear weapon loss incident

Nuclear weapon loss incident

FieldValue
imageMk43.jpg
image_size320px
captionA MK43 free-fall nuclear weapon on a handling dolly
alt
dateDecember 5, 1965
summaryPre-flight human error
occurrence_typeIncident
sitePhilippine Sea
coordinates
plane1_fatalities1 Pilot (LTJG Douglas M. Webster)
plane1_typeDouglas A-4E Skyhawk
plane1_operator[[File:Attack Squadron 56 Insignia (US Navy).jpg12px]] Attack Squadron VA-56
Carrier Air Wing Five
plane1_tailnumBuNo *151022*

Carrier Air Wing Five

The 1965 Philippine Sea A-4 crash was a Broken Arrow incident in which a United States Navy Douglas A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon fell into the sea off Japan from the aircraft carrier . The aircraft, pilot and weapon were never recovered.

The accident

On 5 December 1965, 31 days after Ticonderogas departure from U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay in the Philippines, The pilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Douglas M. Webster; the aircraft, Douglas A-4E BuNo 151022 of VA-56; and the B43 nuclear bomb were never recovered from the 16000 ft depth. The accident was said to occur 68 mi from Kikai Island, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan.

Ticonderoga had aboard Carrier Air Wing Five during this cruise, with two squadrons of Skyhawks. The lost aircraft was part of Attack Squadron 56 (VA-56); VA-144 was the other.

Number of weapons

Though most sources state that a single weapon was involved, a document from Los Alamos National Lab indicates that two weapons were involved.

Revelation

It was not until 1989 that the United States Department of Defense revealed the proximity of the lost one-megaton H-bomb to Japanese territory. The revelation inspired a diplomatic inquiry from Japan requesting details.

References

References

  1. (29 August 2022). "The Bizarre Mystery of the Only Armed Nuke America Ever Lost".
  2. Richard Halloran. (May 26, 1981). "U.S. discloses accidents involving nuclear weapons". [[The New York Times]].
  3. "Broken Arrows: Nuclear Weapons Accidents".
  4. Maruyama Kuniaki 丸山邦明. (2005). "Amami sengo-shi".
  5. "CV-14".
  6. (2022-10-11). "An Introduction to Los Alamos National Laboratory". Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States).
  7. (May 9, 1989). "U.S. Confirms '65 Loss of H-Bomb Near Japanese Islands". [[The Washington Post]].
  8. (10 May 1989). "Japan Asks Details On Lost H-Bomb". The Washington Post.
  9. "Ticonderoga Cruise Reports".
  10. (April 2022). "Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents". [[Lulu Publishing]].
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

1965-in-military-history aviation-accidents-and-incidents-in-1965 aviation-accidents-and-incidents-involving-nuclear-weapons cold-war-military-history-of-the-united-states 1965-in-japan united-states-navy-in-the-20th-century philippine-sea japan–united-states-relations december-1965-in-asia
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