Has lost nuclear bomb been found after 66 years?
A NUCLEAR bomb which has been missing since 1950 may have been found at the bottom of the ocean.
Sean Smyrichinsky was diving off the west coast of Canada when he spotted a large metal object.
The Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) believes it could be the nuclear weapon from a US B-36 bomber that crashed in 1950.
It is sending its navy to the site near the Haida Gwaii islands to verify the find but the US government does not believe the bomb contains nuclear material.
The bomber crashed on its way to Carswell Air Force Base in Texas.
It had been on a secret mission to simulate a nuclear strike and had an 11,000lbs Mark IV bomb on board to see if it could carry the payload.
Several hours into its flight, the engines caught fire.
The crew dropped the bomb over water so it wouldn’t detonate on land before putting the plane on autopilot so it would hopefully crash in the middle of the ocean.
Five of the 17-man team died after parachuting out of the burning bomber. Three years later, the wreckage of the B-36 was found hundreds of miles inland. Dirk Septer, an aviation historian from the Canadian province of British Columbia, says the US government searched the wreckage but couldn’t find the bomb.
‘It was a mystery to everyone,’ he said. ‘It was the height of the Cold War and they were just paranoid that the Russians would get a hold of it.’ Mr Smyrichinsky says he found the device early last month while diving for sea cucumbers off Pitt Island, near the Alaskan border with British Columbia.
It was ‘bigger than a king-size bed’, flat on top with a rounded bottom and had a hole in the centre just ‘like a bagel’, he told the BBC.
Mr Smyrichinsky said he joked with his fellow divers that he had found a UFO. It took several days before he could alert people who might know what the device was, but one of his friends told him about the lost nuke.
The American military says the bomb was filled with lead and TNT but no plutonium and so isn’t capable of a nuclear explosion.
A DND spokesman said the device could be the bomb. And while the US military do not believe the bomb is active or a threat, Canada is sending military ships to the site to make sure.
But Mr Septer is not convinced and says the location is wrong. ‘It could be anything,’ he said. ‘Whatever he found, it’s not the nuke.’