Lost nuclear bomb may still be on seabed near Greenland

A leading Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, has claimed that there is an American nuclear bomb still lying on the seabed near Greenland 32 years after it a B52 crash.

On 21 January 1968 the B52 bomber, codename Butterknife V, was flying above Thule in Greenland. It crashed on the ice in Baffin Bay. Three of the four bombs broke on impact scattering radioactive debris. Each of the bombs was a B28 thermonuclear weapon with a yield of 70 to 350 kilotons.

While the US claimed that all the weapons had been accounted for they did not say that they had all been recovered. Jyllands Posten says:

"Detective work by a group of former Thule workers indicates that an unexploded nuclear bomb probably still lies on the seabed off Thule."

There were several other incidents in which B52s crashed. One of the most serious was in January 1966 when a nuclear armed B52 collided with a refuelling tanker over Palomares in Spain.