The Canadian Navy is sending a ship to a remote area of the British Columbia coast to see if an object found by a diver is part of an unarmed atomic bomb jettisoned by a crashing B-36 in 1950. Sean Smyrichinsky told the Vancouver Sun he found a strange-looking piece of metal on the ocean floor off Boyle Point on Pitt Island, about 500 miles north of Vancouver, while diving for sea cucumbers. “I found this big thing underwater, huge, never seen anything like it before,” Smyrichinsky said. He told others about his find but it wasn’t until he related it to a longtime resident of the area did the connection get made. “Nobody had ever seen it before or heard of it, (because) nobody ever dives there,” he told the Sun. “Then some old-timer said ‘Oh, you might have found that bomb.'”
“That bomb” might be a Mark IV atomic bomb of the same type that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. The U.S. Army has acknowledged that a bomb was jettisoned from a crashing B-36 in that area but that it did not contain any fissionable material. The aircraft was on a training flight from Alaska to California when three of its engines caught fire. The 17 crew members abandoned the aircraft but five died. The aircraft continued inland and crashed near the top of Mt. Kologet, about 200 miles from where the diver made his find. The Canadian Navy says the official record says the bomb’s core was packed with lead, rather than plutonium, but wants to make sure. However, it likely still has the TNT charge used to detonate the plutonium. “The Canadian Armed Forces treats reports of suspected unexploded ordnances very seriously and we continue to investigate this matter,” a government official told the Sun.
