On the eve of Valentine's Day, 1950, an American Strategic Air Command B-36 bomber-loaded with an atomic
bomb-flew into the frozen night on a simulated bombing run from Alaska to San Francisco. The engines
suddenly failed on this notoriously unreliable aircraft and the crew, before parachuting into the rugged
terrain of northern British Columbia, set the autopilot to take the aircraft far out to sea.
Years later the wreckage of the bomber was accidentally discovered on a remote northern British Columbia mountaintop
hundreds of miles from its presumed location deep beneath the Pacific Ocean.
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Did an atomic bomb lie undetected
for a number of years in coastal northern British Columbia?
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Or was the nuclear weapon jettisoned
and destroyed only miles from Canadian shores
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becoming the world's first dirty bomb?
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Was this America's first lost nuclear
weapon?
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Finally, and most baffling, did one
of the missing crewmembers, the last man aboard, attempt to pilot the doomed aircraft back to its
Alaskan base?
A Discovery Channel special on this topic aired in November 2006 with strong media coverage. The special is expected
to air several more times in 2007 and 2008.
This compelling true-life mystery will resonate with readers in a world in which a new nuclear arms race
is shaping the geopolitical climate.
