Broken Arrow: America's First Lost Nuclear Weapon

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. Did an atomic bomb lie undetected for a number of years in coastal northern British Columbia? Or was the nuclear weapon jettisoned and destroyed only miles from Canadian shores, becoming the world's first dirty bomb? Was this America's first lost nuclear weapon? 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.

Norman Leach is a Calgary based historian, freelance writer and speaker. He has won a number of awards including The Crystal Book Award for the University if Lethbridge, an Honourary Peacekeeper Award from the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canada 125 and Alberta Centennial Medal.