The B-36 Broken Arrow and the Smithers Museum Turret

The object you are looking at, here in the Bulkley Valley Museum in Smithers, is a portion of a gun turret from a United States Air Force Convair B-36 bomber that crashed on Mount Kologet, in northwestern British Columbia, sometime after midnight on February 14, 1950. It was the first-ever loss of an American nuclear weapon, what the military calls a Broken Arrow.

The aircraft, a B-36B with serial number 44-92075, was assigned to the 7th Bombardment Wing at Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. It had taken off from Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, on a twenty-four-hour simulated nuclear-strike mission, with a planned bomb run over San Francisco before flying nonstop to Fort Worth. There were seventeen men aboard.

The plane carried a Mark 4 atomic bomb. It held a substantial amount of natural uranium and about five thousand pounds of conventional explosives, but no plutonium core. Until 1951 the US military held no nuclear cores; they were entirely in the custody of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. What the flight did carry was a dummy capsule, a lead-filled simulated container for the core, which was later recovered.

Seven hours into the flight, in minus-forty cold, three of the six piston engines began shooting flames and were shut down, and the remaining three could not deliver full power. The investigation blamed ice buildup in the carburetor air intakes. The crew decided to abandon the aircraft.

The atomic bomb was jettisoned and detonated in mid-air over the Inside Passage, a large conventional explosion. Canadian authorities were never told the plane was carrying a nuclear weapon.

Twelve of the seventeen crew survived. The wreckage was not found for three years, until 1953, when a Royal Canadian Air Force flight searching for a different missing aircraft spotted it on Mount Kologet, about fifty miles east of Stewart and northwest of Hazelton. A United States Air Force team reached the wreck in August 1954, recovered components, and used explosives to destroy what was visible above the snow.

The Canadian government declared the site protected in 1998. The gun turret you can see here is the piece of that aircraft that ended up in Smithers.