Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• On board the USS Ticonderoga, the crew was running what was supposed to be a routine exercise involving the loading and unloading of a nuclear bomb on an attack aircraft.
• As it was being raised to the deck on the ship’s aircraft elevator, a slight turn of the ship caused the Skyhawk to start rolling uncontrollably, and its pilot never heard signals to hit the brake.
• In a tragic turn, both plane and pilot sank quickly because of the enormous amount of extra weight, and the bomb is still lying at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean today.

It was supposed to be a routine exercise. Perhaps an odd phrase to use when describing the handling of nuclear weapons, but during the Vietnam War, it was standard procedure to regularly load and offload 2,100-pound nuclear bombs onto attack aircraft aboard the USS Ticonderoga. If detonated, those bombs would explode with a force between 70 kilotons and 1 megaton. Something so dangerous and powerful should have been impossible to lose sight of—but in an instant, one of those bombs vanished.

In 1965, in the wake of Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained bombs on North Vietnam to thwart the Hanoi regime’s support for its South Vietnamese allies, the Ticonderoga was en route to Yokosuka, Japan. After serving in WWII, the carrier had been modernized in the early 1950s, including a refit that relocated its aft elevator to the starboard deck edge. In October of 1965, it departed San Diego for its second Vietnam War deployment, and at the end of November, the carrier was ordered back to Yokosuka, Japan, for maintenance and R&R.

On December 5, the “Tico” was in the Philippine Sea—approximately 68 miles from Kikai Island in Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture—when an exercise that would turn into a tragedy was authorized by the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Robert N. Miller. Miller gave orders to load a B43 nuclear bomb onto a Douglas A-4E Skyhawk of Attack Squadron 56 (VA-56), expecting the weapon to be unloaded again later.

Lieutenant Douglas Webster was slated to fly the Skyhawk that afternoon after Airman Richard Edminster passed the controls to him. It was 2:00 pm when the thermonuclear bomb, covered in a gray tarp, was transported to the No. 2 hangar bay. The weapon arrived on an Aero 33D bomb truck, a specialized hydraulic loading vehicle used to position heavy ordnance beneath aircraft, and was flanked by a security escort of two armed Marines.

Chief Petty Officer Delbert Mitchell, an aviation ordnanceman on the Ticonderoga, was one of the witnesses to the exercise and the events that followed. He remembered what happened very clearly. “All six members of my team were standing around, each of us with a checklist to cover the different tasks we had to perform,” he told the U.S. Naval Institute in a 2019 interview. “Mine was to verify the weapon was on ‘safe’ and to report it to the crew chief. The W Division personnel removed the tarp from the weapon, and we all immediately identified it as a live B43 thermonuclear weapon.”

Mitchell also remembers the shock of seeing the “Y1” symbol and realizing the bomb had a yield of up to 1 megaton—70 times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima. He and his team used the Aero 33D bomb truck to hydraulically lift the B43 into the centerline bomb rack on the Skyhawk’s underside, and once it was successfully loaded, they locked it in with sway braces meant to keep it from shifting. Webster climbed into the cockpit after checking the aircraft and the bomb for any signs of potential hazards. When everything was declared safe, Mitchell’s team watched as the Skyhawk was pushed onto the No. 2 plane elevator.

To understand what happened next, it may help to know what a deck-edge elevator is. Unlike centerline elevators that sit within the body of the ship, the Ticonderoga’s No. 2 elevator was a platform mounted on the side of the hull, cantilevered out over the open ocean. It was designed to lift aircraft between the hangar deck and the flight deck without blocking flight operations on the centerline. The side of the elevator facing the sea was essentially open. Safety netting was strung along the edges to prevent crew members from falling overboard into the water, but the netting was never designed to restrain an aircraft—especially not one with a bomb weighing nearly a ton slung beneath it.

The Ticonderoga turned to starboard. The ship heeled accordingly, tilting the deck-edge elevator and hangar slightly downward toward the sea and creating a situation in which the Skyhawk was now on a slope angled toward the open ocean. The aircraft had difficulty making it over the ramps between the hangar and the elevator, but once it started rolling toward the unprotected edge, it was impossible to stop. Plane directors blew their whistles in a frenzy, but Webster—who appeared to be searching for something inside the cockpit—seemed oblivious to their panic. In the seconds that followed, all efforts to hold the plane back proved futile. The Skyhawk slammed against the edge of the elevator, crashed through the safety netting, tipped forward, flipped upside down, and plunged into the ocean.

According to eyewitness accounts, as the plane rolled toward the edge, Webster’s head was down in the cockpit. When the aircraft slammed against the deck of the elevator, Webster looked up and partially rose from his seat. He grasped the edges of the open cockpit and appeared to attempt to stand up, but he was restrained by his seat harness. He couldn’t unbuckle in time. When the aircraft fell into the Philippine Sea upside down, Webster was trapped.

Questions would continue to haunt Mitchell and other survivors of this tragic accident. Could the oppressive heat of the South Pacific—which had caused many of he crew to suffer from heat exhaustion— have left too disoriented to hear the signals shouted by the crew on the deck, even though he had been medically cleared for duty? Perhaps. But there may be a more obvious reason why he was looking down instead of slamming the brake. Edminster, the pilot who’d been flying the plane earlier that day, stood six feet six inches, while Webster was only five feet eight inches tall, and Webster hadn’t made any adjustments to the pilot’s seat. Such a significant height difference meant that Webster’s feet probably couldn’t reach the plane’s brake in a seat adjusted to Edminster’s proportions. Webster may have been making a last-ditch attempt to reach it, but he couldn’t.

Heavy with the weight of the bomb and approximately 3,400 pounds of JP-5 jet fuel, the inverted Skyhawk was quickly claimed by the ocean. It sank rapidly, straight down through nearly three miles of water, with Webster still strapped into the cockpit. At that depth, recovery was completely impossible with 1965 technology. It remains there to this day. And while it’s unlikely that the bomb will detonate underwater, the plutonium-239 in its core has a half-life of approximately 24,100 years, so it won’t be neutralized anytime soon.

The government tried to cover up its egregious mistake for decades. The Pentagon first disclosed the loss of the nuclear weapon in a 1981 Department of Defense report, but that document deliberately obscured the location, stating only that the incident occurred “more than 500 miles from land.” It wasn’t until May of 1989, when Newsweek published a report revealing the bomb’s proximity to Japanese territory, that the full story emerged. The Pentagon confirmed that the Ticonderoga had been only about 80 miles from the nearest Japanese island, creating a diplomatic firestorm. Japan protested vigorously, since the United States had agreements not to bring nuclear weapons into Japanese territory, and the Ticonderoga had been en route to a Japanese port with nuclear weapons aboard. The revelation confirmed what many had long suspected: that the U.S. had routinely violated its commitments regarding nuclear weapons in Japan.

One unfortunate side effect of that decades-long secrecy is that Webster’s name was left off the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. His stepbrother, Michael Rawl, made two separate attempts to have Webster’s name inscribed on the Wall, and both failed, likely because the classified nature of the incident and the redacted accident report (which did not mention the nuclear weapon) made it impossible to establish the proper documentation. Instead, Rawl nominated Webster for an “In Memory Day” honor—a separate ceremony for those who died in service during the Vietnam era but whose names do not appear on the Wall. A memorial marker was also erected in Webster’s hometown of Warren, Ohio.