Haug parachuted onto the base as well, and made his way to a different hangar. He and D’Amario had suffered only scrapes and bruises. About an hour after the crash, the gunner, Sergeant Calvin Snapp, was found in good shape near the dump. A couple of parachutes and ejection seats were spotted from a helicopter, three miles from Thule, along with footprints in the snow. Security police followed them to the base of a nearby mountain, where Major Hopkins and a copilot, Captain Richard Marx, had gone looking for help. Marx had bruises and abrasions; Hopkins, a broken arm. The body of Captain Leonard Svitenko, another copilot, was discovered at around midnight. He’d died leaving the plane. And almost a full day after the crash, the last remaining crew member, the navigator, Captain Criss, was found wrapped in his parachute, six miles from the base, suffering from frostbite, hypothermia, a dislocated shoulder. Criss was forty-three years old and eventually lost both of his feet. But he later worked as a postmaster in Maine, kept playing golf, and lived for another forty years.
The B-52 had struck the ice at a speed of almost six hundred miles per hour, about seven miles west of Thule. The high explosives of the four hydrogen bombs fully detonated upon impact, and roughly 225,000 pounds of jet fuel created a large fireball. For five or six hours, the fire burned, until being extinguished by the ice. When the first Explosive Ordnance Disposal team arrived at the site two days later, using flashlights and traveling from Thule on a dogsled, they found a patch of blackened ice about 720 yards long and 160 yards wide. Pieces of the bombs and the plane were scattered across an area of three square miles. The pieces were small — and highly radioactive. Tiny particles of plutonium had bonded with metal and plastic debris, mixed with jet fuel, water, and ice. Plutonium had risen in the smoke from the fire and traveled through the air for miles.
The one-point safety tests of the Mark 28’s core, performed secretly at Los Alamos during the Eisenhower administration, had been money well spent. If the Mark 28 hadn’t been made inherently one-point safe, the bombs that hit the ice could have produced a nuclear yield. And the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon, or two, or three — without any warning, at the air base considered essential for the defense of the United States — could have been misinterpreted at SAC headquarters. Nobody expected the Thule monitor to destroy Thule. Instead, the Air Force had to confront a less dangerous yet challenging problem: how to decontaminate about three square miles of ice, about seven hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, during the middle of winter, in the dark.
Generators, floodlights, a helicopter pad, sleds, tracked vehicles, and half a dozen prefabricated buildings were brought to the crash site. New roads from the base were cut through the snow. A “Hot Line” was drawn around the contaminated area, with restrictions on who could enter it and decontamination control points for everyone who left it. Once again hundreds of young airmen walked shoulder to shoulder, looking for bomb parts and pieces of a B-52. Most of the debris was small, ranging from the size of a dime to that of a cigarette pack. Some of it had fallen through a gash in the ice, cut by the crash, that later refroze. The ice was about two feet thick; the water below it six hundred feet deep. Pieces of the bomb and the plane were carried away by the current or settled on the bottom of Bylot Sound.
Arctic storms with high winds complicated the recovery and cleanup efforts, spreading plutonium dust and hiding it beneath the snow. But the levels of contamination were more accurately measured at Thule than at Palomares. A new device, the Field Instrument for the Detection of Low-Energy Radiation (FIDLER), looked for the X-rays and gamma rays emitted by plutonium, instead of the alpha particles. Those rays traveled a longer distance and passed through snow. Over the next eight months, the top two inches of the blackened ice within the Hot Line were removed, trucked to the base, condensed, packed in containers, shipped to Charleston, South Carolina, and then transported by rail to the AEC facility in Aiken. The radioactive waste from Thule filled 147 freight cars.
During the summer of 1968, after Bylot Sound thawed, a Navy submersible searched for part of a Mark 28 bomb. The plutonium cores of the primaries in all four weapons had been blown to bits, and most of the uranium from their secondaries had been recovered. But a crucial piece of one bomb was still missing, most likely the enriched uranium spark plug necessary for a thermonuclear blast. It was never found — and the search later inspired erroneous claims that an entire hydrogen bomb had been lost beneath the ice.
