U.S. Navy papers reveal N-accidents

Press, 2 June 1986, Page 6

U.S. Navy papers reveal N-accidents

By ANDREW KRUGER, of the Australian Associated Press (through NZPA) New York

Recently declassified Pentagon documents show that the United States Navy accidentally released nuclear weapons in each of the years 1965, 1968, 1969 and 1970. They do not say how many, where, or whether the weapons detonated. The documents reveal that the United States Navy had more nuclear weapons accidents and incidents than was previously known. Three heavily censored reports for the years 1965-

77 show that the Navy had 381 nuclear weapon accidents and incidents, more than 29 a year.

The release of these figures under the Freedom of Information Act confirms speculation by defence analysts that the Pentagon understated Navy experience with nuclear weapons. The security status of the reports was recently upgraded to “classified” from “confidential,” enabling the Navy to censor them before their release under freedom of information laws.

The Massachusettsbased public interest group, Nautilus Pacific Research, made the docu-

ments available to the news media in the United States yesterday. They show that the Navy tried to downplay one nuclear weapon accident until the news media found out about it. The accident, in which a Skyhawk aircraft with a nuclear bomb attached fell off an aircraft-carrier in a western Pacific port in 1965, "under ordinary circumstances ... would have been reported as an incident,” the Navy said.

"However, because news of the in-port occurrence had gotten into the media of the nearby community, the occurrence was reported as a ‘significant’ incident.”

Censorship of the reports makes it difficult to identify the types of ships concerned, or their host fleets. This reinforces American policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of nuclear weapons aboard its ships or aircraft. It makes it difficult for proponents of New Zealand’s ban on nuclear ships to say that American warships of the type that had visited that country had suffered or were likely to be in nuclear accidents.

Navy reports of the nuclear accidents between 1965 and 1977 show that

most (38 per cent) concerned bombs carried by naval aircraft. Surface launched weapons accounted for about 37 per cent.

The Asroc anti-sub-marine missile carried by many American warships appears to be the most accident-prone, accounting for 90 per cent of all such incidents. Asroc, which carries either a conventional torpedo or a nuclear depthcharge, was first introduced on United States Navy ships in 1961. The reports show that 60 per cent of all accidents for 1965-73 resulted from personnel error. In the next three years

equipment failure narrowly became the primary cause of accidents in this category. The United States Navy reported that the most frequent type of nuclear weapon accident was the flooding of weapons by “improper activation of sprinkler systems, rough seas,” and so on. Other incidents occurred during handling and transport, storage,. assembly or dismantling during maintenance, or during testing. Some incidents reportedly entailed the “actual or technical inadvertent release” of a nuclear weapon.