Eastern Passage (25 page)

By August 30, the 43rd Bombardment Wing of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) had established itself at Goose Bay. The Wing was staffed by 616 officers (mainly air crew) and 3,560 other ranks, and equipped with 36 B-50A
^*

intercontinental bombers capable of carrying enough atomic weapons to destroy a number of Soviet cities.

The operations diary of the 43rd’s security section records: “Upon arrival at destination the bomb carriers were met and cleared by Air Police security [and the bombs] were unloaded from the bomb carriers and taken to a restricted storage area … in a forest approximately 4 miles from the base where they were stored 1500 feet from the nearest road. Each unit was guarded 24 hours a day.”

Once operational at Goose Bay, 43rd Wing, like the fabled camel in the Bedouin’s tent, showed no inclination of ever leaving. It was still flying out of Goose Bay when I visited that air base in 1953 and did not leave, in the end, until 1971.

During this occupation there was a continuous interchange of men and equipment between 43rd Wing and its permanent home at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, and nuclear bombs were routinely flown back and forth between Labrador and Arizona for inspection and adjustment. On the morning of November 10, 1950, one was loaded aboard B-50 No. 46-038 of the 43rd’s 64th Bomber Squadron. The aircraft was airborne shortly after noon with its eight-man crew and a monster in its belly.

This was a Mark IV version of Fat Man, the nuclear fission bomb that in 1945 had all but obliterated the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Its core was a sphere of plutonium (Pu-239) surrounded by a sphere of uranium (U-235) which weighed about 445 pounds. This in turn was embedded in the middle of another sphere, about four feet in diameter, consisting chiefly of 4,895 pounds of the high explosives RDX and TNT. At detonation, the chemical explosives were designed to produce an implosion which, sequentially (and almost instantaneously), would crush the inner spheres, initiating a nuclear reaction to produce an explosion equal in power to that of 21,000 tons of TNT.

This particular bomb had been made “safe for transit” by the removal of the plutonium sphere through a tube built into its core. (The plutonium was referred to as “the pit” because it was at the centre of “the fruit.”) Temporarily separated from its Fat Man, the pit
nevertheless travelled with it. The uranium remained in place within the bomb because it could not be removed without dismantling the entire weapon.

The pilots and navigator of bomber 46-038 began their flight on a course designed to take them west and south across the Canada-U.S. border somewhere in the vicinity of Sault Ste. Marie. After only a few hours, however, the plane ran into trouble when first one, then a second engine failed, leaving just two to keep the bomber airborne.

When desperate efforts to restart the stricken engines were unsuccessful, the crew knew they had either to abandon the bomber in flight or attempt an emergency landing. Bailing out was not really an option. The potential consequences when the unmanned plane inevitably crashed were too horrendous to contemplate. An emergency landing had to be attempted –
if
a suitably equipped airport could be reached.

While the captain and navigator urgently conferred, the bomber was labouring in the vicinity of the little north-woods settlement of Chibougamau, 250 miles to the northwest of Quebec City. The nearest airport equipped to handle a B-50 with nuclear material aboard was an SAC base at Van Buren, roughly 440 miles to the eastward, on the U.S. side of the border between Maine and New Brunswick. Van Buren it had to be. However, to have risked a landing there with two engines out and a Fat Man nuclear bomb aboard would have invited an explosion that could have obliterated Van Buren as well as the Canadian town of Saint-Léonard, just across the Saint John River. So Fat Man had to go.

Strategic Air Command standing orders stipulated that if an atomic bomb had to be jettisoned over friendly or neutral territory, the drop should be made into a large expanse of open water where the consequences could be expected to be less disastrous than over land. Only one suitable drop zone existed on the new course of the crippled Superfortress 46-038 – the St. Lawrence River between
Tadoussac and Murray Bay, a stretch of water some forty miles long and up to eighteen wide, with depths as great as six hundred feet.

Shortly before 1600 on November 10, 1950, the B-50’s bomb bay doors swung open and the Fat Man was dropped.

Next day the
Montreal Gazette
reported that St-Alexandre-de-Kamouraska on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River had been rocked by a mighty explosion. The
Canadian Encyclopedia
records that townsfolk saw a thick cloud of yellow smoke spiralling up a thousand metres above the middle of the river. Then came a low rumble that shook houses for forty kilometres around.

Vera’s
mate had described to me a smoke or vapour pillar towering so high it mingled with the cloud deck overhead. He thought the explosion must have taken place ten or fifteen miles to the south of Saint-Siméon where his vessel was lying. A subsequent wave surge from that direction nearly caused his
goélette
to break out her anchor and go adrift.

Some time after the event, the U.S. Air Force issued a succinct notice to the effect that one of its four-engined bombers had accidentally dropped some 500-pound practice bombs into the St. Lawrence River while on a training flight.

There the matter rested until almost fifty years later when the Canadian Minister of National Defence stated
for the first time
that an American B-50 from Goose Bay carrying a Mark IV nuclear bomb had lost its cargo over the St. Lawrence River.

Recent releases of previously secret documents from the Pentagon reveal that there were at least two other similar accidents
in the United States
during 1950. On July 13, a B-50 carrying a Fat Man bomb stalled soon after takeoff and crashed between the Ohio towns of Lebanon and Mason, killing the four officers and twelve airmen aboard and causing an explosion that was heard 25 miles away and blew a crater 200 feet in diameter and 25 feet deep. The U.S. Air Force denies that any nuclear materials contributed to this explosion.

Then, on August 5, another B-50 Superfortress carrying a Fat Man experienced propeller and landing-gear problems while taking off from Fairfield-Suisun airfield in California. The pilots attempted to make an emergency landing, but the plane crashed, causing a huge explosion that killed 19 aboard the plane and severely injured as many as 173 residents of mobile homes in the vicinity of the crash. The USAF attributes this massive explosion to conventional 500-pound bombs that happened to be aboard.

A Pentagon report on the St. Lawrence River incident in November of 1950 now claims the plane jettisoned an
empty
Mark IV (Fat Man) casing
and
three conventional 500-pound high-explosive bombs, the blast from which “was felt for 25 miles.”

We will probably never know the bomb’s exact point of impact, but it must have been somewhere between Cap-à-l’Aigle on the north shore and St-Germain de Kamouraska on the south side of the river, in a body of water 12 to 14 miles in diameter with an average depth of about 35 fathoms (210 feet). The high-explosive component would have detonated on impact. Since the “pit” had been removed from the bomb, plutonium would not have been involved but the uranium sphere must have been blown to smithereens and its extremely toxic dust scattered into the air and into the waters of the St. Lawrence.

One can only guess at what must have happened to life in the river, and on land beneath the prevailing west-east airflow downstream from the point of impact. However on January 12, 1988,
New York Times
correspondent Philip Shabecoff published an article in that newspaper about a mysterious die-off of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence which since the 1950s had reduced the beluga colony there from an estimated 1,200 to about 450. Pollution was suspected of being the cause, but the identity of the pollutant had not been established. Shabecoff’s piece also noted that the region of the beluga die-off “has Canada’s highest level of human birth defects, although no direct cause-effect relationship has been shown.”

Over the years, scientists have autopsied more than eighty beluga corpses discovered along the shores of the St. Lawrence, and Dr. Pierre Beland of the St. Lawrence Institute of Ecotoxicology has reported finding “lesions of a kind never before reported in marine mammals, as well [as] tumours in numbers 10 times greater than normally found.” And Dr. Lee Shugart of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory concludes the dead whales had been exposed to a substance “that would produce cancer in laboratory animals.” Their findings were reported in Shabecoff’s article, but apparently nobody has yet undertaken tests to establish what contaminants might have been involved.

Before the war, blue, fin, sei, and pilot whales were all present in the Gulf and in the St. Lawrence inland as far as the Saguenay River region. For many years
after
1950, few were seen. And for some years after 1950, grey seals, harbour seals, and porpoises reportedly were scarce in the estuary, where previously they had been common. Additional anecdotal evidence given to me by fishermen, mariners, and other observers in the estuary and the Gulf indicates that populations of many species of aquatic or marine-dependent animals suffered significant declines following the explosion. These include several species of sea birds, herring, eels, salmon, squid, and sharks.

Between 1969 and 1977, I spent several summers on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1970, the Quebec department of fisheries investigating the commercial shrimp fishing potential there found shrimp in abundance; but no commercial fishery was established because, the captain of the Quebec research vessel told me, the shrimp were “dangerously contaminated.” The source and nature of the contaminant was unknown to him and so far as I know has never been publicly identified.

On the Magdalens, my wife and I noted a high incidence of cancer among the permanent residents, although there had never been any industrial activity on or around these islands to which this might have been attributed. Fishing and sealing were the
only
significant commercial activities, and provided the major source of protein for most of the
madelinots
.

One morning I came on deck to find the Gaspé coast in view, curving away to the southeast. We were “rounding the bend” into the wide waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the six-hundred-foot-high limestone cliffs behind Cape Gaspé were looming into distant view. Occasional clusters of tiny houses clinging to the shoreline below the massive brow of the Gaspesian mountains made me wonder how
les habitants
managed to make a living with only fish, trees, and rocks to draw upon.

Not long after I took the tiller, we sailed into the midst of a covey of dories bobbing a mile offshore while their two-man crews set and hauled handlines for cod. I altered course to hail one of the little boats and asked in my atrocious French if we could buy a fish.
“Mais non, mon ami!”
the man in the stern yelled. “We geev you wan!” with which he threw a glistening and still quivering ten-pound cod onto our deck as we sailed past.

Angus, who had taken the graveyard watch, was still asleep so Murray relieved me at the helm while I gutted the fish and took it below to cook cod chunks simmered in sea water with a few peppercorns and served with boiled potatoes, the whole smothered in melted butter. We did justice to it. Nothing of that noble fish remained for the gulls except the head and tail; I had sneakily cut out the cheeks and tongue to be later fried in diced salt pork for my own delectation.

Although sometimes disrupted by untoward events, our days afloat were following a steady pattern. Angus and I kept alternate four-hour watches, beginning at 8:00 in the evening and continuing until 8:00 next morning when Murray, who could now steer a compass course, would take the helm and handle the vessel pretty much on his own while we elders slept or did ship’s chores, wrote up
the log, saw to ongoing navigation, and repaired or replaced worn gear – a never-ending task on any sailing vessel.

Navigation thus far had mostly been from buoy to buoy, from light to light, or from landmark to landmark, a fairly easy task, necessitating only correct identification of the “marks” as shown on the charts or as found in the indispensable
St. Lawrence River Pilot
. We streamed the patent log during every watch. Our lovely brass affair not only told us how far we had gone but how fast. From it we learned we were averaging five knots. Angus claimed this was a fast passage but Murray complained it was as slow as the tractor-drawn wagon he drove on the Finnerty farm.

Most of the cooking was done on an alcohol-fuelled Primus stove as the weather was too warm for us to endure the heat from
Bonnet’s
coal-fed Fisherman range. As I had warned him, Murray was the galley drudge and cabin boy, washing up and attempting to keep things tidy below decks – no easy task at any time and nearly impossible in rough weather. Nevertheless, he did his work with such enthusiasm that Angus promoted him from Ordinary Seaman to Able Seaman.

Here is how my father’s journal described the way things were aboard and around his little ship, always referring to himself as the Old Man, which is what the captains of great windjammers of old were called by their crews, sometimes in fear and fury, sometimes in admiration.