Broken Arrow Nuke - BUNKER HILL, Ind. - Shamaine Plechko grew up not knowing much about her father or him. She was only 6 months old when he died.
It happened here on the air base during a terrible, protracted wildfire that involved the most impressive weapon of the Cold War, the giant B-58 Hustler, and the aircraft's extraordinary payload capacity—five nuclear bombs, four 70-kilogram bombs, one measuring one Nine megatons.
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This disaster made the news everywhere. "Plane burned by hydrogen bomb" - Daily Oklahoman; "Indiana B-58 N-Bomber Burns" - Louisville Courier-Journal; "Air Force Investigates Plane Explosion" - Indianapolis News.
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But the girl's life continues. It was a good life in Houston with her mother, brothers, grandparents, and when she was 4, her stepfather, who was a good man, her father.
As Shamein grew older, she became interested in her father. She knew it was a training accident that had cost her her father, but her mother, now suffering from Alzheimer's disease, would not discuss the details and would not mention nuclear bombs. Shamain began to research the Internet and came across an interesting book written by an author from Indiana who intended to solve the mystery.
December 8, 1964: The Broken Arrow incident in Indiana kills Air Force Capt. Manuel "Rocky" Cervantes, 5 nuclear bombs are dropped on Bunker Hill Air Force Base.
Manuel "Rocky" Cervantes Jr. Raised in Dallas and graduated from Sunset High School (Class of '53) where he was a cheerleader and R.O.T.C. After school, he joined the Air Force and worked his way up through the ranks. On December 8, 1964, dying from a ruptured artery, he reached Capt. His age is 29 years.
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The 96-foot-long, gleaming silver Hustler, built like a needle, a hang-glider, was incredible. But flying was not easy. Hustler crews were highly skilled and highly respected, second only to astronauts among Cold War pilots. B-58 Hustlers
Bunker Hill Air Force Base was one of only two Air Force bases in the country to host them (the other Hustler squadrons were originally based in Texas and later in Arkansas).
In the 1960s, when US-Soviet relations were at their worst, Hustler crews were on alert. They broke sound barriers, often carried nuclear bombs, hung on both wings, one under the fuselage, and flew across the country.
"It was like riding a rocket," said Jerry Anderson, 80, who worked with Cervantes at Bunker Hill. - One day, over Lake Michigan, over Wisconsin, I began to descend on the lake. You were over the lake. I was leveling at 50,000 feet. .I am at a speed of Mach 2.3. In the middle of the lake" Mach 2.3 is 1750 mph.
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Changed Speed Sensitivity. He flew like an arrow, but he was strong like a brick. It's like God in heaven."
Many planes crashed. Between 1962 and 1970, 17 airmen based at Bunker Hill were killed in 11 separate Hustler crashes. Nuclear bombs have only been used once, in the 1964 accident that killed Rocky Cervantes.
Cervantes' death occurred during training. The runway was icy and his plane skidded, probably due to jet blast from the forward throttle. Its landing gear collapsed, the fuel tank exploded and the plane burst into flames. The pilot and bombardier reacted quickly. They opened the canopy and jumped down with minor injuries.
But Cervantes' exit was more difficult because the sailor's seat was between the other two seats. The fire spread quickly - the plane was always ready to fly to the Soviet Union and carried 14,000 gallons of fuel - a highly flammable mixture of kerosene and gasoline.
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"Rocky opened his canopy, got up and looked around," said eyewitness Strunk, who was at the camp that day. “By then everything was engulfed in flames, so he closed the dome and ejected. He thought, 'Get out of this fire,' that's the only way out."
It's impossible to know for sure what Cervantes was thinking, but a few months earlier two of his friends had been fatally burned in an accident at Bunker Hill. One stayed in the hospital for two days, the others for three. "I'm not going to burn out," Cervantes promised Anderson, Anderson recalled in a recent interview with the Indy Star.
Cervantes, surrounded by fire, got into the "escape pod" and ejected. Shot 100 feet into the air. There was no time to stuff the parachute. Barely landed on a small asphalt road. Cervantes died soon after.
Most people don't know anything about the nuke incident in Indiana, said Tom Kelly, a retired police officer from nearby Kokomo who volunteers at the Grissom Aviation Museum. The museum is located on the grounds of Bunker Hill Air Force Base, which became Grissom Air Force Base after Indiana-born astronaut Gus Grissom died during training in 1967. Today it is an Air Force Reserve base.
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The Air Force and the press downplayed the incident. A U.S. Air Force official admitted for the first time that there were nuclear bombs in Indiana, but he emphasized the term nuclear "device." He said there was nothing to worry about. The sinking of five nuclear bombs in a raging 12-hour fire made news for two days.
During the Cold War, when Americans feared nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Russians and were ready 24/7 to deliver a lethal blow, nuclear accidents occurred with a frequency that today seems alarming.
Bunker Hills was one of three such "broken boom" accidents in 1964 alone, and one of 32 that occurred between 1950 and 1980. (In some cases, the bombs have never been found, as in the case of the missing bomb bay of an unmanned aircraft that crashed into the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles west of the Washington-Oregon border on September 25, 1959.)
But according to the Defense Department report, neither accident resulted in a nuclear explosion because "on most missions, it was standard safety procedure to keep the capsule containing the nuclear material separate from the weapon," so the bombs were minimally unarmed. Not often.
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But when there was a big fire, the bombs sometimes leaked radioactivity. They did it at Bunker Hill in December 1964.
The bombs were collected and sent to the Atomic Energy Commission. But what about the radioactive wreckage?
In the mid-1970s, Kelly was serving in the Air Force stationed at Bunker Hill when he noticed something strange. In the remote part of the large camp area was a wooded area, completely closed - even as far as Kelly, he took rudimentary defenses.
The three-hectare area was surrounded by a high mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Old rusted signs read Controlled Area and No Digging. Kelly thought about it.
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Two decades later, the answer came. The base was downsized, and some of its 2,200 acres were set aside for other uses (such as the Miami Correctional Facility, the state's largest prison). Since it was mostly on old military bases, some environmental cleanup was required. This remote, wooded area, Kelly's three-acre fenced-in area, was found to be radioactive.
Indiana Department of Environmental Management and Air Force personnel arrived for the cleanup. They started digging. They came across parts of the plane - landing gear, engine, emergency pods, etc. They called in aviation historians from Ohio, who determined that the parts came from Cervantes' plane, a B-58 Hustler, serial number 60-116.
Kelly loves history as well as mysteries. He was watching the TV show The Rockford Files, in which James Garner plays a private investigator who cures many colds. In 2013, Kelly self-published Who Did It, Guardmount, and used the Bunker Hill nuclear bomb incident to set the scene. He dedicated the book to Captain Manuel Cervantes.
A few years ago, Shamain Plechko, who lives in Houston and hasn't been to Indiana since she was six months old, was Googling her father when she stumbled across Kelly's book. As a board member of the nonprofit Grissom Aviation Museum, she contacted Kelly to tell her all about her father's military service and that fateful day. He told her about her father's ride, an unusual B-58 Hustler.
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Only 116 aircraft were built before the concept was scrapped in 1970. Most were sold for scrap metal. Eight were preserved not as postcards, but as museum exhibits. One of them is at the Grissom Aviation Museum.
Shamain and her husband, Rick Pleczko, visited Grissom in 2017. "I thought a lot about my dad," Shamain said, "I wanted to see where he went and where I was born." I wanted to see the plane."
The Grissom Hustler is a sight to behold with its flared wings and rocket-shaped fuselage. It is larger than it appears in the photo. This is the pearl of the museum collection.
But it is parked on the street and has been there for three decades. The elements do a lot of damage. The museum recently launched a capital campaign.
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