Lost Nuke - Documentary

Capt. Theodore F. Schreier disappeared February 1950. Presumed dead, into either the Pacific Ocean or the mountains of British Columbia.

Air Force training exercise gone wrong?

Loss of the radioactive plutonium core of a nuclear bomb?

Schreier came to school at UW-Madison in 1936. He was a career Air Force officer. On the night of Feb. 13, 1950 Schreier was part of a crew of 17 scheduled to fly from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Fort Worth, TX aboard a B-36 aircraft.

The Air Force called it a routine training mission, but in fact it was a simulated nuclear "attack" on San Francisco, something that was done with some regularity during the Cold War. After completing the "attack," the plane would fly to Texas. A Mark 4 atomic bomb was on board the B-36.

The plane encountered heavy rains, and then icing on its wings. Three engines caught fire. It was originally reported that all 17 crew members had parachuted out of the plane. Twelve were found alive by fishing boats and the Canadian Navy. The remaining five were presumed drowned.

In the summer of 1953 a rescue team searching the mountains of British Columbia for a lost civilian plane came across the wreck of the B-36. The wreck was 300 miles north back toward Alaska rather than the spot where the crew bailed out. A "birdcage", an object used to transport a bomb's plutonium core, which is kept separate from the bomb was found at the British Columbia crash site.

After the wreck was discovered the US Air Force descended on the crash sight. They had a Geiger counter and explosives, which they used to obliterate the wreckage once they were finished with it. When they left rumors began circulating locally that a body had been recovered from the plane.

The surviving crew members have always maintained there was no plutonium core aboard but when interviewed in private. They would say, "There are things that happened that we just can't talk about because we don't want to say anything to damage our country."

Schreier's family knew nothing of any of this. "They were told when Ted went missing that he was on a transport plane." The Air Force named streets after four of the five crew members who died in the crash of the B-36. The only one not getting the honor was Ted Schreier.