A U.S. military official confirmed Monday that a hydrogen bomb was lost in the Pacific Ocean near Okinawa when a jet fell off an aircraft carrier in 1965. Many Japanese expressed outrage at the disclosure.
The report was the top story in most Japanese newspapers and was featured on the television news. Japan, the only nation ever attacked with nuclear weapons, remains very sensitive about nuclear arms questions.The report was disclosed over the weekend in a report from Washington in the current edition of Newsweek magazine.
Asked about the report, a U.S. military spokesman in Tokyo said a nuclear weapon was lost in the Pacific in 1965 when an A-4 Skyhawk plane fell from a U.S. carrier in international waters about 80 miles from the closest point of the Okinawa island chain. The spokesman demanded anonymity.
The Newsweek article said the aircraft and bomb were lost in waters with a depth of 16,200 feet.
The Japanese government does not know the present location and condition of the bomb, and there have been no discussions with the United States about how to deal with it, said a Foreign Ministry official who requested anonymity.
He said his government had no plans to investigate the accident or possible dangers posed by the bomb.
The loss of the one-megaton bomb, which has a force of 1 million tons of TNT, was kept secret at the time, Newsweek said, quoting a report by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
The pilot was killed when the plane carrying the bomb accidentally rolled off the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, which was on its way from Vietnam to the Japanese port of Yokosuka, said the report.
When the loss of the bomb was reported in a 1981 U.S. Department of Defense listing of nuclear weapons accidents, there was no indication that it occurred near inhabited islands, another Foreign Ministry official said.
"The report said only that it happened 500 miles from the Asian mainland," said the official, who also insisted on anonymity.
In Okinawa prefecture, a string of islands stretching 570 miles south of Japan's main islands, citizens expressed anger, Masaji Shinzato, a reporter for the Okinawa Times, told The Associated Press.
There already was a great deal of bitterness over the continuing presence of 35,000 U.S. troops, whose facilities occupy much of Okinawa's territory, he said. At the time of the accident, Okinawa was under U.S. control. It was returned to Japan in 1972, 27 years after Japan's defeat in World War II.
The report said the bomb was lost not far from one of Okinawa's smaller islands, about 200 miles from Okinawa Island.