Air museum welcomes newest additions
BY ALEX CANTATORE
Staff Reporter
It may be hard to imagine a day when thermonuclear weaponry would be welcomed into most towns. For a contingent of Castle Air Museum volunteers, employees, and executives, however, it was all smiles when a flatbed truck pulled into Atwater on Friday morning with four former hydrogen bombs strapped onboard.
“You got clearance for this?” joked Castle Air Museum Director Joe Pruzzo as he watched volunteers unload the former bombs.
“Oh yeah, top secret,” replied volunteer Harry Kauffman.
While Castle Air Museum has long been home to planes that played a pivotal role in the Cold War, including a B-52 Stratofortress, visitors have never before had the chance to see the weapons they employed.
“People come out here and want to see what bombs they carried and what missiles they carried,” Pruzzo said.
The thermonuclear weapons, representative of those carried onboard military aircraft daily between the late 1950s and early 1980s, will be the heart of a new exhibit on Cold War munitions at the museum. A total of five former H-Bombs will be displayed, ranging from 8 to 26 feet long, alongside information about the weapons, their histories, and development.
The four weapons that arrived on Friday were obtained from the Sandia Corporation and trucked in from Albuquerque, NM. Ranging in size from 750 to 7,000 pounds, even the smallest of these steel husks was once filled with the equivalent of 500,000 tons of TNT, or more than 60 times the explosive power of the bombs used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
One more thermonuclear weapon, a Mark 17 H-Bomb, is expected to join Castle’s collection before year’s end. The largest H-Bomb ever built at a weight of more than 43,000 pounds and with the explosive power of 36 million tons of TNT, the Mark 17 serves as a potent reminder of the threat of nuclear warfare.
“Fortunately they’ve never had to be used in anger,” Pruzzo said. “We are very fortunate that the Cold War did come to an end and that we live in a relatively peaceful world.”
Other than perhaps a fresh coat of paint, Castle Air Museum is not expecting much work will need to be done in order to make the weaponry display worthy. Staff stated that the museum is hoping to open the exhibit this fall, though it will possibly slip until spring.
The display, which will be one of less than 10 in the country to include thermonuclear weapons, was made possible in part by the donations of six Turlockers to help offset the costs of transporting the weapons. One of those citizens, Ed Wheeler, was a former pilot of the B-52 and B-36 aircraft that carried H-Bombs aloft each day.
Now a member of the Castle Air Museum’s board, Wheeler looks back on his pilot days with pride. In training he recalled once dropping the empty shell of Mark 17 H-Bomb, and the sheer loss in weight causing his plane to instantly climb more than 6,000 feet.
“It was just a daily job,” Wheeler said. “Looking back, when we were carrying these weapons around, we realized the seriousness of it, but it was a job that had to be done.”
If they had ever been forced to make use of their nuclear weapons, he mused, there would likely be no home to come home to.
“We knew what would happen,” he said.
To contact Alex Cantatore, e-mail acantatore@turlockjournal.com or call 634-9141 ext. 2005.
Originally published in the Turlock Journal 8/29/2008.
Retrieved from the Turlock Journal Web site.