Ed Helms

They zipped it up, tight-lipped.

But as we all know, military secrets have a way of slinking into the public zeitgeist eventually.

Are you guys good secret keepers?

Are you trustworthy?

Yeah.

The Navy was spectacularly or perhaps frighteningly able to conceal this incident for over 15 years.

It wasn't until 1981 that the Pentagon disclosed the incident.

The Washington Post reported about it in a mere three sentences buried in a nuclear accidents report.

However, the folks at the Pentagon also did not bother explaining the details of where exactly the bomb was.

They first stated that the bomb was more than 500 miles from land.

Vague much?

They also assured everyone that the bomb posed no danger since it was 16,000 feet underwater.

But in 1989...

The environmental group Greenpeace, alongside naval expert William Arkin, exposed more naval documents revealing that the bomb was dropped only 70 miles off the coast of the Ryukyu Islands, as opposed to the 500 they had said before.

They also pointed out that this incident violated Japan's strict anti-nuclear policies and exposed some serious Navy secrets about nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

With no other choice, the Pentagon finally admitted the whole truth about this gigantic snafu in a statement that same year in 1989.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

It feels like these international incidents are there's always some measure of just sort of posturing of like we have to respond this way because protocol demands it of us.

And so we must make these statements and we must say these things.