Escarglow?

Now here's a news story. How can you go wrong with lost nuclear bombs and radioactive snails? You might be thinking - oh I saw that movie on the USA network last week, but alas - this is one set of radioactive slimy creatures that won't be attacking tokyo - not for at least 26 years or so. (That's the time it would take a snail to cover the 10,000+ kilometers to get from Spain to Japan. Yes, I bothered to look it up and do the math...)

Palomares, Spain gets the distinction of having the worlds first overly radioactive attack snails.
Here's the news article (Reuters India, apparrently it's not a good enough article for US distribution), or read on for my much more interesting summary.

Apparently, the good old US Armed forces dropped a few nuclear bombs on spain back in '66. Lucky for them, they weren't armed. Unlucky for them, they apparently weren't engineered so well. When they hit the ground (3 of them) and the water (1 of them), they sort of opened up and spilled a bunch of highly radioactive gunk all over the place.

Apparently, our clean up crews were about as good as our safetey teams back then, so as a result they get radioactive snails some 40 years later. Again, unfortunately for them, the snails are of course considered a local delicacy. I wonder much escargot the restaurants will be selling now.

Next month, Spain and the US have jointly decided to pay for a soil investigation to research the feasibility of a clean up. Good job guys. Way to work out the details of sort of starting to clean things up 40 years later. I'm glad I didn't grow up in that neighborhood.

It makes you wonder how many nuclear bombs have accidentally been dropped around the world. Maybe we should just put them all in a warehouse or a silo somewhere until the time really comes. I mean - what's the difference between the world ending at 2:30 versus 3:00? Put them in storage.