A fireball over the Arctic.

A missing hydrogen bomb.

A Cold War program exposed in a single, shattering night.

Before dawn on January 21, 1968, a U.S. Air Force B-52G code-named HOBO 28 streaked across the polar sky carrying four thermonuclear weapons. Its mission—Operation Chrome Dome—kept nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7, ready to strike Moscow in minutes. But when a cockpit fire roared through the bomber at 41,000 feet, the crew faced an unthinkable choice: burn alive or bail out into −60 °F darkness. Minutes later a mushroom-shaped blast lit North Star Bay, scattering plutonium and tritium across Greenland’s ice.

What really happened after the crash?

Hobo 28 Down pulls back fifty-year-old security curtains to reveal:

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• The race against meltdown – How Project Crested Ice turned Thule Air Base into the coldest, most radioactive construction site on Earth, carving 11,000 tons of poisoned snow before the spring thaw.
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• Diplomacy in deep-freeze – Denmark publicly banned nukes in Greenland—yet secret cables reproduced here show the silent bargain that let America park doomsday weapons on Danish soil.
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• The bomb that still haunts sonar scans – Classified Navy expeditions slalomed under the icecap hunting a one-ton sphere of uranium and lithium deuteride—and the chilling theory of where it may lie today.
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• Thulegate – The political scandal that toppled Danish ministers, fractured NATO unity, and forced Washington to confess it had loaded the Arctic with atomic fire.
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• Echoes in Inuit blood and snow – How radiation drifted into seal meat, sled-dog teams, and the DNA of hunters who never knew the sky was armed.
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Gary Covella, Ph.D., weaves newly declassified USAF accident reports, Danish parliamentary transcripts, and eyewitness interviews into a pulse-pounding narrative that reads like a thriller yet never strays from the historical record. From cockpit alarms to Oval Office crisis rooms, Hobo 28 Down follows every second of the disaster, then tracks its fallout through decades of lawsuits, cancer clusters, and climate research.

Why Chrome Dome died—and why it matters now

In 1968 global panic ended America’s airborne-alert strategy overnight. Today Russian bombers again loop the pole, and hypersonic missiles erase warning times once more. Covella argues that the forgotten lessons of HOBO 28 have never been more urgent—and that the true cost of nuclear “readiness” is still buried beneath melting ice.

Inside you’ll also discover

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• Minute-by-minute cockpit transcripts that show how a single foam seat cushion ignited the inferno.
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• The heroic—but tragic—parachute descent of co-pilot Leonard Svitenberg, whose frozen body was never recovered.
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• Testimony from Greenlandic workers who shoveled radioactive slush for $3 an hour—and the class-action suit that fought for justice half a century later.
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Hobo 28 Down drags you onto the flight line at Plattsburgh, into the glare of Arctic searchlights, and behind Strategic Air Command vaults, building a narrative that accelerates like the bomber itself. Maps, diagrams, and uncovered photos put you in the wreckage.

Turn the page and witness the crash that changed nuclear strategy forever—while one bomb remains lost in the dark below.