On the menu today: A follow up to yesterday’s deep dive into the possible explanation for drone sitings over New Jersey, walking through a rumor that is terrifying but not particularly plausible.
The Rogue-Bomb Theory
The hottest theory about why there are so many reported sightings of drones and lights in the sky over New Jersey is that there’s something radioactive and dangerous on the loose somewhere in that area, and the drones are part of a government effort to find it.
John Ferguson is the CEO of Saxon Aerospace in Wichita, Kan.; You can find his company’s website here. He floated the “searching for radiation” theory in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, which you can watch on X here:
I’m a manufacturer of unmanned aircraft, military grade unmanned aircraft. . . . There’s all of these mysterious drones going on off the East Coast, and as a professional, as a subject matter expert, I wanted to give you my opinion on what I think could be going on with these drones. I don’t particularly believe that these have a nefarious intent, I could be wrong. But I wanna give you the truth, and what I believe. It’s my own opinion, and I have not bounced this off of anybody, so if you think it’s bulls***, whatever, that’s cool. I don’t want to spread misinformation, as we know there’s a lot of that going around. . . .
Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had dismantled the nuclear program, and there were, with Russia, there were countless nuclear missiles that were disarmed and disposed of. Well, there were over 80, I believe, over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing. Okay? We don’t know where they are, maybe somebody does, but nobody really knows where these are, I speak to some pretty high-level government officials on this stuff, and it seems as though that is the case.
Allow me to call a time out and clear up the timeline. According a summary from Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association:
At the time of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, including an estimated 1,900 strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and 44 strategic bombers. By 1996, Ukraine had returned all of its nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for economic aid and security assurances, and in December 1994, Ukraine became a non-nuclear weapon state-party to the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). The last strategic nuclear delivery vehicle in Ukraine was eliminated in 2001 under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
There has never been any serious evidence of any lost or loose nuclear weapons during the transfer of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal to Russia. In fact, there’s never been a lost nuclear weapon in Russia, despite that country having, as of today, the world’s second-largest arsenal and plenty of terrorist groups that would like to get their hands on them. I say “never” at least as far as any Western intelligence agency, government, or international organization has been able to determine — and a lost nuclear weapon is not the sort of thing people shrug off. As I wrote back in 2023:
The Russian government has all kinds of problems with corruption and incompetence, but so far, it has a surprisingly strong record of controlling and protecting such weapons. Way back in 1997, former Russian national-security adviser Alexander Lebed claimed that the Russian military had lost track of upwards of 100 nuclear suitcase bombs. Somehow, in the past 26 years, none of those nuclear-suitcase bombs has ever been found — at least as far as those of us in the general public know — and thankfully none has ever detonated.
Back in 1998, the then-commander in chief of U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Air Force General Eugene E. Habiger, inspected Russian nuclear-weapons sites and determined that in some ways, the Russian sites were arguably more secure than ours. . . .
Furthermore, if Ukraine had a remaining secret arsenal of nukes, or even potential access to one or more “loose nukes,” do you think the Russians would have occupied Crimea in 2014 or launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022?
Ferguson continues:
I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago, who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which, they had their ears closed, about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on. He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine. And he knew that that thing was headed towards the United States. Okay? That is a very serious deal. And everyone knows that the United States government, this administration, is pushing to get into a war with Russia. We all know that, we all feel it. We all see it. Okay?
If the Biden administration is as hell-bent on getting into a war with Russia as some believe, they’ve got an amazingly counterproductive way of doing it: slow-walking weapon systems to Ukraine and constantly limiting the way the Ukrainian military can use them. If the true desire of the Biden administration was to get into a war with Russia, they wouldn’t have spent the past three years refusing Ukrainian requests for arms and equipment for fear of “escalation.”
Ferguson continues:
Drones, they have no reason to be in the air at night, unless you’re doing some type of ISR work — intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. You know, looking for bad guys. Or looking for a victim, a search and rescue victim. Or law enforcement. Or some type of military project, right? There’s no reason for a drone to be flying at night, really. Because they don’t see s***. Unless you have thermal optics, drones really don’t see stuff. You need to do mapping during the day. If you’re going to do farming stuff, you do it during the day.
The only reason why you would ever fly an aircraft, an unmanned aircraft, at night is if you’re looking for something, rather it be a person, or trying to smell gas. We have methane gas-detection systems that can detect gas leaks in pipelines. You really wouldn’t use thermal optics for trying to find gas leaks, just simply because the only way you’re actually going to find a gas leak with thermal optics is if the gas leak is aggressive enough that it has a difference in temperature. . . .
Ferguson discusses how thermal imaging creates digital images from temperature variance and gas leaks, and then:
We have special sensors that can detect gas leaks. We also have special sensors that can detect radioactive material. So, with this gentleman, that I had spoken with, who was trying to raise the alarm, to try to get somebody in the government to say, “Hey, we need to work together to try to find this nuclear warhead,” none of that ever happened. They knew that warhead was on its way to the United States, that’s all that ever came of it. Nothing ever happened. This government did not do anything at all to help this gentleman raise the alarm and raise awareness that there is a very deadly weapon on its way to the United States.
It’s out there. Nobody knows where it is now. It left Europe, and now it’s gone. So my guess, my own guess, is that these drones are not nefarious in intent. If they are, they are, but I doubt it. But if they are our drones, the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground. That’s it. There’s no other reason for a drone to be flying in the air, other than to piss a bunch of people off at night. That’s it.
So, my belief is they’re trying to smell something on the ground — gas leaks, radioactive material, whatever. So — do I think that they’re coming up out of the ocean? No, don’t think so.
Joe Rogan shared the video of Ferguson’s theory Sunday and said, “This is the first video about these drones that has got me genuinely concerned.”
President-elect Donald Trump, holding a press conference, yesterday:
Q: Can you comment on the drones that are flying around with New Jersey ports? It seems like the American people have a big . . .
Trump: The government knows what is happening. Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it’s a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went, and for some reason they don’t want to comment. And I think they’d be better off saying what it is. Our military knows and our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense. I can’t imagine it’s the enemy because if it was the enemy, they’d blast it out. Even if they were late, they’d blast it. Something strange is going on. For some reason they don’t want to tell the people and they should because the people are really. . . . I mean, they happen to be over Bedminster, want to know the truth.
Q: Have you received an intelligent-
Trump: They’re very close to Bedminster. I think maybe I won’t spend the weekend in Bedminster.
Q: Have you been a-
Trump: I’ve decided to cancel my trip.
Journalist: Have you received an intelligence briefing on the drones?
Trump: I don’t want to comment on that.
(An aside: Isn’t it nice to have a president-elect who answers questions from reporters regularly?)
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the claim that there’s a loose nuke or a dirty bomb somewhere in the Northeast. As noted yesterday, Saturday’s Army-Navy game in Landover, Maryland featured the president-elect, the vice president-elect, the speaker of the House, the incoming Senate majority leader, the incoming White House chief of staff and national security adviser, the nominees to be secretary of defense, director of national intelligence, director of the FBI director, secretary of commerce, the governors of Virginia and Georgia, incoming senator Dave McCormick and outgoing senator Joe Manchin, Senators Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and Elon Musk, plus lots of high-level uniformed military officials.
That’s a crowd of high-level officials just short of the State of the Union address. It’s hard to believe the U.S. Secret Service would allow that many top officials to gather in one spot if there was a genuine mass-casualty threat lurking around out there. And if all those officials had all gathered in defiance of warnings from the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Capitol Police, etc., that’s the sort of thing that would be very likely to get leaked to the press.
Maybe you believe that if there was a genuine U.S. government search for a “broken arrow” lost nuclear weapon or a potential dirty bomb, someone in our government would leak. There are decent odds that those who live in the potentially threatened area would want their families to leave the area at risk. But maybe you believe that not a single person in the U.S. government who knew about the threat would let it leak to the media or public at all.
But if the stakes were so high — thousands of lives, tens of thousands of lives, and a permanent radiation zone right in the middle of one of the most densely packed areas of the country — would the government really only use the drones to search at night?
The U.S. government has a Nuclear Emergency Support Team, and they roll out for any large event; this year “NEST aircraft have flown above the Super Bowl, the Boston Marathon, and both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.” NEST deliberately avoids using black helicopters to avoid fueling conspiracy theories.
In fact, somebody with radioactive dye in their body caused a recent NEST response. A team was called out after local police found a radioactive puddle in a fast-food parking lot somewhere in America.
Smith says they quickly identified the source. “If somebody doesn’t use a public restroom and happens to alleviate their need in a parking lot, then that can cause a troubled signature if there is indeed an isotope, a medical isotope involved,” she says.
If there was really a ticking-clock nuclear or dirty bomb somewhere in the New Jersey area, you would be seeing a lot of government and police activity around the clock, not just in the skies at night.
In case you’re wondering, “To date, six nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered.” They’re mostly at the bottom of the ocean; the most recent incident was on April 7, 1989: “About 300 miles north of the Norwegian coast, the Komsomolets, a Soviet nuclear-powered attack submarine, caught fire and sank. The vessel’s nuclear reactor, two nuclear-armed torpedoes, and 42 of the 69 crew members were lost.”
ADDENDUM: From the discussion of the Soviet nuclear weapons that were in Ukraine linked above:
To solidify security commitments to Ukraine, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances on December 5, 1994. A political agreement in accordance with the principles of the Helsinki Accords, the memorandum included security assurances against the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s territory or political independence. The countries promised to respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine.
Boy, that worked out just great for the Ukrainians, huh? It’s amazing anyone bothers to sign treaties.