Nuclear missile dating to Cold War found in Ohio man’s garage | World News

An old Cold War nuclear missile was found in a man’s garage after he tried to donate what he thought was just a rusty rocket to a museum.

The owner, who didn’t want to be identified, had offered to donate the item to National Museum of the US Air Force in Ohio, where staff alerted police.

The bomb squad was deployed to investigate the rocket in Bellevue, Washington State, but found there was no warhead attached or fuel inside, meaning it never posed any danger.

Bellevue Police Department said the device was ‘in fact a Douglas AIR-2 Genie (previous designation MB-1), an unguided air-to-air rocket that is designed to carry a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead’.

Spokesman Seth Tyler told BBC News that without the warhead it was essentially just ‘a gas tank for rocket fuel’.

He described the event as ‘not serious at all.’

‘In fact, our bomb squad member asked me why we were releasing a news release on a rusted piece of metal,’ he added.

The owner of the missile had not been expecting a call from the police, Mr Tyler said, as it appeared the museum didn’t let him know they had reported the weapon.

He was ‘extremely irritated’ by the media coverage, Mr Tyler said.

The rocket had belonged to a neighbour, who bought it in an estate sale.

When the neighbour died the man decided to get in contact with the museum to see if they were interested in taking it on.

This type of rocket was used by the US Air Force and Canada during the Cold War and was the most powerful interceptor missile ever deployed by the Air Force, The Seattle Times reports.

The first and only live firing of a Genie was in July 1957. Production pf the missile ended in 1962.

Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Bellevue Police Department invoked Elton John’s Rocket Man as they joked: ‘And we think it’s gonna be a long, long time before we get another call like this again.’

Last year, a nine-year-old boy dug up a live hand grenade in his garden in Yarcombe, east Devon.

George Peniston-Bird was playing when one morning when he discovered the unexploded World War Two weapon and told his mum.

Police were called and the grenade was safely detonated in a nearby field.

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