Somewhere under the muddy shallows of Wassaw Sound, off the coast of Georgia, sits a 7,600-pound hydrogen bomb. The United States Air Force dropped it there in 1958, searched for ten weeks, gave up, and has left it alone ever since. It is one of a handful of American nuclear weapons that were lost and never recovered — and this one lies a few miles from a beach town of 3,000 people.

How a thermonuclear bomb ended up on the sea floor near Savannah is a story of a mid-air collision in the dark, a pilot with an impossible choice, and a decades-long argument over just how dangerous the thing really is.

A collision in the dark

In the small hours of 5 February 1958, a B-47 Stratojet was flying home to Homestead Air Force Base, Florida, after a simulated bombing run. In its bomb bay rode a single Mark 15 hydrogen bomb — a weapon with a yield of up to 3.8 megatons, roughly 190 times the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

The exercise was nearly over when an F-86 Sabre, flying a mock intercept, sliced into the bomber. The fighter’s pilot, Lieutenant Clarence Stewart, ejected and parachuted — badly frostbitten — into a South Carolina swamp. The B-47 dropped like a stone from 38,000 feet, and only at 20,000 did its pilot, Major Howard Richardson, wrestle it back under control.

A 1952 U.S. Air Force film introducing the B-47 Stratojet.

Ditch the bomb

Richardson nursed the crippled bomber toward Hunter Air Force Base near Savannah — only to learn its single runway was under repair and dangerously rough. A hard landing might tear the huge bomb loose and send it out the front of the aircraft, in his words, “like a bullet through a gun barrel.” So he made the only sane choice: jettison it into the sea.

At about 7,200 feet and 200 knots, the crew released the Mark 15 over Wassaw Sound. There was no flash, no shockwave — just a splash somewhere in the dark water. Richardson then put the battered B-47 down safely at Hunter and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The bomb was never seen again.

Armed, or disabled?

Here the story splits. The Mark 15 held 400 pounds of conventional explosives and highly enriched uranium. Whether it could have produced a nuclear blast depends on one thing: was its plutonium “capsule” aboard? For decades the answer has flipped back and forth.

In 1966, an assistant secretary of defense told Congress the Tybee weapon was one of two lost bombs that were “complete” — armed with their nuclear capsules.

Richardson spent his later years furiously rejecting that account. He pointed to the receipt he had signed — which barred any active capsule from being inserted into the bomb — and dismissed the nuclear-danger claims outright.

Air Force records support Richardson: Strategic Air Command test flights of that era were not authorised to carry live capsules. The likeliest truth is that the bomb cannot produce a nuclear detonation — but it still holds hundreds of pounds of high explosive and weapons-grade material on a public seabed.

Restored archival film of the B-47 Stratojet.

Still down there

The Navy searched for nine weeks in 1958, dragging sonar and cables across the sound. They turned up Civil War cannonballs — still live — but no bomb. A 2001 survey concluded the Mark 15 is probably buried under five to fifteen feet of silt. In 2004 a retired officer with a Geiger counter thought he had found it; the Air Force sent a team, decided the radiation was natural, and closed the case.

Officially, the bomb is judged safest where it lies, and best left undisturbed. So it stays — a genuine hydrogen bomb, lost on purpose, resting quietly in the mud a short boat ride from the beach.

A short recap of America’s still-missing Tybee bomb.

Sources: 1958 Tybee Island mid-air collision (Wikipedia); Roger Pinckney, “The Saga of the Tybee Bomb,” Garden & Gun; BBC News; NPR; U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency assessment (2001).