In February 1958, after a mid-air collision over Georgia, the US Air Force dropped a 7,600-pound Mark 15 hydrogen bomb into Wassaw Sound, just off Tybee Island. The Air Force and the Navy searched for ten weeks. They never found it. More than 68 years later, it is still down there, somewhere under the mud, a few miles from a busy beach town.
This is the true story of the Tybee bomb: the night a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter collided in the dark, the pilot’s decision to jettison a thermonuclear weapon, the search that failed, the declassified testimony that said the bomb was “a complete weapon,” and the people who spent years trying to find it.
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Chapters:
0:00 A hydrogen bomb off a Georgia beach
1:15 Winter, 1958: why the bomb was up there
2:20 Ivory Two takes off
3:48 The collision
5:30 The decision: drop the bomb
7:47 Ten weeks of searching
9:38 The missing capsule
12:10 The hunters: Derek Duke and the 2001 review
15:16 Still down there
Sources:
– U.S. Air Force review of the lost Tybee Island weapon, Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency (2001)
– Form AL-569 “Temporary Custodian Receipt”, 4 Feb 1958 (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission)
– W.J. Howard, Assistant Secretary of Defense, testimony to Congress (1966, declassified 1994)
– NPR, “For 50 Years, Nuclear Bomb Lost In Watery Grave” (2008); Garden & Gun, “The Saga of the Tybee Bomb”
– Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, “Fact Sheet: The Missing Tybee Bomb”
Footage: U.S. government films in the public domain (U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army “The Big Picture”, U.S. Navy, Department of Energy nuclear test films, Universal Newsreel), via the Internet Archive.
Present-day Tybee Island aerials: “Free 4K Drone Beach Content – Tybee Island” by JDG Drone Detours and “Tybee Island LightHouse – Walk to the Top” by Natures Lullaby, both CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Photos and documents: Wikimedia Commons, public domain (AEC, USAF, USGS, NASA); Tybee bomb core diagram by Anynobody, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Music: YouTube Audio Library.
If it were your beach, would you want them to dig the bomb up, or leave it where it is? Tell me in the comments.
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#ColdWar #NuclearHistory #TybeeIsland #BrokenArrow #History
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