Somewhere beneath the shallow waters near Tybee Island,
12 miles east of Savannah, lies a 7,600 pound unexploded
nuclear bomb that was dropped by a crippled Air Force plane
in 1958. It's lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound, the place
where the 1996 Olympic sailing competition was held.
The Air Force says the bomb isn't dangerous, because it's
missing the plutonium capsule needed to cause a nuclear
explosion, although it still contains radioactive uranium and
has the explosive power of 400 pounds of TNT. "The bomb
off the coast of Savannah is not capable of a nuclear
explosion," said Major Cheryl Law, an Air Force spokesperson.
As for the uranium inside the bomb, "to have that hurt you,
you would actually have to ingest it."
"It's a nuclear bomb," counters Derek Duke, a former Air Force
pilot who has been researching the case for 2 years.
"It's like if I take the battery out of your car, then I try to
convince you it's not a car. It needs to be found so it
moves from the dark, scary realm of lost and unknown and
we know where and how it is." Duke has proposed to find the
lost bomb by using a team of military experts who had
technology capable of scanning the ocean floor.
Duke found an April 1966 letter written to the chairman of
Congress' Joint Committee on Atomic Energy by W.J. Howard,
who was then secretary of Defense. There were four nuclear
weapons listed that had been lost and never recovered. Two
were described as "weapons-less capsules" that were
incapable of creating a nuclear blast, but the Tybee bomb
wasn't one of them. Howard listed the Tybee bomb and
another bomb, lost in the Western Pacific in 1965,
as "complete" weapons.
The Air Force has checked its original records on the bomb
and announced that Howard's letter was wrong. They
estimate it will cost a million dollars to find the bomb, so they
would prefer to leave well enough alone. Also, there's no
guarantee that it could be located, since tides and weather
patterns over the years could have moved it out to sea.
Duke's search was inspired by a nearly forgotten story he
heard about Tybee Island, which is now a beach community
filled with expensive homes. In February, 1958, a bomber on a
training mission collided with a fighter jet near Savannah
and had to drop the bomb in order to land safely. It was
dumped in the waters near a small island near Tybee, called
Little Tybee. The military spent weeks searching for it, then
gave up.
Some Tybee residents discounted the story as a
myth. "Savannahians have all kinds of tales and legends," said
U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston. "And part of the Savannah lore was
there's a bomb off Tybee. And you'd go, 'Is there really?'"
"It was all over the newspapers and the radio. But nobody
worried about it," said Tybee city councilman Jack Youmans,
75, who was living there when the bomb was dropped. "If it's
there, then it's there. That's all."
But Kingston isn't taking it so lightly. "Four hundred pounds of
TNT to some folks isn't a big deal," he said. "But if
it's your family and your boat that hits it, it is a big deal."
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