The U.S. loses a hydrogen bomb off Tybee Island
On this day · 5 February 1958
On February 5, 1958, an Air Force crew jettisoned a multi-megaton bomb into Georgia waters, where it still rests.
During a night training mission on February 5, 1958, an F-86 fighter collided with a B-47 bomber in the dark sky over the Georgia coast. The damaged bomber was carrying a 7,600-pound Mark 15 hydrogen bomb, a weapon with a yield of up to 3.8 megatons, hundreds of times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
To land safely, the crew jettisoned the bomb into the waters of Wassaw Sound, near Tybee Island outside Savannah. The bomber touched down without it.
The Air Force and Navy searched for weeks before declaring the weapon irretrievably lost that April. A 2001 survey suggested it lies buried under 5 to 15 feet of silt.
It is still down there.
Classified as a “Broken Arrow,” the Tybee bomb remains unrecovered to this day. Officials maintain it lacks the plutonium capsule needed to detonate, though that claim has long been disputed.
Sources & references
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