The Tybee Bomb: America Loses a Hydrogen Bomb Off Savannah, Georgia (1958)
In the pre-dawn hours of February 5, 1958, a mid-air collision over the skies near Savannah, Georgia forced a US Air Force B-47 bomber crew to jettison a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb into the Atlantic Ocean to save their aircraft. Known as the Tybee Bomb, the weapon was never recovered despite extensive Navy searches, leaving a thermonuclear device somewhere in the shallow waters off Tybee Island to this day. The incident remains one of the most striking examples of the risks inherent in the Cold War's nuclear arsenal.
The Collision and the Decision to Drop
During a simulated combat mission on the night of February 5, 1958, a B-47 Stratojet bomber piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Howard Richardson collided with an F-86 Sabre fighter jet flown by Lieutenant Clarence Stewart over the skies near Sylvania, Georgia. The F-86 pilot ejected safely, but Richardson's B-47 suffered serious damage to its right wing and fuel tanks. Carrying a 7,600-pound Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb, Richardson requested and received permission from his commanders to jettison the weapon before attempting an emergency landing at Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah. Circling over the mouth of the Savannah River, the crew released the bomb from about 7,200 feet, watching it fall into the shallow waters of Wassaw Sound near Tybee Island. Richardson successfully landed the crippled aircraft minutes later, and no injuries resulted from the incident on the ground or in the air, apart from Stewart's ejection injuries.
Did You Know?
The Tybee Bomb has never been found despite decades of search efforts, and the US government paid to install permanent monitoring in the area rather than risk a full excavation. Some researchers believe it lies buried under several feet of sand and silt near the mouth of the Savannah River, making the hydrogen bomb an enduring, if largely forgotten, feature of the Georgia coastline.
The Search That Found Nothing
In the weeks following the drop, the US Navy and Air Force launched an intensive search-and-recovery operation, deploying divers, minesweepers, and specialized underwater equipment to locate the bomb amid the murky, silt-laden waters off Tybee Island. Despite weeks of effort, the search team never located the weapon, and by April 1958 the Air Force officially declared the bomb "irretrievably lost." Officials have long maintained that the Mark 15 bomb, part of a class of weapons using the fusion principles pioneered in America's first full-scale thermonuclear test in 1952, was unarmed and did not contain its plutonium capsule at the time of the drop, meaning it posed no risk of nuclear detonation. However, conflicting historical accounts and a 1966 Congressional record have raised questions about whether the capsule was in fact aboard, fueling decades of speculation, environmental concern, and periodic renewed search efforts by private investigators and documentary teams.
The Bomb's Place in Thermonuclear History
The weapon lost off Tybee Island belonged to a new and terrifying class of armament: the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. Unlike first-generation fission weapons such as those used in 1945, thermonuclear devices harness nuclear fusion to achieve yields typically twenty times greater, while requiring far less mass and volume. Their multi-stage design—distinct from simpler boosted fission weapons—allowed even non-fissile depleted uranium to serve as fuel, making more efficient use of scarce fissile material. Following the first full-scale US thermonuclear test in 1952, four other Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-recognized states, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, and France, eventually developed the technology. The Tybee incident, occurring just six years after that first test, underscored how quickly these enormously powerful weapons had become embedded in routine military operations, and how the sheer scale of Cold War nuclear stockpiling created lasting risks that persist, quite literally, beneath the waves off the Georgia coast today.