Oops We Dropped a Nuke: The 7,600-Pound Hydrogen Bomb Still Chilling Off Tybee Island Since 1958

On February 5, 1958, a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a 7,600-pound Mark 15 hydrogen bomb collided with an F-86 fighter jet during a training exercise off the coast of Georgia. The bomber's pilot, facing a rather inconvenient dilemma—namely, that his damaged aircraft was struggling to stay airborne with a thermonuclear weapon in its belly—received permission to jettison the bomb into the waters near Tybee Island before making an emergency landing. The Air Force assured everyone that the bomb lacked its plutonium capsule and posed minimal risk, though they spent weeks searching for it in the murky coastal waters. They never found it. And so, somewhere off the Georgia coast, there lies what the military euphemistically terms a "broken arrow"—one of several dozen nuclear weapons the United States has simply misplaced over the decades. The "Tybee Bomb," as it became known, remains lost to this day, nestled in the sediment somewhere between Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean. The Air Force eventually gave up the search and declared the weapon "irretrievably lost." Local real estate agents, one imagines, have chosen not to highlight this particular feature in their coastal property listings. Successive investigations and reports have alternated between "nothing to worry about" and "well, it's not ideal," though the government maintains the device cannot detonate. It's still down there, waiting—a 3.5-ton paperweight at the bottom of Wassaw Sound, and quite possibly the most expensive piece of lost luggage in American history. This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.