Savannah-Jewel of the South and the Missing Hydrogen Bomb!

As recorded in many travel venues, Savannah Georgia is one of the most beautiful picturesque cities, not only in the United States, but the world. From the striking river front to the Spanish Moss dripping Live Oak Trees and Palms adorning this stunningly beautiful City of Garden Squares, to some of the most beautiful antebellum architecture anywhere in the south, Savannah is truly a jewel of American history. Add to that the colorful, if not eccentric, Savannahians themselves, who are as much the charm of Savannah as the city itself, as captured in John Berult’s book and consequential movie by Clint Eastwood–Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But for all of its old word charm, Savannah has a dark secret.

Just off the coast between Tybee Island and the shoreline of Savannah, a hydrogen bomb, at least a hundred times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Japan during the Second World War lies covered in nearly 70 years silt and detritus on the ocean floor obscuring it from recovery. Such events are called a Broken Arrow and as mentioned in the movie Broken Arrow staring John Travolta and Christian Slater, which one is scarier, the idea of loosing a nuclear weapon, or loosing nuclear weapons so often that there is actually a name for it?

So how did it get there? In the name of national security and protecting America, during the cold war of the nineteen fifties and sixties, it was common place, unknown to the public, for SAC–short for Strategic Air Command, to stage war games over American soil using live nuclear bombs, a practice that many today would consider absolute lunacy, particularly if it used live hydrogen bombs.

I suspect, though I have no proof or corroboration of it, the idea may have been that if an attack actually happened while an exercise was ongoing that any aircraft already in the air and armed would be able to respond faster that a sortie originating from the ground. Still, that being the case, why not have two bombers flying the same mission, one with a real bomb traveling at a safe distance, while the other practiced the targeting and simulation. Should a threat actually materialize one bomber would still be there in the air, ready to respond, yet far enough away to avoid any accidental event or encounters such as what happened on February 5, 1958.

On that date a B-47 SAC bomber carrying a live 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb collided with a F-86 fighter jet over southern Georgia and jettisoned its payload somewhere in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia which may have ended up the in adjacent river, no one knows for sure.

Though the exact amount of plutonium it carried is not known, pictures of the simulated payload show it slightly smaller than a volleyball. For perspective, the amount of plutonium to power an aircraft carrier for more than a year is about the size of a peanut.

The Air Force claimed the search to find the missing bomb lasted for months collimating finally, with a public statement that left undisturbed, the bomb posses no threat to the area. Yet today, with all of our advanced technology and knowledge of tracking nuclear signatures, the bomb has still not been recovered and is still there. There is one explanation, though unlikely, that a Russian Submarine recovered the bomb and that is why a signature could never be found.

Now, an even scarier thought, the lost bomb off the coast of Savannah is but one of as many as 8 lost by the United States, not all in Georgia, but somewhere and the likelihood of other bombs lost by other nuclear countries is even greater. And like the bomb resting on the ocean floor off the coast of Savannah, if history teaches us anything, it teaches us nothing exists forever…undisturbed.

Published February 2021 -Website: https://kim-michael-author.com