TYBEE
ISLAND, Ga. (AP) - Lost beneath the shallow waters and sand off the
Georgia coast lies a Cold War relic that lingered for decades, a
7,600-pound nuclear bomb dumped by a crippled Air Force plane.
Nearly 43 years later, questions raised by a former military pilot and
a Georgia congressman have caused the government to consider renewing its
search for the lost bomb near Tybee Island, 12 miles east of Savannah. The
bomb is lost in Wassaw Sound, where the 1996 Olympic sailing competition
was held.
The Air Force insists the bomb lacks a key plutonium capsule needed to
cause a nuclear explosion, though it still contains radioactive uranium
and the explosive power of 400 pounds of TNT.
"It's a nuclear bomb," insists Derek Duke, a former Air Force
pilot who's been researching the case for two 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."
Air Force officials aren't so sure. After weighing the potential
dangers of leaving the bomb against the cost of finding it, possibly $1
million or more, they plan to decide soon whether a new search is
warranted.
Duke's own search has revived what had become a largely forgotten tale
on Tybee Island, a beach community of 4,000 where rustic bungalows sit
beside $500,000 homes.
In February 1958, a B-47 bomber on a training mission collided with a
fighter jet near Savannah and had to drop the bomb to land safely. It was
dumped on the south side of Tybee's uninhabited sister island, called
Little Tybee. The military spent weeks searching for the sunken weapon,
then gave up.
For residents who remembered, the bomb was ancient history by the time
the Olympics came to town. Others had never heard the story, or discounted
it as local myth.
"Savannahians have all kinds of tales and legends," said U.S.
Rep. Jack Kingston, who represents coastal Georgia in Congress. "And
part of the Savannah lore was there's a bomb off Tybee. And you'd go, 'Is
there really?'"
Kingston was skeptical until Duke came to him last summer with a
proposal to find the lost weapon himself using a team of former military
experts with technology capable of scanning the ocean floor. Newspaper
clippings from 1958 and government documents indicated the bomb was real.
But how dangerous was it?
Duke points to an April 1966 letter to the chairman of Congress' Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy by W.J. Howard, then assistant to the secretary
of defense. Howard listed four nuclear weapons that had been lost and
never recovered.
Though two were described as "weapons-less capsules," and
thus incapable of a nuclear blast, the Tybee Island bomb wasn't one of
them. Howard listed it and a device lost in the deep Western Pacific in
1965 as "complete" weapons.
At Kingston's urging, the Air Force checked its original records on the
bomb and concluded Howard was wrong.
"The bomb off the coast of Savannah is not capable of a nuclear
explosion," said Maj. Cheryl Law, an Air Force spokeswoman. As for
the uranium still inside the bomb, "to have that hurt you, you would
actually have to ingest it."
That doesn't mean the bomb is harmless. High explosives in the 12-foot
cylinder, resembling a large propane tank, could cause serious damage if
they detonated with a boat directly overhead. There's also the
environmental threat of an underwater explosion and radiation leakage
killing fish and other sea life.
But there's no guarantee the bomb could be found. Experts have warned
the Air Force that tides and strong weather patterns over the years could
have moved the bomb out to sea.
Kingston said he's willing to follow the Air Force's lead for now. But
he'd like to see some effort, if only a small search covering just a few
miles.
"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."
But an Air Force expert on nuclear weapons who has studied the Tybee
Island bomb said damage from an accidental explosion would be minimal.
Officials believe the bomb sank at least five miles off the coast,
beneath 20 feet of water and an additional 15 feet of sand and silt, said
Maj. Don Robbins, deputy director of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and
Counter Proliferation Agency.
If it exploded, the bomb "would create maybe a 10-foot diameter
hole and shock waves through the water of approximately 100 yards,"
Robbins said. "Even boats going over it would not even notice. They
might see some bubbles coming out around them."
The amount of uranium in the bomb's casing is too low to cause a
serious environmental threat, he said.
A month after the Tybee Island incident, in March 1958, a second B-47
dropped a similar bomb, without its nuclear payload, in Florence, S.C. The
resulting explosion blasted a crater into the ground and injured six
people.
Tybee Island residents, known to ride out hurricane warnings at the
beachside bars, haven't been ruffled by the wayward bomb.
"It was all over the newspapers and the radio. But nobody worried
about it," said city councilman Jack Youmans, 75, who was living on
the island when the bomb was dropped. "If it's there, then it's
there. That's all."
Tybee Island Mayor Walter Parker said he hasn't received a single phone
call from residents about the bomb. And John Mack Adams, an island retiree
who writes about local history, hasn't heard much other than a friend's
joke that their property values might plummet.
"A lot of the locals have lived here all their lives. They look at
it kind of like a crap shoot," Adams said. "These folks don't
scare too easily."
AP-ES-01-12-01 1556EST
