When you think you have had a bad day…

Imagine this kind of day. You are peacefully motoring along, your wife chatting and playing with her wedding rings, and someone you know sideswipes your car. Worse, the ol’ ball and chain is so startled she throws up her hands and yep – the wedding ring and engagement ring go out the window – at speed. Guaranteed, that day will come up whenever you two get in a fight.  Forever.

Well, the Air Force had one of those days on February 5th, 1958, when a midair collision between an F-86 and a B-47 bomber forced the bomber to drop a nuclear bomb. Just off Georgia (yeah, you guys who were rooting for Atlanta get disappointed)  in the Wassaw Sound.

Colonel Howard Richardson was flying his B-47, playing OPFOR as a supposedly nuclear-armed Russian bomber. Lt. Clarence Stewart, the stalwart fighter defending our sacred shores, got a wee bit too close to the bomber. As in hit it. The impact destroyed the end of Richardson’s right wing, took out a fuel tank, and literally left an engine dangling.

From a height of 38,000 feet when the midair collision occurred, the bomber plunged to 20,000 feet before Richardson could stabilize his altitude. Lieutenant Stewart parachuted to safety, but Richardson and his crew continued flying, because even though their mission was a simulation, the bomb they were carrying was not. With a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb 100 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima on board, landing safely was an urgent necessity.

… Colonel Richardson made the decision to jettison the nuclear bomb his aircraft was carrying into the shallow ocean waters of Wassaw Sound north of Tybee Island, Georgia.

His hope was that the bomb would be easy to locate and recover there, since the water is no more than a few feet deep in many areas. He was wrong.

While Richardson and his crew made a hard, but ultimately safe landing at Hunter Army Airfield, the Mark 15 hydrogen bomb would never be seen again.

The Mark 15 was a “lightweight” nuke – only 7,600 pounds. Sounds pretty heavy, until you remember that both Fat Man and Little Boy from Japan 1945 required stripping extraneous weight from B-29s to get off the ground – and they were literally 100th the yield.

A team of Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard personnel began a frantic, secretive search for the bomb the day after it was lost. Because the bomb was thought to have plunged through the water and buried itself several feet beneath the seabed, the search was conducted by divers using a handheld sonar devices and boats using galvanic drag and cable sweeps—underwater towed metal-detector systems. But it was all to no avail.

Just over a month later, the search was called off, and the hydrogen bomb was declared “irretrievably lost” by military officials.

Some think a Soviet sub may have snuck into the waters, found the bomb, and made off with it… given the state of Soviet technology at the times, my money says they may have wanted to but didn’t. Given that over much of the area the waters are only a few feet deep, it seems to me unlikely that someone could casually pick up a 4-ton bomb.

The Air Force has long maintained the Mark 15 was dropped without its plutonium capsule—essentially making it a dummy incapable of a nuclear detonation. But a 1966 letter from Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Howard, declassified in 1994, described the Tybee bomb as a “complete weapon.” Howard later recanted, telling military officials his memo was “in error.” Not everyone is convinced. Popular Mechanics

No one seems to really know, and the odds are, that after repeated searches periodically, that the bomb is still down there somewhere.

Interesting postscript: you would think that Lt. Stewart’s Air Force career would have had an extremely short life expectancy, wouldn’t you? Helped lose a nuke, totaled his plane, effectively totaled the bomber (it never flew again.)  Guess again – Lt. Col. Stewart retired in 1977 after over 100 combat missions over Vietnam with a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Silver star –  having had to eject from a SECOND plane in 1966 when its engine exploded.  This Day in Aviation

Category: Air Force