That's right! We actually dropped a bomb on ourselves, and it wasn't just any bomb either! This bad boy was a thermonuclear bomb! That's the kind that could make a real big impression on anyone within range! Here is the story behind this...taken from the archives of Now I Know!
The Mark 15 hydrogen bomb, pictured above is a thermonuclear bomb weighing a relatively light 7,600 pounds. It is roughly twelve feet long and three feet in diameter. Like most nuclear weapons, it can cause a great deal of destruction upon its detonation. Unlike most nuclear weapons, we managed to lose one.
On February 5, 1958, a B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 15 took off from Homestead Air Force Base near Florida’s southern tip. The B-47 was on a training run off the coast of Tybee Island, on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia. But the mock mission went awry, as the bomber collided with an F-86 fighter jet also involved in the exercise. The F-68 was disabled and its pilot immediately ejected and survived. The B-47 was able to remain airborne, but was greatly damaged. Unable to guarantee a safe landing — a critical concern, given the plane’s payload — its pilot, Colonel Howard Richardson, proposed a solution: drop the bomb in the ocean.
And that is exactly what happened. Richardson, with permission from command, dropped the bomb from a distance of about 7,000 feet above sea level while traveling at over 200 miles per hour. The bomb landed in the ocean just off Tybee Island and, per Richardson, did not explode. The B-47 made an emergency landing at Hunter Army Air Field, and no one, miraculously, died. Richardson earned a medal for his cool-under-pressure performance in the skies.
But what ever happened to the bomb? No one knows. The day after the mid-air collision, Air Force and Naval recovery crews took to the seas to recover the jettisoned hydrogen bomb, but after a nine week search, they came back empty handed. Another recovery effort was made in 2001, but it, too, was unsuccessful. More recently, in 2004, another Air Force colonel asserted that he has narrowed down the location to an area roughly the size of a football field, by triangulating off heightened levels of radioactivity in the area. But to date, the bomb still sits somewhere in the ocean, unrecovered.
This may be by design. The Air Force asserts that the bomb is safer there than it would be if jostled, as they assert, the weapon lacks a plutonium trigger, which is requisite to creating an explosion. However, prior testimony from W.J. Howard, an Assistant Secretary of State suggests that this may be incorrect, and that the lost Mark 15 is, in Howard’s words, a “complete bomb.”
Now, doesn't that give you a warm and fuzzy feeling all over? Not only did we have to drop a nuclear bomb just off the coast of Georgia, but no one can find the blessed thing! Even with all the tech toys at the government's disposal, it still remains lost to this day!
I don't know about you, but I don't think I want to be living anywhere around Savannah, Georgia! Call me crazy, but I figure why take the chance, ya know?
Coffee on the patio this morning. Don't worry about the weather, it's cool but dry!
