I never knew there was an H-bomb lost off the coast of Savannah Georgia. WTF?

Kingshakabobo

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Mon Aug-20-07 10:21 AM
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I never knew there was an H-bomb lost off the coast of Savannah Georgia. WTF?

The History Channel is doing a story on it. We can find JFK JR's plane, the Liberty Bell 7, most of TWA Flight 800 but we can't find a friggin H-BOMB????

Yikes. I never heard this.

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0803-08.htm

The Case of the Missing H-Bomb
by Jeffrey St. Clair

Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.
Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Warsaw Sound, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Warsaw Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb's 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn't detonate.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/17/tech/main702634.shtml

No Sign Of Long-Lost Nuke

SAVANNAH, Ga., June 17, 2005
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(AP) The first government search in decades for a nuclear bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 failed to uncover any trace of the sunken weapon, the Air Force said in a report Friday.

The report released nine months after scientists tested radiation levels in waters off Tybee Island concluded the 7,600-pound bomb cannot explode and should be left at sea.

"The best course of action in this matter is to not continue to search for it and to leave the property in place," said the report by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency.

A damaged B-47 bomber jettisoned the Mark-15 nuke into a sound about 15 miles from Savannah in February 1958 after colliding with a fighter jet during a training flight.