There's an H-bomb in Our Swamp
by Edward Welsh
In 1958, a US warplane jettisoned a device in a marsh in Georgia. Was it a
nuclear weapon? No, says the Pentagon. But new evidence has raised doubts.
Ken Wade is nudging his fishing boat through the narrow creeks that cut into
the steamy coastal swamps of Georgia. Twenty yards away pelicans preen, but
they are not his concern. Wade is here to point out the site that he
believes to be the final resting place of a nuclear bomb, jettisoned 43
years ago somewhere off the mouth of the Savannah River by a disabled B47
airplane.
�In the middle of the grass, I once floated into a circle of clear
water,� he recalls, pointing towards the dense, red-tipped reeds
stretching south of the river mouth. �If you step on the marsh, you
would sink up to your waist. I believe the bomb landed in that spot and sank
deep into the mud, creating a crater which over the years is being
reclaimed by the grass.�
Wade lives on nearby Tybee Island, where many of the 3,500 inhabitants
believe that there is a fully primed nuclear weapon, 100 times more powerful
than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, stuck somewhere in their muddy backyard
. Even though Tybee welcomes three million visitors each year to its beach,
the mayor and city officers continue to draw attention to the bomb by
demanding that the Government digs it up.
In 1958 the US Air Force insisted that the bomber had jettisoned nothing
more than a simulated weapon, used for training purposes � little
more than a metal shell stuffed with TNT. But to the intense annoyance of
the Pentagon, four decades later the issue is again tormenting it.
In the past year, enthusiasts with a passion for uncovering Cold War secrets
have stumbled upon an official document, apparently inadvertently
declassified, which states that the Tybee bomb was a �complete weapon
�. Furthermore, a former serviceman who loaded bombs on to B47s has
emerged to contradict the Air Force�s position.
Despite the Pentagon�s firm denials that there is anything amiss,
this new evidence has forced it to look into the possibility of searching
for the missing bomb under the eyes of Georgia congressmen and the American
media.
What is not in dispute is that on the night of February 4-5, 1958, a B47
bomber set out from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida with a Mark 15 Mod 0
on board. This was one of America�s earliest thermonuclear bombs,
containing 400lb of conventional explosives and uranium. The 7,600lb weapon
was designed with a removable nuclear capsule, or plutonium trigger. The
Pentagon insists that this key piece of equipment was not on board.
At 3.30am on February 5, the bomber collided with an F86 fighter jet in
midair. The jet crashed after the pilot baled out, and the bomber crew made
three unsuccessful attempts to land at Hunter army airfield outside Savannah
.
The Pentagon says that because of damage to the aircraft, �its
airspeed could not be reduced enough to ensure a safe landing�, so
permission was given to jettison the weapon to prevent a conventional
explosion caused by a crash landing at Hunter.
At 7,200ft, the device was released �into the water several miles
from the mouth of the Savannah River in Wassaw Sound, off Tybee Beach�
;.
In the first few days after the collision, the Air Force did not mention
that anything had been jettisoned. But some days later it was announced that
�a portion of a nuclear weapon� had been released in the area
. The Air Force added that there was no danger of a radioactive explosion,
presenting one local newspaper with the chance to publish the headline
65533;Jettison of Nuclear Weapon Here Disclosed�.
It is easy to understand the Pentagon�s embarrassment. The accident
happened in the middle of the Cold War. In the previous October, the Soviet
Union had launched Sputnik, beating the Americans in putting the first man-
made object into space. This added to fears in Washington that Moscow had
stolen a march in the development of intercontinental ballistic missile
technology.
After refueling, B47 bombers were capable of reaching the Soviet Union.
Although the Pentagon insists that the bomber involved in the collision was
on only a training mission, it accepts that in early 1958 other B47s were
taking off from America with armed Mark 15s on board.
Off the Savannah River, an intensive search took place using ships with
divers and underwater demolition teams. Local newspapers reported that the
Air Force was anxious to recover the �portion� of the weapon
it had admitted losing, for security reasons and because it was an �
expensive part�.
But after three square miles had been examined over more than two months,
the search was called off and the bomb was officially declared �
irretrievably lost�. Major Harold Richardson, the bomber pilot,
received the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving the aircraft and its crew
, and the island returned to its insouciant ways. As the years passed, the
Tybee bomb became just another of the martial tales recounted by locals
during sleepy afternoons spent in hammocks.
This stretch of coast, where the American continent peters out in a series
of steamy creeks, swamps and wooded sandbanks, was strategically important
for a long time because the Savannah River was the gateway to the cotton
fields of Georgia and South Carolina.
Pirates used Tybee as a haven for decades, and General James Oglethorpe, the
Englishman who founded Savannah, built a small fort there in 1733. Forty-
six years later, in one of the bloodiest battles of the War of Independence,
American and French troops used Tybee as a base for their unsuccessful
attempt to capture the city.
During the Civil War, Union forces, having stormed Tybee, forced Confederate
forces on a nearby island to surrender. Only last year, a civil war mine
was discovered at the river entrance. But with the demise of cotton after
the civil war, the area became a backwater. Tybee has wooden houses
reminiscent of the West Indies, and its inhabitants tend to rise early for
church � and drink late. Butterflies the size of a hand fly between
palm trees and live on oaks decorated with Spanish moss. Cranes, blue herons
and marsh hens colonize the marshes, and bottlenose dolphins greet passing
skiffs.
The backwoods calm was punctured this year by the arrival of Lt-Col Derek
Duke, who claimed to have fresh evidence that a hydrogen bomb with the power
to wipe out Tybee and Savannah and to send tidal waves up and down the East
Coast of America did indeed exist in their midst.
The retired USAF pilot, who says that he ran a National Security Agency
operation in Vietnam, agrees to meet me in the parlor of a fine mansion in
one of Savannah�s squares.
On first impressions it would be easy to dismiss Duke as an eccentric. A
short man, nearer 60 than 50, he has an unnatural-looking head of black hair
and seems to be obsessed with the Tybee bomb as an example of how the
federal Government is bent on conspiring against Americans.
Originally from Savannah but now living and working as a flying instructor
in nearby Statesboro, Duke also has a financial interest in the bomb. He has
formed a consortium which has offered to find the device for the Pentagon
at a cost of �600,000.
And last year, Duke, acting as a �clearing house� for
information from other like-minded people, received the best piece of
evidence to date to contradict the Pentagon�s case that the Tybee
bomb was unarmed.
In 1966 Chet Holifield, the chairman of the Congressional Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy, was angered by adverse publicity from that year�s
Palomares incident in Spain, in which another midair collision caused the
temporary loss � for 80 days � of a nuclear bomb by the US Air
Force.
To investigate, he held a hearing behind closed doors and asked Jack Howard,
then assistant to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, to provide the
committee with a list of accidents in which nuclear weapons had been lost
and never recovered. Howard�s response referred to four accidents
divided into two categories, one involving �complete weapons�,
the other �weapon-less capsules�.
The Tybee bomb was included in the first category.
Howard�s note, on paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense
and stamped �Secret�, was declassified in 1994 and remained
unnoticed until it was passed to Duke.
The amateur sleuth has also produced a witness. Howard Nixon worked as a
crew chief loading nuclear weapons on to planes at Hunter airfield from 1957
to 1959. He says: �Never in my air force career did I load a nuclear
weapon without installing a nuclear capsule in it first.�
Duke�s evidence reached Jack Kingston, the congressman for the
Savannah area, who demanded that the Air Force should look again into
whether there was a live nuclear bomb in his home district. The politician
65533;s intervention encouraged the Pentagon to reopen the case,
commissioning the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency
to carry out an inquiry into the possibility of making a new search for the
bomb.
The Pentagon says that it went back and cross-checked receipts for delivery
of the Tybee bomb to Major Richardson, and other documents, which confirmed
that the device was unarmed.
Lt-Col Steve Campbell, a Pentagon spokesman, says that Howard, who now lives
in Albuquerque, New Mexico, made a mistake by listing the Tybee bomb as a &
#65533;complete weapon�. �We have discussed this letter with
Mr Howard and he agrees that the accident should have been categorized as
one involving a �weapon-less capsule�,� the official
says.
Duke remains unconvinced. �Are you telling me that the right-hand man
to the Secretary of Defense, with all the resources of the Department of
Defense, gets a detail like that wrong to a congressional investigation that
is taking the issue of lost bombs very seriously?� he asks.
�McNamara would have eaten Howard alive if he had been that sloppy.
65533;
The Pentagon�s newly commissioned inquiry concluded that there should
be no attempt to find the device, and that it was best left wherever it was
. As it was unarmed, it followed that there was no danger of a nuclear
explosion off Tybee.
The spread of heavy metals leaching from the bomb was also a low risk, the
inquiry said, and the conventional explosives, if left undisturbed, posed no
hazard. However, if there were an attempt made to move the bomb, believed
to be up to 15ft under the sea bed, there could be an accidental detonation
of the TNT, which could seriously damage the regional aquifer and local
drinking water supplies.
Lt-Col Donald Robbins, the deputy director of the Air Force�s nuclear
weapons agency, adds that loaders did not know what they were putting on to
the B47 � this was known only to the crew. He also insists the bomb
jettisoned that night was a simulated weapon. �There was no plutonium
, no nuclear capsule, on board,� he says.
Congressman Kingston accepted the findings of the latest inquiry but Tom
Cannon, Tybee�s city manager, remains unhappy. Sitting in Fannie
65533;s, a beachside eatery which attracts customers with an image of three
female bottoms about to be nipped by a crab, he explains that his 21-year
career in the Army, where he was involved in intelligence, has made him wary
of taking the Pentagon at its word.
�One thing you learn is to use weasel words with the best,� he
says. �You tell me this: 40 years ago, why did they spend two months
looking for a bomb if it was a fake?
