Did You Know? The U.S. Once Lost a Nuclear Bomb — And It’s Still Missing

On February 5, 1958, a B‑47 Stratojet bomber was flying a night training mission off the coast of Georgia. It carried something almost no training aircraft ever carried: a Mark 15 Mod 0 thermonuclear bomb, a weapon capable of producing a blast nearly twice the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.

During the exercise, an F‑86 fighter jet accidentally collided with the bomber at 36,000 feet. The fighter disintegrated. The bomber survived — barely — but one of its wings was damaged so badly that the crew wasn’t sure they could land safely.

The pilot radioed in, and the Air Force gave an order that sounds unbelievable today:

“Jettison the weapon.”

The crew released the bomb into the waters near Tybee Island, just east of Savannah. They expected it to float or be easy to spot. Instead, it vanished almost instantly into the dark, silty bottom of Wassaw Sound.

The Navy launched a massive search effort. For months, divers, boats, and aircraft scanned the area using sonar, magnetic detectors, and grid‑pattern sweeps. They found nothing. The bomb had either buried itself deep in the mud or slid into a trench.

The Air Force eventually concluded that the safest option was to leave it where it was. Disturbing it could be more dangerous than letting it rest undisturbed under layers of sand and sediment.

To this day, the Tybee Bomb remains:

unrecovered
unlocated
still technically armed (though missing its plutonium core)
still sitting somewhere off the Georgia coast

Occasionally, fishermen report strange sonar readings. Treasure hunters claim they’ve found “the spot.” The government has investigated several of these claims, but none have ever panned out.

The official stance remains unchanged: The bomb is buried, stable, and best left alone.

Locals have turned the whole thing into a kind of coastal folklore. Restaurants sell “Tybee Bomb” T‑shirts. Kayak guides tell the story to tourists. And every few years, someone proposes a new search — just in case.

But the truth is simple and astonishing: