October 19, 2004
By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
TYBEE ISLAND, Ga. — This seaside resort town 18 miles east of Savannah is the very personification of "laid back." The primary pursuits seem to be sunbathing and people-watching. Islanders tend to ignore hurricane evacuation orders, and the city manager wears shorts and sandals to work.
So folks here aren't about to fret over a hydrogen bomb that might — or might not — be buried off their coast, left there since a crippled Air Force bomber jettisoned it in 1958.
"The only time it even comes up is when one of these groups brings it up. It's been out there since '58. What are you gonna do?" says Michael Buttimer, a bartender-manager at Doc's, a legendary drinking establishment near the beach. He's wearing a baseball cap that says "Tybee Island Bomb Squad — Wassaw Sound."
Wassaw Sound, about 10 miles south of Tybee Island City Hall, is the latest likely site of the long-lost bomb. Late last month, a federal government team of 20 experts spent two days searching a football-field-sized area in Wassaw Sound. The team collected water and sand samples and radiation readings and took them to Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico for analysis, says Lt. Col. Frank Smolinsky, an Air Force spokesman.
"We feel comfortable that we will be able to provide an answer of yes, it can be located at this site, or no, it cannot," Smolinsky says. He says that process will take "several weeks or a little more."
LOST WEAPONS
The U.S. military lost an estimated 11 nuclear bombs during the Cold War that have never been recovered. Some of those incidents:
1956: A B-47 bomber from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa carrying two nuclear weapon cores in their carrying cases disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea. No trace of the aircraft, weapon cores or crew was found.
1957: A C-124 cargo plane from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware lost power and was forced to jettison two unarmed nuclear bombs in the Atlantic Ocean. The incident was kept secret for more than 10 years.
1959: A Navy plane that had caught fire jettisoned a nuclear bomb in water 8,500 feet deep near Whidbey Island, Wash. The incident was kept secret for more than 10 years.
Source: The Brookings Institution
And if it is the bomb?
"That's the second million-dollar question," Smolinsky says. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The same experts would need to reconvene and decide what would be the appropriate action.
"We will do whatever is best for the local area in regards to removing the bomb or not removing the bomb. Moving it would not be an easy endeavor to undertake."
The Air Force estimated in 2001 that it would take up to five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.
The military searched for the bomb for more than nine weeks in 1958 before declaring it irretrievably lost.
Several years ago, Derek Duke, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who lives in Statesboro, Ga., about 90 miles northwest of here, asked the military to search again.
The Air Force said in a July 2001 report that the bomb, likely buried beneath 6 to 40 feet of water and more than 5 feet of mud, posed little threat if left undisturbed.
The 7,600-pound bomb is about 12 feet long and about 11⁄2 feet in diameter. It contains about 400 pounds of conventional explosives plus an undisclosed amount of uranium. It is incapable of a nuclear explosion because it does not have the plutonium capsule necessary to trigger an atomic blast, the Air Force says.
If it were armed, the bomb's destructive power would be 100 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 — strong enough to incinerate almost everything within a 5-mile radius. It would produce a 160-mile radius of deadly radioactive fallout.
The bomb was dumped into the Atlantic Ocean off the Georgia coast the morning of Feb. 5, 1958. A B-47 bomber on a simulated combat mission from Homestead Air Force Base near Miami collided with an F-86 fighter jet. The F-86 pilot bailed out, and his jet crashed. The crew of the damaged B-47 attempted three landings at nearby Hunter Air Force Base with the bomb onboard.
Crewmembers then were given permission to jettison the bomb offshore, dropping it from an altitude of about 7,200 feet. They did not see an explosion when the bomb hit the water, and they later landed safely at Hunter.
Duke's interest in the bomb dates to 1998, when he learned of the missing bomb. He used radiation and metal detection equipment to search Wassaw Sound.
Military authorities decided to search the sound last month after Duke reported finding unusually high radiation levels in that area. Duke initially maintained that the bomb did have the arming capsule. Now, he says, that's not really a consideration. "With (the search team) having come, it's a moot point with me right now," Duke says. "If it is armed or not, unless it creates any additional danger, I'm not going to go there. That's for someone higher up the food chain than me."
Duke, 59, says he started searching for the bomb because "if I didn't do it, I didn't see anyone else that would or could do it." He says the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon added urgency to his search. "We've got a very real terror threat."
That might suggest that island denizens are sitting on pins and needles awaiting the military's test results.
Not so, Tybee Island Mayor Walter Parker says.
"We've always been fairly laid back, and we're not all that concerned," says Parker, 69 and in his 15th year as mayor. "I have not heard one person on Tybee Island say they're concerned. We've been assured there's no chance of a nuclear explosion at all. "The only concern some people might have is that it might deter some tourists, but we have not seen or heard anything to support that."
Tybee Island, which boasts a famous lighthouse, earns up to half of its annual budget from tourism. Its population of 3,600 year-round residents swells to as much as 12,000 during the summer. Some weekends, 40,000 sun worshipers crowd its beaches.
"I have not heard from one property manager, one hotel manager or one condo manager about this hurting their business," City Manager Bob Thomson says. "And I would have heard."
Louie Williford, 59, is nursing a beer at Doc's and not pondering the bomb. "I don't really think about it," he says. "If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. Ain't nothing I can do about it."
http://marriotthsia.netlinkrg.com/Default.asp?&MKTCMP=USAToday_ROSNewsContent_336x280-backup_BIG2RI&EPNAVCEC=InProcess