The Nuclear Bomb on Georgia's Seafloor

On February 5, 1958, a U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber carrying a 7,600-pound Mark 15 hydrogen bomb collided with an F-86 fighter jet during a night training exercise off the coast of Savannah. To avoid a crash landing with a nuclear weapon on board, the crew jettisoned the bomb into the waters near Tybee Island. The Navy launched a massive search using sonar and divers but came up empty. The Air Force eventually declared the bomb "irretrievably lost." The Mark 15 had a potential yield of 3.8 megatons — about 190 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. A 2001 survey estimated it lies buried under 5 to 15 feet of silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound, where it remains to this day.