The Tybee Bomb

Take the battery out of a car and try to convince someone it is not a car.

Come to the south end of Tybee and look at the water between Little Tybee and Wassaw. That is Wassaw Sound. That is the water people mean. Not the pier. Not North Beach. The island has talked to that sound since the night of February 5, 1958.

A B-47 out of Homestead collided with an F-86 near the Georgia–South Carolina line. The fighter pilot, Lt. Clarence Stewart, ejected and lived. The bomber pilot, Col. Howard Richardson, got the damaged plane back under control. To lighten it, and to keep a crash-landing at Hunter from becoming an explosion on the field, the crew was given permission to jettison the weapon. They released it from about 7,200 feet over water. They saw no explosion. Richardson landed at Hunter and later received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

What they dropped was a Mark 15, twelve feet, 7,600 pounds. It carried roughly 400 pounds of conventional high explosive and highly enriched uranium. Yield, if fully functional, is commonly given up to about 3.8 megatons. Search started the next day. On April 16, 1958, it was declared unsuccessful and the bomb irretrievably lost.

On Tybee the object in the sound is the Tybee Bomb. A hydrogen bomb. Still out there. Still theirs. People will tell you a shrimper hung it in his nets. W.G. Smith told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that in 1959 or 1960 his net snagged something so heavy a diving buddy had to free it, and the diver came up and said, “That’s a bomb.” Smith’s son Glenn figures his father caught it. People will tell you a Russian submarine slipped in and hauled it off. Sarah Jones, who runs the Tybee Island Historical Society, has put that version on the record as a “vague notion” that was “never substantiated.” People will tell you it is live, that if it went off the fireball would be a mile wide. People will point at different water. A handyman at Café Loco told the Times there were probably a thousand stories out here.

The official file sits beside that conversation. In 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense W.J. Howard told Congress the Tybee weapon was a “complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule.” That is why the argument never died. In 2001 the Air Force said the bomb was in a training configuration with no nuclear capsule aboard, and that a February 4, 1958, AEC receipt marks the core as “simulated,” a 150-pound lead cap. DOE work put the likely rest under five to fifteen feet of silt in Wassaw Sound. Left intact, they said, the conventional explosive hazard is low. A recovery attempt could present a serious explosion hazard.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Duke spent years pressing for recovery. In 2004 he reported radiation seven to ten times background about a mile offshore. The Air Force attributed the readings to naturally occurring monazite. Georgia DNR monitoring through at least 2007 did not show unnatural contamination. Duke’s line is the one that travels: take the battery out of a car and try to convince someone it is not a car. The 1958 receipt says simulated. The 1966 testimony says complete weapon. The island lives between those two pieces of paper.

Joe Inglesby’s Tybee Bomb Squad shirts have been in local shops for roughly two decades. “It’s a good topic,” he said. “For Tybee, anyway.” Jones, on the 65th anniversary in 2023, said the bomb became “the source of tall tales and legends,” and that islanders have “taken in stride” any threat. In 2015 a hoax claimed divers had removed it. They had not. The bomb was not recovered.

The Historical Society is at the Light Station, 30 Meddin Drive Directions. Do not go looking for the weapon. Official line, restated in 2023: if you think you have found a bomb, leave it and call 911. Stand at the sound instead. The island is still talking to it.