A missing H-bomb lies off Georgia's coast _ but is it a danger?

By The Associated Press

Posted 12:15PM on Saturday, May 1, 2004

The 20-foot Boston Whaler bobs in the swells of Wassaw Sound off Savannah. The engines grumble as Derek Duke peers over the stern. This, he says, is the place.There seems to be nothing special out here. But beneath the ocean floor near this city, an aluminum cylinder lies entombed in silt. It's like an 11-foot-long bullet with a snub nose and four stubby fins. Written on it, its name: "No. 47782." Enclosed in its metal skin: 400 pounds of conventional explosives and a quantity of bomb-grade uranium.No. 47782 is an H-bomb _ a Mark 15, Mod 0, one of the earliest thermonuclear devices developed by the United States.It has rested off Savannah since 1958.It might well have remained a footnote to Cold War history were it not for the man on the boat and his one question: Is it a danger?___As a child growing up near Savannah, Derek Duke, now 58, heard the story: A pilot was forced to jettison an H-bomb bomb near Tybee, one of city's barrier islands, after a mid-air collision.But it wasn't until 1998, when he stumbled onto some old news stories about the "Tybee Bomb" while surfing the Web, that Duke became intrigued by it.He searched the Internet and local newspaper archives. He read the limited information available about the bomb. Many details, including the amount of uranium it contained, remain classified.By 1999, he began contacting others who might know something about the case. He talked to residents who lived in the area. He wrote letters requesting unclassified documents.Then Duke looked up the pilot.Howard Richardson was surprised by the telephone call from Duke. Slowly, he began to share his story.It was Feb. 5, 1958, and he was a major at the controls of a B-47 bomber _ one of a dozen from the 19th Bombardment Wing taking off on a training mission from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida.At the time, it was routine for crews in training to carry transportation-configured nuclear bombs, with the detonation capsules removed to prevent a nuclear explosion, the Air Force said. It gave the crews the opportunity to practice with the bomb, said Billy Mullins, associate director of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency.The mission was to simulate dropping a bomb on a city in the Soviet Union and to evade Air Force fighters sent up to simulate Russian interceptors.Over Reston, Va., which was unknowingly playing the role of the Soviet city, Richardson's navigator lined up the target on the radar screen and punched the launch button. The button activated a transmitter that recorded how close the crew came to hitting the target.Then Richardson turned the B-47 south toward home through a screen of "enemy" fighters.When he and his two-man crew crossed into North Carolina at more than 37,000 feet, they were back in friendly skies.But that's when the B-47 collided mid-air with one of the "enemy" fighters.Struggling to keep the bomber under control, Richardson headed for Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah.But the tower operator told the crew the runway was under construction."I thought that if we landed short, the plane would catch the front of the runway and the bomb would shoot through the plane like a bullet through a gun barrel," Richardson said.So, on that clear, moonlit night, Richardson turned the B-47 toward sea and dropped the bomb in the ocean, before landing.For nearly 10 weeks, Navy divers searched the waters near Tybee Island. The weather was bad, the water cold, the visibility poor. On April 16, 1958, the military declared the bomb "irretrievably lost."The bomb became one of 11 "Broken Arrows" _ nuclear bombs lost during air or sea mishaps, according to U.S. military records.Four months after Richardson's accident, the Atomic Energy Commission changed its policy, banning the use of nuclear bombs during training.As Duke was learning all of this, he turned up a copy of the receipt Richardson had signed. Written near the top was the word "simulated." That, according to the Air Force, meant the bomb did not have a detonation capsule. Without it, there was no risk of a nuclear explosion.That might have been the end of the story if not for another document Duke soon acquired.This one was a letter, written in 1966 to the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, recounting the testimony of Assistant Defense Secretary Jack Howard before a 1966 congressional committee.Howard, the letter says, testified there were four complete nuclear weapons, including detonation capsules, that were missing or lost. Among them: the bomb dropped off Savannah.Decades later, Howard recanted his testimony after Duke gave the letter to the media and elected officials.But which version was really true?That's when Duke's intrigue turned to determination."Until that point, I bought the military's story," he said. "But not now. Something is just not right."He began studying topography maps, tidal charts and weather patterns. But Duke knew he needed help navigating the waterways. In Harris Parker, a 64-year-old sometime treasure hunter and sometime movie consultant, he found both an expert and a partner.Together, Duke and Parker spent countless hours trolling Wassaw Sound, dragging Geiger counters behind their boat and bringing up sand to test.Mapping every inch of their effort, they identified what they believe is a plume of radiation, although the readings are only slightly higher the sea's natural radiation level.But the plume wasn't near Tybee Island. Rather, it was just off Wassaw Island, about 20 miles from Savannah. Perhaps, Duke says, the bomber crew had mistaken one landmark _ an old World War II bunker _ for another near Savannah when it dropped the bomb.In August 2000, Duke gave the Howard letter to U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican. Kingston, in turn, asked the Air Force to investigate whether a live nuclear bomb might be lurking off the Georgia coast.On April 12, 2001, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency reported the bomb was likely buried about 5 to 15 feet in silt somewhere below the ocean floor. There is "no current or future possibility of a nuclear explosion," the report said. And if left undisturbed, the conventional explosives in the bomb posed no hazard.In fact, the uranium in the bomb is of less concern for radioactivity than as a heavy metal, Mullins said.Recovering it _ at an estimated cost of $5 million _ didn't seem worth the trouble or the potential danger to Savannah's fresh water supply, he said.Nonetheless, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks some folks in Savannah began to worry. A town hall meeting was called to discuss the bomb and the Air Force findings."If we're so worried about terrorists getting aho