Georgia:Amateur Divers Find Long-Lost Nuclear Warhead

You have to apply the 'smell test' to stuff like this. The Navy has searched exhaustively for these for decades using the most sophisticated equipment and highly trained professionals that exist and they came up empty handed (or so we are led to believe). What are the odds some amateur diver would stumble onto them? Slim. Very, very slim.

Tourists on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom can sometimes be seen collecting what they think is amber stone, without realizing it is nothing else but pieces of phosphorous, which can very easily catch fire and burn them.About 40 percent of the bombs containing phosphorus and dropped during the British raid on Germany in 1943, ended up in the sea, where they have been rotting ever since. About 65 bombs are found on Germany’s coastlines each year.

link to photo used

I'm going with hoax.

If you scroll down on this wedding website you can even see the happy couple, in a still from a sample.

www.flyingsamurai.com.au...

a reply to: AgentSmith

Lol that is funny not to mention a mark 15 doesn't have a exposed firing pin, that was what got me curious. The bomb is still safe at the bottom of the ocean.....,....... As I run to the closet to get my flippers and metal detector. See y'all next spring.

a reply to: hillbilly4rent

Hopefully! And not in the hands of anyone it shouldn't be...

By the way in case anyone doesn't know, Google Images has a relatively new feature (probably a couple years old knowing my perception of time) - You can copy the link to any image on line and then just go to:

images.google.com

Then click on the little camera icon, you can then upload an image or just post in the URL. That way you can see where else the image is used, if it's someone famous who it is, etc etc. Good for working this sort of stuff out super fast ;-)
Better than Tin Eye or whatever it is.

Sorry if I'm teaching anyone how to suck eggs, but just in case it's of use to anyone :-)

originally posted by: kloejen
1958 Tybee Island mid-air collision

"The Tybee Island B-47 crash was an incident on February 5, 1958, in which the United States Air Force lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, United States. During a practice exercise, the B-47 bomber carrying the bomb collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. To protect the aircrew from a possible detonation in the event of a crash, the bomb was jettisoned. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island."

link

Who knows?

back then in the late 50s there were constant fallout scares being published monthly as the seasons & winds changed...
so a USA military actually carrying a real nuclear device on a training flight seems ludicrous...

a dummy bomb the same size and weight is more likely

in any case... the bomb that was aloft in the midair crash did not have the 'trigger' so there would never be a possibility of a detonation...

besides... the 'lost nuke' search would not have stopped because there would still be the radioactive uranium/plutonium/whatever source of critical mass just sitting there waiting for criminals or spies (or radical Jihadists from the future) beating the bushes, dredging the Bay... to recover that nuclear fuel

originally posted by: St Udio
besides... the 'lost nuke' search would not have stopped because there would still be the radioactive uranium/plutonium/whatever source of critical mass just sitting there waiting for criminals or spies (or radical Jihadists from the future) beating the bushes, dredging the Bay... to recover that nuclear fuel

*warning - unverifiable but nonetheless true info to follow*

Well, actually, they found that thing years ago. It's buried in the mud, some 30-40 feet down IIRC. They knew about where it was, and ended up putting transducers in/on the bottom mud and using compressed air bangers to image for it. It's intact. more or less.

Core samples of the bottom muck showed that the movement of the mud at the level the weapon was stuck at was very slow, migration of material from the bomb was almost non-existent and thus it did not constitute a health hazard. In order to remove the weapon from the mud, a caisson would have to be built around the weapon and the mud removed, however there was enough diffusion and scattering of material from the weapon that a lot of mud would have had to be buried somewhere. That's tough to manage underwater, even if it's not super deep where the thing is. Digging it out would have therefore represented a worse danger than leaving it there, in terms of health problems for the area. After analyzing the issue, the DoD decided that no-one could remove it from the location without extensive site work, and that they could easily spot that before it got going.

So, overhead, a lonely satellite watches the area every few days. If you park over the magic spot for long, I guess they would come visit you there, but no one ever has.

However, a Mark 15 would be a jackpot, if you could get your hands on one. It's a weird design - the casing itself is HEU. Not as high as the primary, but pretty darn good - something like 78% IIRC. You could do very little work with that and make a significant number of little compression uranium bombs with just the casing.