Many consider Savannah to be the most haunted city in America. Tours of cemeteries and mansions believed to be occupied by residents of the spirit realm are among its most popular attractions. In Wright Square, the moss, which dangles from most of Savannah’s oak trees, mysteriously stopped growing after a woman was hanged there, in 1735. Decorated hearses ferry visitors past the Mercer Williams House Museum, where an antiques dealer shot his lover and inspired the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
But the eeriest spot in the region sits 10 miles offshore near Tybee Island. There, in the shallow waters of Wassaw Sound, lurks the biggest ghost story of them all: a 7,600-pound, Mark 15 thermonuclear weapon that may still be able to detonate.
The story of the Tybee Island bomb is as baffling as it is frightening and true. The nuclear bomb has been languishing somewhere off the Georgia coast since 1958, when a B-47 bomber plane intentionally dropped it in the ocean after an accidental midair collision during a nighttime training exercise. Its exact coordinates remain unknown.
Why was a fully operational nuclear bomb aboard a training flight? It can be explained only in the context of Cold War hysteria, when bombers were in the air at all times, ready to Dr. Strangelove the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice.
The Mark 15’s casing contained weapons-grade plutonium, uranium, and TNT capable of releasing an explosion 190 times more powerful than the Fat Man bomb, which destroyed Nagasaki in 1945. And all those materials are likely still inside.
Because of the bomb’s exposure to the elements, and because it’s probably damaged, it may be leaking this toxic brew into the Atlantic. Considering the bomb’s proximity to the Florida aquifer, it could pollute much of the drinking water in the Southeastern part of the country.
And yet for those who live on Tybee Island, a quirky place mostly occupied by retirees, aging hippies, and transplants from the Northeast, any mention of it is usually met with a chuckle. Tybee’s beach was used to film the opening sequence of the 2017 remake of Baywatch. Merchandise stands hock Tybee Island Bomb Squad hats, and the Tybean Coffee Bar sells a drink called the Tybee Island Bomb.
In 2005, the air force announced they had no intention to try and locate it. This followed a study by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons and Counterproliferation Agency that concluded the bomb was safe—wherever it was—and buried somewhere underneath the silt and sand. Following the announcement, many considered the issue closed.
But is it?
Those who demanded answers almost 20 years ago are still dissatisfied by the government’s response. Elevated radiation levels have been detected in nearby waters. Many locals fret over the bomb’s impact on large development projects such as the dredging of the Port of Savannah and the Trump administration’s plans to open up the Atlantic shelf for oil exploration.
Because Tybee’s is considered one of only two nukes in the world to be “irretrievably lost”—the other one is languishing in the western reaches of the Pacific Ocean after having fallen off the side of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga in 1965—some experts in the nuclear community say the time has come to find it.
In a way, the Tybee story shares many of the elements found in the film Jaws. An idyllic—if touristy—seaside town, a looming threat downplayed by authorities, experts sounding an alarm, and a man with a boat convinced he can find it. All that’s missing?
“Nobody wants to say it,” says Cathy Sakas, a local naturalist and former scientific diver for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “but there’s a very big shark in these waters.”
The Accident
Georgia’s coastline is among the most protected and preserved in the country. Over the years, its Nantucket-esque barrier islands have attracted members of high society.
In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette on nearby Cumberland Island. Sandy West, the heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass fortune, lived on Ossabaw Island and converted it into a nature preserve and a writers’ retreat. The Rockefellers, Morgans, and Vanderbilts summered on Jekyll Island. Former presidents Coolidge, Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, and both Bushes have vacationed on Sea Island, which also hosted the G8 summit in 2004.
This all would have seemed rather quaint to Major Howard Richardson on February 5, 1958, when his B-47 was falling apart over Bluffton, South Carolina. According to Charles Petty, a Savannah resident and air-force veteran who’s writing a book about the Tybee incident, here’s how it all happened:
Richardson and his crew had just completed a 14-hour training exercise originating from a base in Florida, which simulated a bomb drop. As they practiced refueling over the Gulf of Mexico, they were outmaneuvered by jets posing as Soviet fighter planes along the Mississippi. Once they hit their target, they all started to head home.
Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Richardson, says Petty, the exercise was still on. Within minutes, jets were behind his B-47 in attack formation, and one of them accidentally flew up into the bottom of Richardson’s plane, tearing off part of the tail and damaging the fuselage.
He needed to land immediately, but Hunter Army Airfield, in Savannah—which had the closest runway—refused to allow him to do so. It’s unclear whether that was due to the bomb aboard or because the runway was under construction.
Regardless, Richardson had only one option—to fly out over the ocean, drop the bomb, and then attempt a landing at the airfield. The second time, they were allowed to come in. Richardson and his crew survived, and for his actions, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Operation Chrome Dome
Today, the idea of aircraft armed with nuclear weapons flying over population centers seems ludicrous. But according to Stephen Schwartz, an independent expert on nuclear weapons and a nonresident senior fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, maneuvers like this were standard policy in the late 50s.
The fear of a Soviet strike, he explains, led the air force’s Strategic Air Command to ensure it could retaliate at a moment’s notice. The policy, called Operation Chrome Dome, required multiple nuclear-armed B-52 bombers to be on continuous airborne alert.
“It seemed perfectly appropriate and feasible at the time to senior military leaders,” says Schwartz. “There was no media oversight, and no significant congressional oversight…. When accidents happened, they’d find excuses, because it was preferable to deny, lie, obfuscate, and move forward rather than deal with the risks—because they always assumed the real risk was nuclear attack.”
“This sounds crazy, but the policy had a kind of logic,” concurs Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program, at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California. “The priority was winning the nuclear war, not avoiding an accident.”
Within hours of the Tybee accident, search crews and military personnel cordoned off Wassaw Sound so that divers could scour the ocean floor.
Mickey Youmans, a filmmaker and Savannah resident, was eight years old at the time. The day after the accident, he and his father took their boat out on a fishing trip. “We pulled out of Bull River, and it seemed like the entire navy was there,” he says. “We were told to turn around, that there was an accident. We had no idea it was that.”
Youmans says the search lasted for several weeks and then suddenly stopped. Why? “You won’t believe this,” says Youmans with a laugh, “but another bomb dropped in South Carolina.”
Twenty-eight days after the Tybee incident, another B-47 accidentally unloaded a nuclear bomb near Florence. Since there was no triggering mechanism for the nuclear part of the bomb, only the TNT exploded, which destroyed a barn and injured five members of a family.
“Nothing really came of either [incident] other than shrugs by the military and paying a farmer for his blown-up house,” says Youmans.
Troops never returned to Tybee. The search officially ended on April 16, 1958.
The Civilians Intervene
For the next 40 years, the Tybee bomb sank into the silt, and out of the minds of most. Then, in the late 90s, a deep-sea-salvage company run by a former air-force pilot named Derek Duke offered to find it.
A native of nearby Hinesville, Georgia, Duke was researching the Florence accident for his book, Chasing Loose Nukes, when he came across declassified documents that proved the Tybee bomb had never been recovered. Concerned it might still explode, Duke reached out to the air force in hopes that they would take another look, given that technological advancements would make it much easier to locate.
Duke submitted a proposal for a search operation to the air force and promised to keep a low profile to avoid panicking the locals. “Once the bomb was located, we’d hand it over to them,” he says. But his proposal was rejected.
“This thing is an environmental hazard, a big barrel of toxic nuclear waste particularly because it’s located near an aquifer and just downstream from the Augusta nuclear plant,” Duke told The Tybee News in 2001. “All we want to do is find this thing. It needs to be gone for the benefit of everyone.”
Soon after, Duke secured private funding. He and a crew of experts he assembled under the banner of ASSURE—the American Sea Shore Underwater Recovery Expedition—began surveying Wassaw Sound by boat.
Locals thought of Duke as a modern-day Don Quixote; others, a Captain Quint. “Everyone knew who I was, and when folks asked me what I was doing, I said I was fishing,” he says. “In a way, I was.”
According to the Savannah Morning News, Duke’s team discovered high levels of radiation in an area that fit the description of where the bomb was possibly dropped.
Eventually, Duke’s efforts caught the attention of Jack Kingston, a former U.S. representative. His support led to a city-council meeting on the matter. J. R. Roseberry, the former editor and owner of the Tybee News, remembers it as a charged affair, especially since it happened not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Citizens were outraged; some of them had never even heard about the bomb. Harris Parker, a local fisherman, brought in a crab with extra claws that he had recently netted. He also claimed to have caught fish in similarly “deformed” states. Bert Soleau, a chemist and former C.I.A. officer, described a nightmare scenario in which a terrorist organization could potentially find and harvest the nuke to construct dirty bombs.
“Almost everyone there supported Kingston’s effort,” says Shirley Sessions, who served as Tybee’s mayor from 2020 to 2024 and attended the meeting as a city-council member. “And we were able to get the government to look into it again.”
Armed and Dangerous?
Duke’s mission was inspired by his discovery, in 1994, of a declassified memo written in 1966 by W. J. Howard, who was then the assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy. It was addressed to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
The document was part of an effort to inventory missing bombs, and in it Howard described the Tybee bomb as a “complete” weapon, meaning that it contained both plutonium and uranium. Therefore, it was considered an armed nuclear device.
Previously, the military maintained that the bomb’s plutonium trigger capsule had never been inserted. And up until his death, Richardson insisted that he never would have knowingly flown with an armed nuclear bomb. In fact, a temporary-custodian receipt Richardson signed on the day of his mission attests that the capsule had not been inserted:
But according to the Tybee News, Howard Dixon, a former air-force sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that, in his 31 years of duty, he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane that wasn’t fully armed.
Lewis believes Howard’s claim, and not only because it was given as sworn testimony to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “[Howard] worked at Sandia [the nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos] and should know exactly what he’s talking about,” he says.
For Pam O’Brien, a local environmentalist, that revelation changed everything. Given that plutonium becomes much more toxic with age, leakage—rather than an explosion—was her primary concern. “It can get in everything—your eyes, your bones, your gonads,” she told the Tybee News. “You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there!”
Recovery Efforts
Under pressure from Kingston, the U.S. Air Force and Department of Energy jointly issued a report in 2001 which attributed higher than normal radiation levels to “naturally occurring minerals and not the lost MK-15.” Any attempted recovery, the report said, would risk an explosion that could not only put rescue personnel at risk but potentially blow a hole in the Floridian aquifer, contaminating the region’s main water source.
“There is no possibility of nuclear explosion, no risk to the public, and to avoid potential for unacceptable impact to the environment, the Air Force recommends the bomb be left in its resting place and remain categorized as “irretrievably lost,’” the report read.
It also refuted Howard’s testimony that the bomb was “complete.” The “self-contained fully functional bomb” of the period was known as a Mod 2 version, which was purportedly not used until March 1958, one month after Richardson’s mission. The model his plane was carrying was allegedly a Mod 0, which had a removable nuclear-plutonium trigger.
The report did little to alleviate fears, and when the Tybee City Council passed a resolution in 2004, the military agreed to conduct a more extensive search headed by Dr. Billy Mullins, the senior technical and scientific adviser to the secretary of the air force and chief of staff of the air force.
“But it turned out to be just one day!” says Roseberry, who followed the search party in a press boat. He observed the crew taking sonar readings, radiation measurements, and sand samples in Wassaw Sound.
But some of the officials on the boat were not even looking at the water. “Suddenly, I noticed one person in our boat wasn’t taking pictures of the search mission—he was taking photos of us! I later found out he was from Sandia. Go figure,” says Roseberry. “Given that the original search took more than six weeks and involved hundreds of military personnel, I suspect that this was just a horse-and-pony show.”
The results of the 2004 expedition were not released until June of 2005, when Mullins gave a press conference. According to the Savannah Morning News, the report concluded that ”radiation had been detected but it came from monazite, a harmless mineral in the sand that emits high levels, rather than the bomb.”
Afterward, the air force stuck to its original report, concluding the bomb was better off left alone.
Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Water …
Two decades later, it’s boom times in Savannah. Gulfstream Aerospace, which is based there, recently reported a 50 percent increase in earnings compared to 2023. Hyundai is constructing a $7.5 billion, 3,000-acre plant outside of the city. And in the past few years, young professionals have been flocking to its bustling downtown neighborhoods.
In 2022, Savannah’s port authority completed work on an expansion of its channel, adding five feet of depth (from 42 to 47 feet) to the stretch of the Savannah River connecting the port to the Atlantic Ocean. The expansion cost state and federal taxpayers $937 million, and the predicted economic impact may add $282 million to the economy each year.
Now, not even three years later, the port wants to further deepen the channel so that fully loaded cargo ships can reach the port during low tide.
“Right now, you can go up on Talmadge Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Savannah River, and see how close these container ships come to touching the thing,” says Youmans. “It’s too shallow for these big vessels, so I guess they think they either must make the bridge higher or dredge deeper. Or both.”
A declassified memo written in October 1958 warned against this very thing. “There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area,” wrote Brigadier General Alfred Starbird to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. “The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities in the probable impact area.”
When asked if the dredging plans had considered the risk of disturbing the bomb, Georgia’s port authority passed the buck to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees dredging of federal waterways. According to their reports, “the many attempts to locate a bomb have focused on Wassaw Sound, not the Savannah River.” Technically, this gives them an excuse to avoid the issue. (When asked the same question, the U.S.A.C.E. did not respond to Air Mail’s e-mails.)
As a seismic-mapping researcher at the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, of the University of Bradford, in the United Kingdom, Jessica Cook Hale has worked extensively on the offshore geo-archaeology of the Florida and Georgia coastlines. She isn’t all that worried about dredging. Federal regulations require a meticulous process of surveying for unexploded ordinances. Considering the Tybee bomb’s size and weight, she says, it is likely to show up on a magnetometer survey.
That being said, she warns, the bomb would have to be located in the area they plan to dredge. “The point of the survey is to clear a given area that’s going to have commercial activity. If the bomb was outside of that, they would never see it, and they wouldn’t necessarily go looking for it,” says Hale.
Another concerning development is the prospect of oil exploration off the Atlantic coast.
Before leaving office, President Biden issued an executive order protecting 625 million acres of U.S. waters, including the Atlantic Ocean, from offshore oil drilling. President Trump responded, “I’ll un-ban it immediately.”
When the first Trump administration floated the prospect of drilling off the Atlantic coast, in 2017, local officials voiced concern about the impact of seismic surveys, in which compressed air is injected below the ocean floor to search for new deposits. For some, the surveys posed real risks to the underwater munitions dumped into the Atlantic in the 50s and 60s. According to a 2009 Defense Department report, the “blast zone” for the proposed surveys overlaps with at least 30 of these designated munition sites, including five off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia.
In a 2018 article published in Politico, Mayor Billy Keyserling, of Beaufort, South Carolina, specifically mentioned one munition—the Tybee bomb—as a reason to call off the surveys. “To me, that’s the nail in the coffin,” said Keyserling.
Frank Knapp Jr., president and C.E.O. of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, agreed. “The radioactive material is still there, and we don’t know what will happen under seismic testing,” he argued. “This is nothing to play with.”
Knapp has asked federal officials to release all records showing the exact locations of the munition sites, the types of toxic materials they contain, and the weight of the deposits. “We want to know what they know,” said Knapp.
In a 2016 report to Congress, the Defense Department released its research related to the effect of ocean disposal of munitions in U.S. coastal waters.
“The risk associated with recovering sea-disposed munitions appears to be far greater than the risk of leaving the munitions in place,” the report reads. “Recovering sea-disposed munitions may cause them to either break apart and release their contents or detonate. Either scenario can have an adverse effect on human health and the environment.”
As for the Tybee bomb? “They’re saying it’s too dangerous to retrieve, but it’s O.K. to leave it where it is … but they don’t know the location,” says Youmans. “Does that make any sense?”
The costs of locating and recovering the bomb could range from $11 million, as estimated by the air force in 2001, to the billions, according to wary locals. “Recoveries on this scale aren’t easy, and retrieving anything incendiary like that could be dangerous,” says Schwartz. “You’d probably have to create an exclusion zone that might stretch into Savannah, and they don’t want to do that, obviously.”
According to a knowledgeable military official contacted by Youmans, the recovery effort would take no more than two or three days once the bomb’s exact location was determined. There would also have to be a containment shelter constructed over the site.
“It would be a big job,” concedes Youmans. “But doing nothing is a choice in itself—and it may prove to be the wrong one.”
The Leakage Question
The bomb’s casing is a primary concern. According to Petty, it was made of forged aluminum, which is less durable than steel. “Back then, we needed our steel for other things,” says Petty. “[The bomb] was in a damn Coke can!”
“The corrosion would be primarily galvanic, due to the use of dissimilar metals,” says Dave Makel, a Tybee resident and former research professor at the University of Virginia specializing in materials science and engineering. “Plus, salt water is the electrolyte that accelerates the process.”
“What’s inside is probably fissile material and conventional high explosives turned into goo at this point,” says Schwartz, who suspects that seawater has infiltrated the bomb. “Then if you mix in the wiring and other components, it’s probably a complete mess, especially considering the bomb hit the water with such force it’s probably dented and ruptured.”
The air-force report largely concurs. “The internal components would be fully saturated in a salt-water environment and would also be subject to corrosion,” it reads. “Leaching of the materials is expected to remain within a few feet of the bomb.”
“It’s been 20 years now since this report,” says Sakas. “Are we still talking a few feet?”
Cook Hale agrees any form of leaching is problematic, but the part of the ocean floor on which the bomb sits is fairly stable, so there’s only a small possibility that the bomb’s contents have spread to the drinking-water supply. “The Florida aquifer there is buried under meters and meters of these younger sediments,” she says. “And it is a confined aquifer, meaning that groundwater flowing through the Floridian aquifer does not penetrate into the bedrock above it.”
Unless, as the air-force report warned, the bomb was still capable of exploding.
The White Whale
Sixty-seven years have passed since the accident, and yet the Tybee bomb remains a mystery in large part because there were no eyewitnesses to the accident on the ground or in the water.
Near Palomares, Spain, where other nuclear munitions were accidentally dropped into the ocean by a plane after a collision, “there was a fisherman who saw one of the bombs drop in the water,” says Schwartz. “Based on his account, the military was able to determine the general area....Tybee never had that.”
Or did it? According to Youmans, his late friend Rudy Anderson, who worked on a shrimp boat, accidentally discovered its location decades ago. “Rudy said they were shrimping when their boat snagged something, and suddenly the boat was at a 90-degree angle downstream in the outgoing tide current,” says Youmans. “The crew slowly winched the boat against the current until they were over the top of it. And when they brought whatever they’d snagged to the surface, they saw this big, long, bomb-looking thing tangled in the tickle chain. It then bent the outrigger, and the bomb slipped off the chain and went back down.”
Youmans confirms that this tale was told in the presence of other shrimpers, who corroborated Anderson’s version of events. “What I took from their reaction was they didn’t want this thing getting out,” he says. “They were worried people would think the shrimp were radiated…. And that they wouldn’t be able to sell their catches!”
But Schwartz doubts Youmans’s story, simply due to the bomb’s weight. “I have a hard time believing a shrimp net is pulling up a 7,600-pound bomb, assuming it’s still intact,” he says.
Thanks to Anderson, Youmans now claims to have the exact coordinates of where the alleged snag occurred. And it’s even located on Richardson’s flight path. And yet he says that no one from the military has followed up on his discovery.
Duke thinks the bomb is resting near an area ironically called Dead Man’s Hammock, not too far from the shoreline. “I believe Richardson wanted to ditch it around there so it could be more easily retrieved,” he says.
Richardson died in 2018 at the age of 96. Toward the end of his life, he expressed a new view—that the bomb exploded upon impact. “He said they dropped the bomb off the right part of the plane as they were banking left, so the bomb was out of their field of vision by the time it hit the water,” recalls Sessions, who received a letter from Richardson on the subject. “His stance was that although he and his crew didn’t see a detonation, it doesn’t mean it didn’t go off at impact.”
This seems unlikely, given that the six-week search that immediately followed Richardson’s accident involved a blimp dispatched to search for bomb craters.
What also complicates matters, says Petty, is that during the debriefings immediately following the incident, each member of Richardson’s crew gave different and conflicting coordinates of where they believed the bomb was dropped.
Jim Dunigan, a military historian, thinks the army may have already found the bomb, similar to the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Just because you didn’t see anything come out of the water doesn’t mean they haven’t gotten it already,” says Dunigan.
Roseberry admits he’s heard similar rumors, including one that involved the Russians.
“It came from a high-school teacher in Savannah who had a couple of kids playing hooky,” he says. “They were out fishing, got caught in a fog, and couldn’t figure out how to get back to shore. As the fog cleared, they saw a big vessel and a guy in his uniform. They yelled, ‘Can you tell us how to get back?’ They said it was a funny-looking boat and the guy had on a funny-looking uniform. They went back and told the teacher, who called navy security in Charleston, who came over and talked to the kids. And it turns out the vessel they described was a Russian submarine.”
Keir Lieber, a professor at Georgetown University and author of The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, notes that political pressure goes hand in hand with visibility, and the fact that the Tybee bomb is buried under the ocean floor doesn’t help its cause.
“Three Mile Island, Fukushima—those names and visuals were in people’s faces every day in the news,” he says. “Something that’s buried at sea for this long is out of sight, out of mind…. If this bomb was in the Potomac, it would have been found a long time ago.”
Brian West, the current mayor of Tybee, admits that locating the bomb is not among his top priorities. “I’d applaud any brave explorer who’d want to find it, but we have bigger concerns,” he says. “Our deteriorating water system, for example.”
Archaeology or Liability?
Not all Tybee residents laugh at the thought of a bomb sitting in its harbor. On a recent visit to Huc-A-Poos, a popular bar, some locals were surprised to hear it was still out there.
“I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but now that you bring it up, it is concerning,” says Jennifer Deuster. Her boyfriend, the retired boat captain Marty Blood, says authorities should be more proactive, considering the technology available.
“I half kid, but damn,” says Blood with a laugh. “We need to get one of them robots like [was used to explore] the Titanic.”
Since the bomb has been buried for more than 50 years, Cook Hale thinks it should be treated as an archaeological artifact and left alone.
“When we excavate, we are removing the material that we are studying from its original context, and it’s the context that gives it meaning,” she says. “It’s an unusual science in that you can’t repeat the experiment…. There is absolutely no purpose in it unless there’s a type of data that we cannot get without doing so.”
Julia Pearce is a local activist and co-founder of the TybeeMLK Human Rights organization. Recently, she’s been advocating for Tybee to recognize its history as a receiving port for enslaved peoples.
“The slave ships that arrived in Savannah passed through Tybee first because it served as what they called a lazaretto—sort of a quarantine area before the slaves were taken to market,” she says. “If they were too sick or eventually died, they were dumped in the canal or buried not too far from here.”
Pearce is certain a cemetery exists near the canal, which contains the remains of slaves, and she says the authorities have the technology to find it.
“We have ground-penetrating radar that could find it if we wanted to,” she says. “But it’s hard to get folks on board because it is an unflattering time in history.”
A Fragile Peace
It seems like every 20 years or so, civilians and governments alike step back and reflect on the inherent danger of nuclear weapons. Perhaps, thanks to Vladimir Putin’s technical nukes on the front lines in Ukraine, or even Kim Jong Un’s desire to build a weapon of mass destruction, we are once again at that moment.
“We assume that the people handling nuclear weapons are competent and dedicated and infallible,” says Lewis. “In fact, they’re just like the rest of us. They make mistakes.”
If you climb to the top of Tybee’s lighthouse, you can see the entire island, surrounded by Wassaw Sound and its entryway to the Savannah River. Boats of all sizes chug in and out of the channel, carrying goods to and from Savannah as they’ve done for 300 years.
It’s hard to imagine that somewhere out there, a few meters below the shimmering expanse of turquoise green, sits something Robert Oppenheimer called “the destroyer of all worlds.”
“It’s a ghost story, all right,” says Youmans. “And yet it’s true. When you first tell people there’s a bomb in these waters, they laugh. But you know, as with all things—it’s funny until it’s not.”
John von Sothen is a Paris-based writer, a frequent contributor to AIR MAIL, and the author of Monsieur Mediocre