Georgia Mud Nuke Bomb Becomes Sticky Issue
[Original headline: Old bomb in Georgia mud may become a sticky issue]
For more than 40 years, the lost nuclear bomb was much like Art Arseneault's memory of it: out of sight and virtually forgotten.
In 1958, Arseneault led a team of Navy divers on a 10-week search for a hydrogen bomb that had been jettisoned from a crippled bomber into the waters of Wassaw Sound just east of Savannah.
The bomb, 100 times more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, was never found. Military officials said there was no danger of a nuclear explosion and eventually abandoned the search, leaving the bomb resting in the sand and muck between Tybee and Wassaw islands.
For Arseneault, a retired Navy lieutenant commander and former Cobb County resident, the unfound bomb was little more than a mission cut short, a job unfinished.
Then came Sept. 11. Suddenly, the unfound bomb took on new significance because of the possibility it could be exploited as a weapon of mass destruction or, at the least, used to make a "dirty bomb" to spread radioactive material along the Southeast coast.
"In these days of terrorism, I can't believe the United States is going to let that much uranium sit within a mile of the beach and within three miles of downtown Savannah," said Arseneault, now 77 and living in Knoxville.
The Air Force considers the case closed after revisiting it last year at the urging of Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), whose district includes the Georgia coast. The Air Force said in a report last April that a search for the missing bomb would cost $5 million to $11 million and that trying to retrieve it could set off 400 pounds of conventional explosives inside.
But, the report went on to say, "if left undisturbed, there is no reason to expect the explosives to spontaneously explode."
Arseneault agrees with the Air Force that the bomb is probably harmless if undisturbed.
"But I wouldn't let a dredge get within a mile of Wassaw Sound," he said.
Group wants action
Still, Arseneault is concerned enough about the bomb's potential threat that he has agreed to lend his expertise to a group pushing the government to find and remove it. Founded and run by retired Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Duke of Statesboro, an airline flight instructor, the group is known as American Sea Shore Underwater Recovery Expedition, or ASSURE.
"It would be very tragic if the country, having known about this, would let it go and then have someone make a dirty bomb out of this," said Duke.
The components of the bomb are in dispute. Known as the Mark 15, Mod 0, the 4-ton, 11-foot-long bomb is a thermonuclear device, the first of its type deployed by the Air Force. It contained either plutonium or highly enriched uranium, but the Air Force said the bomb was not configured as a nuclear device when it was lost.
That loss came Feb. 5, 1958, when a B-47 bomber on a training mission collided in midair with a smaller jet and was struggling to land at what then was Hunter Air Base, at that time a Strategic Air Command facility. It is now known as Hunter Army Airfield.
According to news accounts from the time and official Air Force reports, the pilot of the B-47 decided he could not safely land the plane with the bomb on board and headed back out to sea to dump it. Without sophisticated radar or global positioning systems available today, the exact location of the plane when it dropped the bomb is unknown.
At the time, Arseneault was commander of a Navy underwater explosives ordnance disposal team based in Charleston. When he got the call to go to Savannah, it was the team's first experience attempting to retrieve a nuclear weapon.
"We knew it had been dropped as a dummy, but it was still a potentially dangerous device," he said.
In addition to the Navy divers under his command, Arseneault said soldiers were sent in to search Tybee and Wassaw islands. To show where they had searched, the soldiers placed sheets of toilet paper on tree limbs and bushes, enraging one landowner.
Bad weather and poor visibility in the water hampered the search. A week into it, Savannah received an inch of snow, the most in 60 years. Water temperatures were in the low to middle 50s, and visibility was severely restricted below the surface.
"It was brutally cold, and our guys were in the water all the time," Arseneault said.
The Air Force compounded the problem by frequently changing the search area. "The Air Force changed the point of impact every two weeks, and the changes were at least a mile from where we had been searching. It was very frustrating," Arseneault said.
Lacking sophisticated detection devices, the team looked for a hole in the bottom of the seabed that would indicate the point of impact. When that failed, they were given hand-held sonar equipment that detects objects underwater.
"We had not used that particular piece of equipment before, so in order to get trained on it, we used the swimming pool at the Savannah Inn and Country Club," he said. "The guy who ran it thought we were crazy."
When the search was called off, Arseneault said, everyone was ready to go home. The cold water, long hours and lack of success took their toll.
Arseneault retired from the Navy in 1965 after 21 years of service and moved to Cobb County. Over the years, he worked for several state and local government agencies, including 14 years with the Cobb County Police Department. Part of that time, he was administrative assistant to Robert Hightower, then chief of the department, now the state's public safety commissioner.
'Unfinished business'
The lost nuke became a distant memory until a trip to Savannah more than a year ago rekindled Arseneault's interest in the subject. Shortly after that, he was asked to join ASSURE as an adviser.
The events of Sept. 11, said Arseneault, have given him even more interest in ensuring the safe disposal of the bomb.
"I'm at a loss to explain the Department of Energy and Department of the Air Force's reluctance to reopen the search for this nuclear weapon," he said, pointing out that the government spent an estimated $30 million to search for and clean up three nuclear bombs dropped on Spanish soil and one in the water just off Spain in 1962.
Duke agrees. "This is just taking care of unfinished business. If this were any other country in the world, that bomb would have been found long ago and disposed of," he said.
Arseneault believes it would be best, considering the state of world affairs, for the government to find the bomb, take it to deep water and dump it there.
Until then, "it's a problem that's not going to go away," he said.
Story originally published by:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution / GA | Ron Martz - Mar 18.02
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