US President George W. Bush's stated motive for the invasion of Iraq was to locate and destroy that country's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the existence of which was an absolute certainty according to now retired CIA boss George Tenent.
Despite intensive searches by the UN and the US military, however, no weapons were found. And no one in the Bush administration likes to talk about missing armaments anymore.
But this is not the first time that the US has been unable to find missing WMDs. Forty-seven years ago, the US Air Force misplaced one of its own nuclear bombs. And when the search party went looking for it, they didn't do so in the remote deserts of the Middle East - they were scanning the waters off the coast of Georgia.
The missing thermonuclear weapon, which weighted 3.4 tonnes and was nearly 100 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, was jettisoned out of the bomb bay of a B-47 bomber. And, like Iraq's fabled WMDs, this weapon has never been found.
A half-century after being lost, the US-made bomb apparently lies on the ocean floor, a mere 40km from the city of Savannah.
This real-life nuclear nightmare began on a chilly February night in 1958, as Major Howard Richardson and his crew of two were on a flight 36,000 feet over rural Georgia. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber had been in the air for eight hours, and had travelled 8,000km as part of a routine two-plane practice mission designed to simulate the rigors of a long distance attack mission to Moscow - should the cold war ever turn hot.
US fighter planes would often strafe the big bombers in simulated attacks. The bomber crews were aware of such training practices, but would never know where or when they might appear.