Penned five years after the release of Dr. Strangelove, Parker F. Jones titled the document, “Goldsboro Revisited, or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb.” The redacted two-page report approaches the subject with the limited gravity its title suggests.
"'Twas an accident, not an incident,” the former head of the Sandia National Laboratories nuclear weapons safety department writes. “There was not jettison. The aircraft broke up in flight. [Redacted] were inadvertently dropped."
A 70,000-pounds flying symbol of mutually assured destruction, B-52 Stratofortress bombers had patrolled the skies above the U.S. since for years. Around midnight, January 24th, four days after the inauguration of President Kennedy, one of the bombers embarked upon a routine aerial refueling. The process was aborted, when a member of the team notified the pilot that the plane’s right wing was leaking fuel.
Ground control instructed pilot Major Walter Scott Tulloch to initiate a holding pattern to burn off excess fuel, only to lose some 37,000 pounds of the fluid in around three minutes, courtesy of a rapidly worsening leak. Tulloch was told to land immediately at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in nearby Goldsboro, North Carolina.
The plane never made it.
The crew lost control at around 10,000 feet, as the right wing broke loose. The bomber nosedived and entered a tailspin. Tulloch ordered all on board to eject around 9,000. Wreckage from the plane covered two square miles of cotton and tobacco crops.
Of the eight on board, five crew members landed safely. Two more died in the crash and a third was able to eject, but died on impact.
Another two passengers also bailed out prior to the crash: a pair of Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs that came loose somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 feet, breaking free from the plane as it separated mid-air. Each bomb sported a payload of 3.8 megatons – roughly 260 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, less than 16 years prior.
The parachute deployed on the first nuclear bomb, getting caught in a tree. The weapon dropped to the ground and implanted itself in a field in nearby Faro, an unincorporated community in Wayne County. No parachute opened for the second, which embedded itself in a meadow alongside Big Daddy's Road, a three-mile stretch just north of Goldsboro. “The impact of the aircraft breakup initiated the fusing sequence for both bombs,” Jones wrote of the incident.
Three of four safety switches on the first bomb failed to work as in intended. Notes Jones, "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.” The second struck the ground below at around 700 miles an hour, triggering the bomb’s “armed” setting. The force of the ground also managed to damage the mechanism required for detonation – an explosion that would have decimated everything in an eight-and-a-half mile radius.
“By the slightest margin of chance,” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reportedly told Pentagon officials two years later, “literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.”
The first bomb was recovered mostly in tact. The secondary core from the other was never found. The uranium-238 is believed to be embedded up to 200 feet under the meadow where it collided with the earth.
The Department of Defense purchased a permanent 400-foot easement of land for $1,000. It bears no markers or fences. Building is permanently banned from the spot, but farming is apparently permitted.
Decades later, Lieutenant Jack ReVelle would recount the recovery, when his Sergeant informed him that the bomb arming switch had been located.
“Great,” ReVelle responded.
"Not great,” the Sergeant answered back. “It's on ‘arm.’"
Sources:
US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina – secret document https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961
Declassified report: Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/12/us/north-carolina-nuclear-bomb-drop/index.html
A thermonuclear bomb slammed into a North Carolina farm in 1961 — and part of it is still missing https://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-bomb-accident-goldsboro-nc-swamp-2017-5