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In the early hours of the 24th of January 1961, a B-52 military aircraft was in the middle of a routine operation when it encountered severe technical difficulties and began to break apart in mid-air. The captain ordered everyone on board to bail out, and they did so, leaving the disintegrating aircraft unmanned, shuddering violently as it plummeted towards farmland near Goldsboro, North Carolina. On board were two nuclear weapons, each one 250 times more powerful than the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima.
The B-52 Stratofortress is a staple of the American military. This subsonic jet-powered plane is built by Boeing and has been in service since 1955. It has played a key role in many conflicts, including the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm. Many B-52s remain in service to this day.
The commanding officer on board this particular B-52 was Major Walter Scott Tulloch. The operation he oversaw was an uneventful one until around midnight on the 23rd of January. At this point, the B-52 attempted a mid-air rendezvous with a tanker plane for in-flight refueling. Before this process could be completed, the tanker advised Major Tulloch that there was a fuel leak in the wing of the B-52. This was, of course, a significant problem. The refueling was aborted, and the B-52 was directed to fly out over open water to burn off fuel. No sooner had it cleared the coast, however, than Major Tulloch reported that the leak was far worse than first thought. They had lost 17,000 kilograms (or 37,000 pounds) of fuel in the space of just three minutes. A new order was issued: the B-52 was to return to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base—its base of origin—as quickly as possible.
Rapidly depleting fuel wasn't the only thing which the crew had to contend with as they attempted to follow this order. The plane had also begun shaking violently. As they headed inland and descended for an emergency landing, the shaking became uncontrollable, and the plane started to disintegrate. Major Tulloch gave the order to bail out just seconds before the plane fell from the sky. The order came slightly too late for two of the men on board. They died as the plane fell to pieces around them. One more crewman would perish during a failed parachute landing, but five would survive—among them Major Tulloch and the co-pilot of the plane.
One of the nuclear bombs on board was also unintentionally ejected from the plane as it came apart. Like the survivors, its descent to earth was arrested by a parachute, which deployed automatically. For several minutes, a bomb powerful enough to reconfigure the East Coast of America drifted slowly earthwards. Its parachute eventually became tangled in a tree in a field near Goldsboro, leaving the nuclear weapon dangling just feet off the ground. The other bomb, meanwhile, was still on board the crashing plane. It remained in place up until the point of impact when it was smashed deep into the ground along with sundry other wreckage. That it did not detonate on impact is nothing short of a miracle.
A recovery operation took place, during which it was discovered that three out of four switches on the first bomb—the one left dangling from a tree—had triggered at some point during the breakup of the plane. This meant that the device, the payload of which could have leveled a city, was prevented from exploding by just a single low-voltage switch. As for the second bomb, this had disintegrated on impact. Pieces of the tail were found 6 meters (or 20 feet) below the ground, submerged in mud. Also discovered was the arm/safe switch. Lieutenant Jack Revelle, the bomb disposal expert tasked with retrieving the two devices, recalled the moment it was discovered with this chilling quote: "Until my death I will never forget hearing my Sergeant say, 'Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch.' And I said, 'Great.' He said, 'Not great. It's on arm.'"
Despite multiple fail-safes and safety features, both bombs had been within a single step of detonating when they reached the ground. The first bomb was made safe and removed, but groundwater flooding prevented retrieval of the second bomb. After removing the core of the device, engineers buried the radioactive remnants and purchased the land directly over the bomb to prevent it from ever being unearthed. The bomb remains there below the ground to this day.
For many years the accident was kept secret. The full truth of what happened in the skies above Goldsboro on that night in 1961 were only recently revealed by the work of investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. One of the documents he uncovered was a redacted copy of a paper in which nuclear weapons safety expert Parker F. Jones picked apart a report on the incident with grim humor. The title of the paper? Goldsboro Revisited or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb—a reference to the satirical 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. Despite a few other dark jokes here and there, the conclusion Jones reached was perfectly clear. "If a short to an arm line occurred in a mid-air breakup, a postulate that seems credible, the mark 39 mod 2 bomb could have given a nuclear burst." Something which, he wrote with a hint of understatement, would have been "bad news—in spades."
In the aftermath of the disaster, changes were made to the design of the B-52. It was noted that extra fuel tanks in the wings had weakened the structure of the plane. These were removed, and other areas prone to fatigue were reinforced… changes which, unfortunately, were not significant enough to prevent four similar crashes involving B-52 aircraft carrying nuclear weapons during the subsequent decade. Naturally, just like the incident over Goldsboro, these brushes with nuclear oblivion were kept hidden from the general public for many years.
The residents of North Carolina never had any idea just how close they came to complete annihilation on that night in 1961. They were saved, in the end, by incredible good fortune: by luck, and by an ordinary, uncomplicated, low-voltage switch.
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