One Switch Stood Between Us and a Nuclear Disaster: The Goldsboro Bombs

0:00 Two bombs fell on North Carolina

Just after midnight, on January 24, 1961, two hydrogen bombs fell on North Carolina. Each one was about two-fifty times more powerful than Hiroshima. One of them came down on a parachute, exactly the way it was designed to when it's dropped on purpose. Its arming sequence was running, step by step. For decades the official story was simple, the bombs were safe, there was never any real danger. Then, in 2013 a government memo was declassified and it says something very different. This is Directive 004, the Goldsboro bombs.

0:46 Airborne Alert

To understand how two bombs ended up in a farm field, you have to understand what that plane was doing in the sky. In 1961, the Cold War had a rule, never be caught on the ground. So the Air Force kept B-52 bombers flying around the clock, fully loaded, ready to turn toward the Soviet Union on a single order. They called it Airborne Alert. That night, one of these bombers took off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro. Radio call sign, Keep 19. Eight men on board. And in the bomb bay, two Mark 39 thermonuclear weapons.

1:27 The leak

Around midnight, a tanker pulled up to refuel them in the air and the tanker crew saw something they did not like, fuel pouring out of the bomber's right wing. A leak like that doesn't drip, it drains. Thousands of pounds of fuel gone in minutes. The crew was told to fly offshore and burn off fuel, then come home. They never got the chance.

1:53 The breakup

As they lined up to land, the right wing gave out, the plane rolled, the pilot couldn't hold it, and at about 10,000 feet, the B-52 broke apart in the dark. The aircraft commander gave the order, bail out. But here's the thing about a B-52 in 1961, not every seat on board ejects. The third pilot, Lieutenant Adam Mattocks, didn't have an ejection seat. So he climbed out through the top hatch of a falling spinning bomber and jumped. He's believed to be the only person ever to bail out of a B-52 that way and live. Five men survived that night, three did not. And somewhere below them, two hydrogen bombs were falling toward the farms near a little place called Faro.

2:44 Weapon One

When a bomber breaks apart, its bombs are supposed to fall like rocks, dead weight. One of them didn't. As it tore free of the plane, the forces of the breakup did something no one had planned for. They started the arming sequence, the way it's designed to happen when a crew drops it on purpose. The parachute opened, the bomb drifted down slow and gentle like it was supposed to. Its parachute caught in a tree. The bomb came to rest nose down in a field, almost undamaged. Out of the four steps needed to set it off, three had already happened. The last one was a single switch. Ready or safe. It was on safe. That's the bomb everyone talks about.

3:35 Weapon Two

The second one is stranger. It never opened its parachute. It hit a swampy field at roughly 700 miles an hour and it broke apart on impact, burying itself deep in the mud. The Air Force sent in a bomb disposal team, a young lieutenant named Jack ReVelle. They dug for days, in freezing water, pumping the hole as fast as it filled. Then one of the men pulled out a piece of the bomb's controls. ReVelle would remember that moment for the rest of his life. His sergeant said, Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch. ReVelle said, Great. And the sergeant said, not great, it's on arm. That bomb broke apart on impact before it could do what it was built to do. But its core section was never really recovered. Part of a hydrogen bomb is still down there today. The government bought a legal easement on that land, you can farm it, you just can't dig.

4:36 The official story

The public was told the bombs were never close to going off. Unarmed, safe, nothing to see. And for a long time that's where the story ended. A crash, a clean up, a marker by the side of the road. Inside the government, the people who built these weapons were telling each other something else.

4:57 Goldsboro Revisited

In 1969, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories named Parker Jones went back through the Goldsboro file. Sandia was one of the labs that designed America's nuclear weapons. Jones wrote up what he found. He gave it a title that sounds like a joke. "Goldsboro Revisited, or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb.". It isn't a joke. Jones walked through the parachute bomb step by step. He concluded that one simple low voltage switch, quote, stood between The United States in a major catastrophe. One switch. He went further. He wrote that the Mark 39 bomb did not have adequate safety for the job the Air Force was using it for, flying around the clock over American soil. That memo stayed classified for forty four years. It finally came out in 2013 after the writer Eric Schlosser asked for it under the Freedom of Information Act, and it was published for anyone to read.

6:03 What if

So what would have happened if that last switch had flipped? A blast of about four megatons, a few miles outside Goldsboro. Reporting on the memo warned that depending on the wind, the fallout could have reached Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, as far north as New York. In January 1961, John F. Kennedy had been President for four days, and Goldsboro was not the only close call. The same era produced a long list of accidents with nuclear weapons, from a bomb lost off the coast of Spain to one that went missing off Georgia. The military even has a name for them, Broken Arrows.

6:43 What the files say

Here's what the files actually say. Two hydrogen bombs fell on North Carolina. One of them ran three of its four steps toward detonation. The last safeguard was a single switch and the engineer who studied it wrote that he didn't trust the bomb. Part of the other one is still in the ground, under a farm field that nobody is allowed to dig. The government's own files tell us this much. We'll keep reading.