On January 24, 1961, a B-52 bomber carrying two H-bombs broke up in mid-air, dropping its nuclear payload in the process.
The pilot in command, Walter Scott Tulloch, ordered the crew to eject at 9,000 feet. Five crewmen successfully ejected or bailed out of the aircraft and landed safely, another ejected, but did not survive the landing, and two died in the crash.
Newly declassified information in 2013 showed that one of the bombs came very close to detonating.
The first bomb that descended by parachute was found intact and standing upright as a result of its parachute being caught in a tree.
However, the second bomb plunged into a muddy field at around 700 miles per hour and disintegrated without detonation of its conventional explosives.
The tail was discovered about 20 feet below ground. Pieces of the bomb were recovered. But excavation of the second bomb was abandoned as a result of uncontrollable ground-water flooding. Most of the thermonuclear stage, containing uranium and plutonium, was left in place, but the “pit”, or core, of the bomb had been dislodged and was removed.
The United States Army Corps of Engineers purchased a 400-foot circular easement over the buried component.
Lt. Jack ReVelle, the bomb disposal expert responsible for disarming the device, claimed “we came damn close” to a nuclear detonation that would have completely changed much of eastern North Carolina.
He also said the yield of each bomb was more than 250 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb, large enough to create a 100% kill zone within a radius of 8.5 miles.
In a now-declassified 1969 report, titled “Goldsboro Revisited”, written by Parker F. Jones, a supervisor of nuclear safety at Sandia National Laboratories, Jones said that “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe”, and concluded that the MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52″.
To date, six nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered.