Two Mark 39 four-megaton hydrogen bombs were aboard a B-52 bomber which encountered difficulties shortly after taking off from the Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro. The heavy, multi-engine jet went into a tail-spin and broke up in mid-air during a live Cold War deployment. The two bombs broke free. One of the free-falling weapons automatically deployed its parachute and armed its trigger mechanism. There were four "fail-safe" devices built into the bomb. Three of them failed.all that prevented the plummering super-weapon from going off was a single electronic switch. Both hydrogen bombs ended up burying themselves deep in fields in the North Carolina countryside.
The document, obtained through a freedom of information investigation, reveals the lie behind persistent US Government denials that American lives have ever been put at risk through safety flaws with its nuclear arsenal. A senior engineer responsible for the safety of nuclear weapons in a secret 1970s study into the accident: "One simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United states and a major catastrophe." The engineer, Parker F Jones, wrote his secret report "Goldsboro Revisited or : How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb" some eight years after the accident.
When we think of nuclear near-misses, we often think of the times in the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union stood nose to nose with missiles poised. It's hard to assess how likely that was in hindsight. But it should be clear by now that the U.S. military came far closer to detonating a nuclear bomb on American soil than Kruschev ever did. The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about one nuclear weapons policy," he said. We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did.
