On January 24, 1961, a B-52 Stratofortress carrying two 4-megaton Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs suffered a severe fuel leak and broke apart mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. As the aircraft disintegrated, it released its deadly payload. Each bomb carried a yield 260 times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.
One bomb drifted gently to Earth via parachute and lodged upright in a tree. The second weapon plummeted at high speed into a muddy field, disintegrating upon impact. When declassified documents surfaced decades later, the terrifying reality of the event was exposed.
The parachuted bomb had progressed through almost its entire arming sequence during its fall. Firing capacitors had charged, parachutes deployed, and safety pins pulled. Out of six distinct safety devices designed to prevent an unintended detonation, five had failed.
Only a single, simple toggle switch—a low-voltage safety mechanism—prevented a massive 4-megaton nuclear explosion. Had that final switch closed due to a short circuit or impact shock, the explosion would have reshaped the American Eastern Seaboard. It would have caused lethal radioactive fallout capable of drifting over Washington D.
C. , Baltimore, and New York City. Parker F.
Jones, a senior safety engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, later authored a supervisor's report titled Goldsboro Revisited, writing that one simple switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe. To this day, pieces of the second bomb, including its secondary uranium core, remain buried 180 feet beneath the North Carolina farmland because excavation proved too dangerous.