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09
TWO ATOMIC BOMBS WERE DROPPED ON NORTH CAROLINA
Fortunately, no atomic bombs were dropped on the Moon, but the same can't
be said of North Carolina. The Tar Heel State's brush with nuclear
catastrophe came on January 24, 1961, about half past midnight. A B-52
with two nukes on-board was cruising the skies near Goldsboro and Faro
when its right wing leaked fuel and exploded. The jet disintegrated. Five
crewmen survived, while three died.
The two MARK 39 thermonuclear bombs disengaged from the jet. Each one
had a yield of two to tour megatons (reports vary), up to 250 times as
powerful as the bomb that decimated Hiroshima. The parachute opened on
one of them, and it drifted to the earth relatively gently. But the parachute
failed to open on the other, so it plowed into a marshy patch of land owned
by a farmer.
The nuke with the parachute was recovered easily. However, its twin proved
much more difficult to retrieve. Because of the swampiness of the area,
workers were able to drag out only part of the bomb. One of its most crucial
components — the "secondary," which contains nuclear material — is still in
the ground, probably around 150 feet down.
The federal government bought rights to this swatch of land to prevent any
owners from digging more than five feet under the surface. To this day, state
regulators test the radiation levels of the ground water in the area every
year. The head of the North Carolina Division of Radiation Protection has said
that they've found only normal levels but that "there is still an open question
as to whether a hazard exists."
The big question is whether or not North Carolina's own Fat Man and Little
Boy could've actually detonated. Due to the technicalities of nuclear
weapons — and the ambiguous nature of the terms "unarmed," "armed,"
and "partially armed" — it's hard to give a definitive answer. We do know
this: The Defense Department said that the ill-fated B-52 was part of a
program (since discontinued) that continuously kept nuclear bombs in the air,
ready for dropping. So, the answer is yes, that jet was fully capable of
unleashing its A-bombs in completely armed mode, with all that this implies —
mushroom clouds, vaporized people, dangerous radiation levels for decades,
etc.
According to the late Chuck Hansen — one of the world's leading authorities
on nuclear weapons — the pilot of the B-52 would've had to throw a switch
to arm the bombs. Since he didn't, the bombs couldn't have gone off. Hansen
mentions the possibility that the switch could've been activated while the jet
was breaking apart and exploding. Luckily this didn't happen, but it was a
possibility.
That switch apparently was the only thing that stopped the bombs from
turning part of North Carolina into toast. The government's own reports show
that for both bombs, three of the four arming devices had activated. Former
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara further corroborated this during a
press conference, saying that the nukes "went through all but one" of
the necessary steps.
Hansen told college students researching this near-miss:
This was a very dangerous incident and I suspect that steps were taken
afterwards to prevent any repetition of it. I do not now know of any other
weapon accident that came this close to a full-scale nuclear detonation
(which is not to say that any such incident did not occur later).
