Yesterday, news outlets ran a story based on newly-declassified documents concerning the 24 January 1961 crash of a B-52 near Goldsboro which resulted in the release of two megaton-sized atomic bombs. I became captivated by the story and spent what free time I had today collecting information on it for its Wikipedia page.
I had known about the crash for some time as UNC’s ibiblio server has hosted documents about it for nearly two decades. It seemed to be an interesting plane crash story with a nuclear angle but it make me worried. What I did not know until today is just how close one bomb was to nuclear detonation, vaporizing much of eastern North Carolina and raining deadly fallout all over the East Coast.
Yesterday’s stories highlighted the fact that only one switch kept one of the bombs from completing its arming cycle and setting off a detonation 250 times as powerful as the bomb that leveled Nagasaki, Japan. While that’s certainly scary enough, today’s sleuthing revealed a much more terrifying situation. It turns out when the second bomb was found it had been fully armed. Its arm switch had been activated. No one knows why the bomb plummeted harmlessly into the ground at 700 MPH instead of reaching a thermonuclear critical mass and wiping out all living things within a 10 mile radius. Only sheer blind luck saved us from nuclear incineration.
Only sheer blind luck. Had that second bomb’s parachute deployed and provided a gentle landing that bomb may have detonated.
In a talk at ECU in March of this year, Jack ReVelle, the lieutenant in charge of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, recalled the ominous find:
ReVelle and his crew began digging to recover the second bomb. After five days, they found parts of the bomb and the crucial arm/safe switch. “Until my death I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, ‘Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,’” ReVelle said. “And I said, ‘Great.’ He said, ‘Not great. It’s on arm.”
Later tests determined the second bomb had gone through five of six steps toward detonation, ReVelle said.
Had that bomb exploded, “it would have created a crater eight football fields wide. It would have destroyed every structure within a four-mile radius. There would have been a 100-percent kill zone for eight and a half miles in every direction.” A lethal cloud of radiation would have blanketed the entire region, he said.
“We’ll never know with any precision exactly how close we came to the worst catastrophe imaginable,” ReVelle said. “But it was damn close.”
President Kennedy, three days into the presidency, ordered changes to our nuclear procedures to help prevent similar mishaps from nuking American cities. Still, it’s a sobering reminder of how playing with nuclear weapons is playing with fire.