North Bomb Explained Clearly

Hi, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion. It's January 24th, 1961. A B-52 military bomber was flying a routine patrol mission over North Carolina. It was one of the many bombers deployed during the Cold War to secure the skies and then suddenly a catastrophic hydraulic failure. The pilot lost control of the aircraft and it began to violently shake. The situation became critical as the plane started to break up midair. The pilot had no choice. He gave the orders for the crew to bail out. One by one, the crew parachuted out of the plane. Below them, they could see the aircraft spiraling towards the ground, unmanned and uncontrolled. On board that plane were not one, but two hydrogen bombs.

Hydrogen bombs are a type of nuclear weapon, hundreds of times more devastating than an atomic bomb, and two of them had just been accidentally dropped. So what started off as an innocuous problem isolated to a single mission had spiraled into what could have become one of the worst disasters in human history. The bombs came off the aircraft as it fell and the detonation sequence in both bombs switched on. One bomb's parachute deployed while the other plunged to full speed into a field. If the bombs had detonated, the resulting explosion would have been over 200 times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It would have destroyed a part of American civilization. So, there's some major questions here. How did this happen? And how was the

largest disaster in human history avoided? And more mysteriously, why didn't the bombs go off? If events had played out slightly different that day, they would have. In this episode, we'll explore the Goldsboro B-52 incident. The world would probably look very different today if this disaster took place. You are watching Fusion TV. It's a day that nearly changed the course of history. Today marks 62 years since a B-52 bomber crashed over Goldsboro, accidentally dropping two extremely powerful nuclear bombs. Yeah. People who saw that crash still think about what could have happened. In this area right here, the bomb went in the ground and it was coming this way. And when I saw when it turned over

like this one time cuz one of the wings were missing, it looked like the whole world was on fire. It's January 24th, 1961, and President John F. Kennedy had only taken office 3 days ago. At that time in 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a paranoid battle of ideologies known as the Cold War. They both had nuclear weapons, but were scared that the other side would use them. One of the ideas that the American military had was to just fly nukes around the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This was called Operation Chrome and involved keeping loaded B-52 bombers airborne all the time. On this particular flight over Goldsboro, North Carolina, the pilot, Major Walter Scott

Tollock, was informed of a problem while midair refueling. There was a fuel leak on the right wing. At first, this was fine. They just had to organize a place to land. The small leak quickly got worse, and at one stage, 37,000 lb or 7,000 kg of fuel had been lost in just 3 minutes. It was now an emergency and the aircraft was instructed to land immediately at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. As they descended, the fuel loss from one side made the plane completely unstable and uncontrollable. The pilot lost control as one of the wings crumbled. Then Major Toll gave the order. With the hydrogen bombs on board, the crew was told to bail from the stricken aircraft. One crew member climbed through a top hatch and the other five ejected. And it

wasn't a second too soon because immediately afterwards the B-52 broke apart and exploded. As the crew floated down in their parachutes and watched the B-52 bomber break apart, they must have had the chilling realization that two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs had now been released and were heading straight towards the ground. One of the bombs slammed into a muddy field at 700 mph or 1,100 km an hour, and PAL drove itself 180 ft or 55 m deep. The other bomb's parachute opened, and it was found hanging from a tree by its parachute, but the nose of the bomb had hit the ground. Furthermore, its explosive crush mechanism had activated, a system that triggers detonation upon contact. It was the final step in

setting off the bomb. So, why didn't it go off? I went and looked through the original documents declassified in 2021. The events played out just a hair shy of disaster. This part of the episode is sponsored by Whisper Flow. As I prepare these videos, I spend a lot of time researching, messaging people, and drafting scripts. And sometimes it can get pretty overwhelming. With 100 tabs open and deadlines approaching, I often find myself thinking much faster than I can type. That's why I've been using Whisper Flow. Whisper Flow is a voicetoext tool that works across pretty much every app I use. Gmail, WhatsApp, Slack, pretty

much anywhere I type. Instead of typing, I speak naturally and it turns my thoughts into clean formatted text that's ready to send. Talking has always been faster than typing. The difference is that most dictation tools capture every pause, every um, every correction, every change of mind. Hey, Jam. Um, actually, let's move tomorrow's meeting, sorry, Thursday instead, around 2. No, make that 3. and can you send me the latest draft beforehand? Thanks. Whisper Flow actually cleans up everything while you're speaking, so the final result feels much closer to something you'd actually write. You could say a lot of apps now include voice dictation, and that's true, but every app does it differently. Having

one system that works the same way everywhere has been surprisingly useful. Whether I'm writing emails, responding on WhatsApp, or taking notes, it's also been really useful when brainstorming with the team. Instead of stopping every few seconds to type, I can just keep talking and stay focused on the idea. Another thing I noticed is how well it handles technical names and industry jargon. Hey Tanzam, can we change the edit for the sections covering Nvidia and the ASML lithography? Can you also download the lots I sent you for Premiere Pro? And over time, it learns the words you use most through its custom dictionary. The result is simple. I spend less time typing and more time thinking. If you would like to try Whisper Flow yourself,

it's free to get started and if you use my link below, you'll get 1 month of Whisper Flow Pro with unlimited words at no cost. Now, let's get back to the North Carolina incident. Here in the documents, it shows the normal trajectory of a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb. Under normal circumstances, the bomb is dropped from about 4,000 ft or 1.2 km. When the bomb is released, the timer starts for 42 seconds. At 28 ft or 8 m, the parachute is deployed, and then about halfway through the fall, the timer expires. At this point, a switch closes, sending a signal to the safety switch to arm the bomb. Now the bomb is ready to detonate. All that has to happen is for the nose of the bomb to make contact with the ground. When the bomb makes contact with the ground, a

special crush mechanism activates, firing the ignition sequence. And from there, it's all over. So, what happened on the day? Well, weapon number one was ejected from the aircraft at an estimated height of 9,000 ft or 2.7 km above the ground. The timer started and the parachute deployed as it was supposed to. The timer ran to 42 seconds and expired. Then the signal was sent to the safety switch to arm the bomb. The nose of the bomb hit the ground and the ignition sequence switch was activated. So the bomb should have exploded. The only thing stopping the disaster was the safety switch. Before the bomb was dropped, the switch was set in the safe position and remained so throughout the fall. Even the final step was complete where the nose of the bomb

was crushed and sent the detonate signal. That electrical current should have gone through if it wasn't for the switch. A lot of commentators at the time were actually saying that the switch was inadequate for the purpose. It could have easily malfunctioned during such a traumatic incident. This admittedly grainy declassified image shows the firing system. Every system step for bomb one had been triggered except for the switch. A subsequent investigation by Sandian National Laboratory puts everything into perspective. They state that if the safety switch arm were to have malfunctioned in some way that allowed the current to flow through, the bomb would have hit the ground and a fullscale nuclear yielded bomb would

have detonated. A senior engineer at the lab whose job it is to ensure mechanical safety of nuclear weapons stated, quote, "One simple dynamo technology low- voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe." End quote. So what about the other bomb that slammed into the mud? Well, the second bomb came off the plane at such low altitude that its parachute didn't even deploy. The timer didn't get a chance to finish. So, there was no possibility of it going off. So, what would have happened if the bomb went off? Each bomb had a 4 ton mega yield. That's 4 million tons of TNT. To put it another way, you know

the Chernobyl explosion, the one that gave nuclear power a bad reputation, but was actually the fault of unbelievable incompetence. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 500 times more powerful than that. And one of the bombs carried by this B-52 was 260 times more powerful than that. If this bomb detonated, according to an estimate by the Guardian and the Arms Control Association, quote, the lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and as far as New York City, putting millions of lives at risk. End quote. Cancer rates would have skyrocketed, and there would be an untold amount of children with genetic defects. It would have been a disaster and changed the course of history. So, back to the second buried

bomb. What happened to it? A portion of the second bomb, including its uranium core, remains buried in the field till this day. As reported by the BBC, the US government has maintained a perpetual easement on the land. Astonishingly, this wasn't the first near disaster event of its kind, and it wasn't the last. In fact, they were so common that they were given a name, a broken arrow event. If you go through the original 2021 declassified document, you can see hundreds of them, but this one was the closest. But here are some more. Sadly, it wasn't good news for all of the crewmen. Three of them didn't make it. Major Richards and Major Shelton and Sergeant Barnes. They were killed in the crash because they

couldn't get out of the aircraft in time. So, what can we learn from all of this? Now, we can look back at the Goldsboro incident and easily say that it was pure luck. But in reality, it was engineering that saved the day, not just good fortune. Years before that flight, somewhere in a quiet office, an engineer at Sandia sat down and asked, "What if everything goes wrong?" They designed for that and added a switch. That single switch, the one would never have heard of if not for the declassified documents, is the only reason why millions of people went to sleep that night and woke up the next morning as if nothing happened.

We tend to remember the disasters where everything went catastrophically wrong. But we rarely remember the ones where things didn't, the cities that weren't wiped off the map and the lives that weren't lost. Five out of the six mechanisms failed that night over North Carolina and one held. That's it. That's the entire margin that could have changed the human trajectory forever. And as we saw, Goldsboro wasn't a one-off. Look at that list of Broken Arrow events again, where each one is a story that almost ended very differently. From 1945 to 1968 when Operation Chrome Dome was stopped, we'd been quietly walking a tight road between safety and disaster. And most people have no idea. Maybe it's

time that we do respect the unglamorous work of engineers and safety inspectors. Because when you think about it, they're the reason why we're still here. So sure, on that January in 1961, we did get lucky, but only because someone somewhere did their job. So, that's the story about how the United States almost nuked North Carolina by accident. It's crazy and I'm glad you stuck around to hear all of it. Anyway, that's about it from me. My name is Togo and you've been watching Cold Fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode. Cheers, guys. Have a good one.