During the 40 plus years of the Cold War Americans lived with a near-constant fear lurking in the back of their minds that at some point nuclear missiles launched from the Soviet Union would obliterate them in their sleep. A recent declassified document shows that in reality the closest the United States ever came to being attacked by a nuclear bomb wasn't during the Cuban Missile Crisis; it was when an U.S. Air Force bomber accidentally dropped two hydrogen bombs over North Carolina, according to the Guardian.
A document that had been classified until recently reveals that two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were dropped over Goldsboro, N.C., on Jan. 23, 1961, when a B-52 bomber suffered an accident and broke up in mid-air. The new document shows just how close the 4 megaton bombs were to exploding, according to the Guardian.
The most terrifying thing that the document shows is that of the four safety mechanisms one of the bombs had to prevent accidental detonation three of them ended up failing. A firing signal was sent to the nuclear core when the bomb struck the North Carolina ground and it was the last fail-safe, a simple switch, which prevented disaster, the Guardian reports.
Parker F. Jones, a senior engineer at Sandia national laboratories, wrote in the report that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe."
The document was uncovered by Eric Schlosser while doing research for a book about the nuclear arms race called "Command and Control."
"The bomb assumed it was being deliberately released over an enemy target - and went through all its arming mechanisms save one, and very nearly detonated over North Carolina," Schlosser told the BBC.
"Robert McNamara had just become secretary of defense and he was terrified by the news," Schlosser continued. "We nearly had a hydrogen bomb detonate a few days after JFK's inauguration that would have changed literally the course of history."
During his research Schlosser discovered that while this incident may have been the closest the U.S. ever came to accidently detonating an atomic bomb with in the country it was far from the only close call. Using the Freedom of Information Act Schlosser was able to discover that there were at least 700 "significant" incidents between the years of 1950 and 1968, according to the Guardian.
"The U.S. government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," Schlosser said. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."
