How US came close to nuclear disaster in 1961

The incidentally occurred just days after John F Kennedy was sworn in as President, when a B-52 bomber carrying a pair of Mark 39 Hydrogen bombs suffered a refuelling mishap and went into a tailspin over Goldsboro, North Carolina, while on a routine flight over the US East Coast.

WASHINGTON: A single, low-voltage electronic toggle switch was all that stood between the United States and a nuclear detonation in its own backyard that would have vapourized an American city and devastated others including Washington DC and New York, according to documents unearthed by an American writer. 

Obtained by the journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, the documents throw light on an incident in which the US Air Force came shockingly close to accidentally nuking its own home turf with a bomb 250 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. The incidentally occurred just days after John F Kennedy was sworn in as President, when a B-52 bomber carrying a pair of Mark 39 Hydrogen bombs suffered a refuelling mishap and went into a tailspin over Goldsboro, North Carolina, while on a routine flight over the US East Coast. 

As the aircraft disintegrated, one of the nuclear bombs was contained in the failsafe manner it was meant to, and plummeted to the ground unarmed and harmless. But three of the four failsafe mechanisms in the other nuke were subverted one by one till its trigger mechanism engaged and sent a firing message to the device. All that stood between safety and catastrophe, as described by a nuclear engineer, was a single, dynamo technology, low-voltage switch — the kind that costs a couple bucks in a hardware store. 

In a secret report titled "Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb" — a take-off on Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb about a nuclear holocaust that Schlosser cites in his new book — Sandia national Laboratories nuclear safety engineer Parker Jones says the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear detonation. "It would have been bad news - in spades," he writes, since the bomb had a four megaton payload. 

Had it detonated, the fallout would have reached as far as Washington DC, Baltimore and New York City, given the strong northerly winds, after eviscerating Goldsboro and much of North Carolina. 

The documents were unearthed by Schlosser, known till now for his best-selling book Fast Food Nation, as part of his six-year research into his new book ''Command and Control'' on US nuclear weapons accidents, which was released this week. The book, which Schlosser tells Mother Jones he wrote to revive the debate on the "most dangerous machines ever invented", is centred around another deadly accident - a 1980 explosion at a missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas, where the W-53 thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful weapon ever mounted on a missile, sat atop a Titan II. "It's remarkable — it's incredible! — that a major city hasn't been destroyed since Nagasaki," Schlosser says in reference to such incidents, which also brings to mind India's own recent Sindhurakshak submarine mishap.