Of all the peculiar places we’ve perused on this channel,
this is quite possibly the least impressive, at least on the surface. I mean... it's a
field. But believe me - this is no ordinary patch of farmland.
Take that odd little copse of trees, for example - isn't it strange that the farmer never bothered
to clear it? You'd think it would make working the field easier, and increase planting area. But it
turns out the farmer never touches that particular bit of land, in fact - he doesn't even own it.
This specific circle of conspicuous conifers in the centre of a North Carolina field
was quietly bought by the United States Army in 1961. Which begs the question - why did
the most powerful military on earth buy a random patch of turf? Well,
it wasn’t the land itself the army was interested in - but what lay beneath.
You see, this seemingly nondescript field in North Carolina hides a terrible secret. A secret that
just over 60 years ago, almost murdered tens of thousands of innocent Americans as they slept.
This is the story of the Goldsboro Incident - the scariest close shave in history.
Just before midnight on January 23rd, 1961 - 3 days after JFK was
sworn in as president - a B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber
was docking with a refuelling plane somewhere over Goldsboro, North Carolina.
Mid-air refuelling is a dangerous business, but these pilots were pros, so there was no problem.
Until there was a problem. The crew on the refuelling tanker noticed that the B-52
was leaking fuel from one of its wings. The operation was aborted immediately,
and the bomber‘s pilot was advised to land at a nearby airbase post-haste.
The trouble was, the B-52 was too heavy to land safely. It's a little-known fact
outside of aviation circles that most planes take off significantly heavier
than they're safely rated to land thanks to the extra weight of a full tank of fuel.
The B-52 was no exception - it's a colossal craft,
capable of holding up to 150,000kg of jet fuel - that's about 22 hefty African bull elephants -
which is the Civil Aviation Authority’s official yardstick for jet fuel, I promise.
Anyway, the plane was still laden with fuel, so the pilot flew a holding pattern to burn
some off before landing. But as the seconds slipped away, so did the oil - every minute,
thousands of litres fell into the soil. What initially appeared to be a minor operational issue
was now a full-scale emergency. The pilot tried to land fervently, but the plane was
damaged irreversibly - it was going down, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it.
Losing any aircraft is a big deal,
but losing this particular B-52 was a potential global catastrophe.
Because bundled within the belly of the bomber were two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs each
containing 200 times the explosive force of Fat Man, the nuclear bomb that obliterated Nagasaki.
Now, before I get onto what happened next, you might be wondering just
what the hell the US airforce was doing flying hydrogen bombs over home soil.
Good question, and I can answer it with just two words: Chrome Dome.
Yes, that’s a playfully offensive term for a bald man, but it was also the very silly
name for a deadly black ops mission run throughout the 1960s by the US air force.
Chrome Dome was what you might call a doomsday program,
created with one simple aim in mind - to intimidate the Soviet state.
Remember this was the middle of the Cold War when nuclear tensions were at an all-time high.
World peace relied on a highly sophisticated strategy
inspired by school playgrounds: if you blow me up, I’ll blow you up big time.
Sounds good on paper, but in practice, the whole 'mutually assured destruction' thing
had a pretty serious flaw - namely that if it ever came to nuclear war,
whoever landed the first blow would have one hell of an advantage.
Suppose the Soviets were able to destroy or disrupt a significant portion of the United
State's command infrastructure in a single strike, it could render a retaliatory attack impossible.
Hence, destruction was neither mutual nor assured.
And that's where Chrome Dome came in. This operation ensured multiple B-52
bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons were in the sky at all times. That way,
even if the Soviets bombed North America back to a radioactive Stone Age,
the president could *still* rain fiery death on Russia, far from home, all thanks to Chrome Dome..
Sure, it was a solid plan - but allow me to paint a precarious epigram. Weapons that could murder
millions, were being flown over the heads of unwitting civilians. And this happened
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 8 straight years in the 1960s.
Flying is one of the safest ways to travel but put
enough aircraft in the sky for long enough, and eventually, fate will deal a fatal fluff.
Which brings me neatly back to January 23rd 1961 and our battered bomber plummeting
toward the ground alongside two of the most powerful weapons ever built by man.
The mighty plane broke apart as it fell, and the nukes were thrown clear. The first
drifted slowly down to earth after its integrated parachute deployed. But the second was speedier,
accelerating to 700 miles an hour before smashing into the ground with the force of a meteor.
As it happens, only one of the two bombs ever came close to detonating,
and it’s probably not the one you'd expect. The nukes were equipped with four different
safety mechanisms designed to deter incidental detonation. In the case of the second bomb - the
one that crashed into a field at close to the speed of sound - these mechanisms worked exactly
as intended. As for the first bomb, well, let’s just say things played out a little differently.
You probably presumed the parachute I mentioned was some kind of
safety feature to protect the bomb in the event of an accident,
but in reality, it was a key part of the weapon's detonation sequence, designed both to give a pilot
time to escape after dropping his payload and to facilitate an 'airburst' explosion - one
where the bomb detonates at a set altitude to ensure maximum destruction on the ground.
In other words, the fact that the first nuke’s parachute deployed at
all was a very ominous sign indeed because it was preparing to explode.
When a bomb disposal team arrived at the site the following day,
they found the 3.5 metre, 3000-kilogram weapon standing perfectly upright and intact,
its tip buried in the ground. It was an alarming sight all round,
although admittedly it was quite a bit better than the alternative, a giant crater of death and fire.
In the years after the incident, there was plenty of debate as to just
how close this weapon had come to exploding. Publicly, the US government played things down,
claiming both nukes were deactivated and that there was never any risk to the public.
It probably won’t surprise you one bit that this was utter bullshit.
In 2013, a newly declassified report revealed that three of the four safety mechanisms built
into the first bomb had failed and that only an electrical switch in the 'off' position
had prevented a firing signal from reaching the nuclear core. In other words, a solitary switch
is all that prevented a full-scale detonation - one that would have killed tens of thousands of
sleeping Americans in an instant and risked the lives of millions more through nuclear fallout.
It's worth pointing out that, despite dodging a nuclear apocalypse,
the Goldsboro crash was by no means victimless.
There were 8 servicemen aboard the bomber when it went down. 8 servicemen... but only 6 ejector
seats. 3 of the crew died, though remarkably one of those not in an ejector seat - Lt. Adam
Mattocks - somehow managed to survive by flinging himself out of the plane's top hatch and deploying
his parachute. To this day, this big-balled badass remains the only person in history
to have bailed out of a B-52 cockpit without an ejector seat and lived to tell the tale.
In the days and weeks after this nearest of misses, disposal work commenced. The first
bomb that almost murdered thousands, proved to be the easiest since it was still in one piece.
So, they used an incredibly complex atom bomb disposal technique: They picked it up
and stuck it on the back of a big lorry - very, very carefully.
But things were a bit trickier when it came to the other bomb.
Having smashed into a swampy field at a smidge under the speed of sound,
the 3-tonne weapon had burrowed 6 metres into soft ground, tearing itself apart in the process.
The bombs contained two separate nuclear cores apiece to ensure maximum destruction
on detonation. The recovery crew quickly located the first and largest of these cores,
but the second was never found, despite calling in a fleet of industrial excavation vehicles.
After weeks of fruitless digging, a decision was made for the hole to be
re-filled and flattened, and basically pretend the whole thing never happened.
As you might have guessed, that lost core is the little ‘secret’ I mentioned at the start of this
video - to this day, a 6-kilo rod of weapons-grade plutonium lies somewhere underneath those trees.
That’s why the US army purchased that particular patch of property - to ensure nobody ever forgot
what lies beneath and decided to build a house on it or something else really stupid.
Remarkably, the rest of the field is still farmed to this day.
What’s also remarkably … stupid, is that the US Airforce was well aware of the issue that brought
the bomber down that fateful night - Boeing had figured out that a recent modification
they'd made to the wings could, under certain conditions, cause them to literally tear off.
I'm no aviation expert, but I think that's pretty serious.
The bomber in question had already been booked in for a refit to fix the issue, but apparently,
the Airforce decided that ferrying thermonuclear weapons across the northern hemisphere
was a totally reasonable thing to do in the meantime, and, well, the rest is history.
In some ways you could say this story is a bit of a non-event - I mean,
aside from the tragic loss of 3 crew members, nothing actually happened. And yet,
for my money, the Goldsboro incident is one of the most fascinating sliding doors moments in history.
A single electrical switch decided the fates not just of millions of Americans,
but very possibly the entire world. After all, a 3.8-megaton hydrogen bomb exploding
on American soil in the middle of the Cold War could easily have had some… dire consequences.
If the Americans thought they were under attack, the response would have been immediate
and devastating, and even if they realised the nuke was one of their own,
would the American government really have admitted to accidentally murdering tens
of thousands of its own citizens? Or might JFK, on his first week in the job remember,
have been tempted to point the finger at the Soviets? I guess we’ll never know.
Thanks for watching.