The Origin Of Weird: Atomic Bombs Fall on North Carolina, 1961 Goldsboro Incident

0:15 Oh, hey there. Oh, hey there. How's it going today? Good. How are you? I'm well. We are uh the history of buffoons, and this is another origin of weird. Number 31. Yeah, I am Bradley. I am Kate. Yeah. How are you today? I think I might have asked that. I'm doing pretty good. Awesome, awesome. It's cold outside. It is frigid outside. Frigid. And you know how much I don't mind cold? This is fucking cold. I mean, you're bald and you wear a hat, which is a first. A first. You're bald and you don't wear a hat. Normally, no, never. Today I saw you with a hat and I was like, oh shit, it must be really cold outside. My uh my boss yesterday at work said he came up to me and it almost sounded like he was joking, but he's like, make sure you wear something tomorrow.

1:04 I'm like, okay. He's like, no, really. Seriously. I don't I don't normally wear I wear a polo in my my work pants, and that's usually what I wear for work. Even when it's like 12 degrees out, that's all I wear. Yeah. I don't wear I bring a sweatshirt with me just in case. Yeah. But literally, just a sweatshirt. So, anyways, it's fucking cold. It is. So, what do you got for us today on the origin of weird? So, we are going to talk about the night that two atomic bombs fell on North Carolina. Okay. That happened? That happened. What year are we talking about?

1:44 We are talking about 1961. Oh dear. And actually, there was quite a few of these instances. Um, not this one in America, and then there's been a couple others, not in America. Isn't that the year JFK was inaugurated? I don't know. I believe that's right. Yeah. Could be. Anyways. I know enough just enough about JFK, but I don't I don't do numbers, so I don't do all of years. Oh, I'm well aware of that. That that is uh very, very true on your part for saying that. So thank you for being transparent. You can see right through me. You can't see anyway John Cena.

2:26 In the early hours of January 24th, 1961, a B-52G Strato Fortress bomber was flying a routine mission over Goldsboro, Goldsboro, North Carolina, as a part of the Operation Chrome Dome. Chrome Dome? Like me? Kind of, only shinier. Only chrome year? Chrome year. You know what's really weird? Okay. Transparency. Yes. The day we're recording this, the anniversary is 65 years tomorrow.

3:06 Oh shit, yeah. Wait a way to put that together. Wow. Like she said, she doesn't do numbers. Like I said. But Operation Chrome Done was a Cold War program. Okay. That kept armed nuclear bombers at the ready. At the ready, in the air, flying 24-7. They did it for about eight years. That's crazy. 24-7. That is weird that they would be like that. I mean, shit was tense back then. I mean, so I get it, but Jesus Christ. Yeah. Eight fucking. And then between North Carolina and then the other places that had these incidences that I'm going to talk about, we're like, maybe let's not do chrome dumb anymore.

3:49 Maybe we should shut that operation down. So it had a crew of eight, and they had been airborne for about 12 hours. Okay. When they noticed that their plane was starting to leak fuel. Oh dear. So they were carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, and Mark 39 is just like their serial number type of thing. Sure. So Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, each with a yield of about 3.8 megatons. Jesus Christ. Roughly 250 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. That would have fucked some shit up. Damn.

4:29 So the B-52 was ordered back to base for an emergency landing, which is also in North Carolina. The base is also in North Carolina. I figured as much, yeah. Captain Walter Tullock, the aircraft commander, initially wanted to burn off fuel before landing to reduce the risk of an explosive landing. But as the bomber descended to about 5,000 feet on approach to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Seymour Johnson. That's his name is funny. Um, things took a little bit of a turn. Yeah. The structural stress on the fuel weakened wing proved too much. And the B-52 started to break apart in mid-air.

5:10 Oh, damn. Literally break apart, just disintegrate. Yeah, I got that. So inside the aircraft, Tuluk sounded the bailout alarm as the plane began disintegrating. And of the eight crew members, five managed to eject and parachute down safely. What happened to the other three? One crewman ejected, uh, did not survive the landing. Oh shit. And two never managed to escape the plane. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's sad. Yeah. So Lieutenant William R. Wilson, one of the survivors, described parachuting in the dark, um, saying, I don't know how it happened. I don't, I know when I landed in the field, I felt awfully good.

5:53 Like I wanted to run. He was running on pure adrenaline at this point. Oh, could you imagine? Yeah. Jesus. He wandered to a nearby fire um nope farmhouse for help. Okay. And when he told the owner homeowners he jumped out of an airplane, he said, quote, they thought at first I was a prowler. I must have been bad looking. Oh, geez. Well, I mean, yeah, you get some random guy in a farmhouse, especially in the middle of nowhere. He was like, um, where'd you come from? Right, son? I I I jumped out of a plane. Say what now? Another crewman, uh, Major Richard Dick Rarden, came down in a tree and then started hiking back through the rural back roads.

6:41 Okay. One pilot, Captain Adam Maddox, survived without an ejection seat by literally climbing out of the cockpit window as the B-52 broke up. That's wild. But he had no seat. He just literally crawled his way out. Opened the window. Pretty much. Sayonara. Pretty much. Wow. So Maddox nearly didn't make it. His parachute initially failed to open. Oh boy. And the shock wave of the plane's explosion collapsed it briefly, but he did eventually get it to work and he obviously lived to tell the tale. Clearly, yeah. Yes. That's crazy though. That would be fucking just like people are like, oh, go skydiving.

7:22 It's in general. I'm like, no, go fuck yourself. I don't, I don't, I don't need to watch myself splat into the ground and then I'm pretty sure that my sister-in-law Lisa gave my brother a 30-year birthday gift of flying out of a plane. Oh, really? Yeah. I think he I think she gave him skydiving. It's his 30th birthday. I got a cake on mine. If if Sarah gave me that for a present, I'd file for divorce. Because I clearly you don't know me. Because fuck that. I I am not a huge heights person to begin with. And the older I get, the less heights I like.

8:03 Yeah. Like I love going up in the mountains, but even like I don't walk as far to the edge as I used to when I was younger. And uh well, you don't have the balance anymore. What are you saying? I'll just have a beer. Um but uh I know there's nothing could I mean maybe a certain dollar amount, but it have to be pretty high, would get me up in a plane, but nothing else would. Yeah, literally nothing else would. Fuck that. Yeah. I hear about too many people bouncing off the ground. And obviously you don't live. So in a weird twist, guards at the gate at the Air Force Base gate arrested um Captain Adam Maddox on the spot.

8:48 Why? They thought this disheveled individual must have stolen a parachute from the Air Force. Did he have no insignia, nameplate, nothing on his on this person? I would assume he did. Eventually he was completely cleared. We're like, oh yeah, you're one. Oh, dude, I know you. Oh, dude, I didn't see you with that that shit on your face or you know, soot or something, but fuck that would be like really, dude, guys, it's me. Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. Dude, it's Maddie. Natug. So when you said Richard Dick, whatever the last kind of is, did he go by Dick then? Okay, because I'm like, what kind of asshole parents would name their kid Richard Dick and then answer last name here?

9:36 So while the surviving crew um were having like the craziest night of their lives, the B-52's broken pieces rained down across farms and woods near the little community of Pharaoh. Pharaoh? Flaming wreckage set fields on fire, which is what a local farmer saw when he looked out of his window at his land. It's like, honey, come look at this. Yeah, he's like, it looked like a roaming candle flying through the sky and just landing in like in the dirt. Yeah. So after crash, the cra if excuse me, as if a crashing bomber wasn't enough, there was another terrifying element to this story.

10:17 The hydrogen bombs. The plane's two nuclear bombs were torn loose as the aircraft disintegrated. Oh boy. The centrifugal forces of the spinning bomber pulled, pulled, like it's got hands, pulled a release lanyard in the cockpit. Oh god. Exactly as it was designed to do if the crew had intentionally released the weapons. Okay. So the bombs didn't just fall out. The B-52 accidentally dropped its nuclear bombs as it broke apart because the system assumed that if the bomber was coming apart, these bombs were meant to be deployed.

11:00 That's wild. So bombs, as one weapons engineer said, are relatively dumb. Okay. They sort of think that if you drop the bomb out of the bomb bay, you must have intended to do that. Wow. So the two Mark 39 thermonu nuclear devices separated from the aircraft as if they were being intentionally used in war. Each bomb weighed over six tons and was nearly 12 feet long. That is insane. As they plummeted downward, one of the bombs, we'll call it number one. Okay. Um, miraculo miraculously deployed its parachute.

11:45 Oh. Mm-hmm. The mechanism sensed it had been released and did what it was supposed to do. Right. The first bomb drifted down relatively gently and lodged into the soft ground of a field. Sure. Coming to rest with its parachute um tangled in the trees. Okay. The bomb number two was not so kind. Oh dear. The parachute failed to deploy. Okay. Weapon two fell like a rock straight down at nearly the speed of sound. Oh, geez. I mean, I suppose, I mean, would you say 12 tons? No. Two two, twelve feet. Six tons. Six tons. Wow. That's wild. It slammed into a muddy field about half a mile from the other bomb and buried itself deep in the ground on impact.

12:31 Did it say how far deep it went? About five to ten feet deep, which five to ten seems like a kind of a wide range. I know it's only feet, but still I don't know. Either way. Yeah. Um, the bomb literally disintegrated into pieces and it scattered debris over like a huge area. So how did they not like detonate? Oh, I'll tell you. Oh. Yeah. Do tell. So emergency teams from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and Exclusive Ordnance Disposal, the EOD units, rushed to the scene that night. Sure. Um, they found and they were trying to find and secure the two lost hydrogen bombs. Right. So the fires from the crash and the chaos of scattered wreckage complicated a little bit of efforts.

13:17 Um, but it was at night, and you know, which obviously didn't help. But by daybreak, they did locate both of the bombs. Okay. The first bomb hanging by its parachute was easy to spot, swinging from the trees with its nose poking into the dirt. The second bomb had driven itself deeply into a muddy field, leaving bits of high explosive and components strewn around a crater. Oh boy. EOD personnel carefully combed the site, recovering what they could. Incredibly, they found the central primary sphere of the second bomb, the plutonium-containing core of the weapon, intact. That's impressive. And unexploded, not too far away.

13:57 That's crazy. Not too far down. Sorry. Not too far down. Huge relief as any detonation of the conventional explosives could have scattered radioactive material. Right. The Air Force announced that this nuclear core had been safely recovered and assured the public that both bombs were unarmed and had never posed a serious threat. So these were never armed to begin with. That's why they didn't technically do what they were supposed to do. Sure. Yeah. So on the surface, it appeared that aside from the tragic loss of the three crewmen in some smashed-up farmland, Goldsboro had dodged literally a nuclear bullet.

14:38 Residents were told there was no risk of radiation, and curious onlookers who flocked to the crash sites were kept at bay due to the remaining high explosive hazards. Right. So behind the scenes, however, the Air Force and bomb experts were nervously examining the weapons to answer a critical question. Just how close were they to creating a nuclear detonation? Yeah. How close? It was close. Like really close. Really close. Like a couple inches close. Like a toggle. That's really close. Like a light switch toggle. I don't know if you can see the light switch, but I mean it will be edited out.

15:19 Light switch toggle. That was pure cinema. Cinematic, I don't. When weapons specialists inspected bomb number one, they discovered the bomb had gone fully gone through its arming sequence in mid-air. The B-52 broke up and the bomb was flung free. It behaved exactly as a nuclear bomb would if deliberately dropped on a target. I guess I never knew that new nuclear bombs could behave. If they're engineered that way. But they're they're talking about it like it's a person or something. Because the person from ChatGPT is a person. Whose name is Chippy.

16:01 Anyways. So the pulling of that lanyard initiated a sequence. Yeah. Internal switches were energized, the weapons triggers engaged, and a timer started taking down. Okay. How long is the timer for, did it say? Yes. So by the time bomb number one hit the ground, it was ready to detonate. It even sent an electrical firing signal to ignite its nuclear core. The only thing that prevented a mushroom cloud from appearing over North Carolina was literally one switch, toggle, if you will, being in the safe position instead of armed.

16:43 That's fucking wild. And I will get to that how many, how long it takes. I will get to that. The single saving grace was the bomb's arm safe switch. A low voltage trigger that remained, thankfully, in safe mode. And that last switch, if that last switch had flipped over to ARM, either by the breakup or an electrical short, we would have had a nuclear explosion on U.S. soil. The blast could have easily devastated a wide region of eastern North Carolina and dumped radioactive fallout over many downwind miles. And it's funny the way you worded that, it's not like we've never had a nuclear explosion in U.S.

17:26 soil, but they did it in Nevada all the time. Yeah. Because, you know, that's where they tested a lot of shit. Like, hey, we'll go to the desert. Yeah. But I mean, even back then, if it's farmland, but fuck. Those are my crops. My cows got pulverized. The Air Force Initial Internal Report after the accident confirmed that bomb number one underwent a normal release sequence. Full operation of this weapon was prevented by the MC772 ARM safe switch. That's wild. The primary safe safety or safetying device. Sure. Meanwhile, other safety features that should have um added redundancy had failed or been bypassed by the accident.

18:14 That's crazy. Even safety, every safety mechanism except for one had failed. Just that one switch. Could you imagine like wow, that would just be wild? Because I mean that would have blown a big ass fucking hole in North Carolina. How far are we talking from like um like Charlotte? Charlotte's in North Carolina, right? Yeah, Charlotte's in North, correct. Let me let me see. Because I'm just curious like what the distance would kind of be. Yeah. Because good lord. I mean, still again. Um farmland, but fucking hell.

18:55 Because at least that radiation fallout could have, you know, the wind pick up. Fuck that would fuck a lot of people up. It would. It would. So my computer is effing up right now because it's using Yahoo and not Google, and it's I don't have the time. We'll look at it later. That's fine. No problem. I was just curious. But because it defaults to Yahoo, and I can't go to Google Maps because it's Yahoo. So like it would take too much time just to get there. Okay. So bomb number two, that same one that slammed into the ground at high speed. That one turned out to be less likely to detonate purely because it was destroyed by the impact so quickly.

19:40 Okay. So its parachute never opened. Yeah, which is crazy. So it didn't have time to complete the full arming sequence before before it buried itself in the mud. Right. The timer on bomb number two had only run 12 seconds, and here's your answer out of a required 42. Second sequence before the crash interrupted everything. So if it would have hit 42, I would have exploded. Yes. If the safety triggers weren't in place and all that. Wow. Yes. So how how far was number one then? Was that like so um I don't know?

20:20 It might have counted down and it still was in that switch position. Because the safety switch that one safety switch was on. Yeah. Okay. So also bomb number two's arm safe switch stayed in safe as it fell. That's crazy that both of them did that. I mean, kind of designed for that, I guess. Yeah. But okay. Jesus. So initially, recovery crews feared that the conventional explosives in beer number two pri build beer bomb number two's primary might have detonated on impact. Um, but later analysis found no detonation occurred and no re radioactive contamination was released. But as as the bomb came down, it created a massive crater.

21:02 Oh, I'm sure it did. Yeah. Yeah. So they were like, oh crap, it was a did it go off. Yeah, did it go off? So that said, bomb number two gave everyone a scare. Yeah. After days of digging in the muddy water, the EOD team finally found the weapons arm safe switch hardware. Jesus. And initially they thought that it was in the safe position. But it wasn't. Upon further review, Lieutenant Jack Ravel said that no, it's on ARM. They looked again even closer because apparently it's just hard to decipher right away.

21:46 I don't know what the situation was. Maybe it got muddy. I don't know. You can't tell. Sure. But the switch was physically stuck in between both positions. Oh my God. Mm-hmm. Jesus Christ. So the impact truck had knocked it askew, making it look like it was set to arm when in fact it was never completed. And yeah. Right, right, right. Wow. What a fucking close call. Yeah. So is it because of this incident that they stopped Operation Chrome Dome? Um, I don't remember. No, I don't even I don't even think this was the last crash when they're like, okay, we should start.

22:26 Oh, because you said there was other ones, that's right. I want to say, yeah. They did this for eight years. And I I don't know. This this was, I think it was 1960 to 68 or something. Oh, so this would have been earlier. Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. But don't quote me on that, but that's something that I read. So hopefully it's right. But quoted. Um, in the weeks and years after the Goldsboro incident, more information did trickle out. Okay. In 1963, just two years after the crash. The crash. It's like a a combination between crash and crotch. Yeah, the crotch. Um, Goldsboro had a um a meeting acknowledging how, despite all safeguards, sheer chance prevented a disaster.

23:15 So at this point, they're starting to be like, oh, it wasn't just it was good luck that we that it didn't go off. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. You know. So in 1983, it was publicly admitted that one of the bombs had gone through all but one of the six or seven steps to detonate. Jesus. Confirming um what many had already long suspected. Sure. Nuclear weapons engineers like Parker F. Jones at Sandia Labs, who studied the incident in detail, was a little bit more blunt. Jesus. He said um, in an internal report in 1969, it was titled How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb, said that the NK-39 mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52.

24:07 So he noted that one simple dynamo technology low voltage switch stood between the United States and master catastrophe. Major catastrophe. Master catastrophe. I love that. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the U.S. Air Force worked quickly to clean up the wreckage, recover the weapons, and reassure the public. The Goldsboro incident was splashed across um the headlines, often with um two atomic bombs fell on North Carolina. I mean, yes, but also you're making it seem like they detonated them. No, no. Okay. The military cornered off the area not only to manage the recovery, but also keep curious civilians and potentially souvenir hunters away from any sensitive debris.

24:56 Yeah. Just two days after the crash, nearby Seymour Johnson Air Force Base officials publicly urged anyone who had picked up pieces of the wreck to please return them officially so they can determine the cause of the accident. Despite an intensive excavation effort, one major part of bomb two was never recovered. Oh wow. The mom the bomb had broken apart upon impact, and while the primary plutonium core was intact, found intact, the uranium secondary stage was nowhere to be seen. It's believed that that chunk of the bomb drilled itself so deep into the waterlogged soil that it essentially vanished underground.

25:41 The crews dug over 50 feet into the crater, um, battling like high water tables that kept flooding the pit. Gotcha. They brought in pumps and heavy equipment and kept at it for weeks, but they never found it. That's crazy. By mid-February 1961, after reaching depths of 70 feet, with still no sign of the missing uranium component, the recovery operation was called off. That's crazy. The government quietly decided to leave the secondary buried rather than excavate half of North Carolina to find it. Yeah. To ensure that lost nuclear material stayed out and posed no, sorry, stayed put and posed no um public hazard.

26:23 The Air Force later bought permanent rights to the land, essentially purchasing an easement for the crass crash site and the surround crash site crash site and the surrounding radius so that no one could dig too deep or build there. Right. So they filled the crater back in, and today that patch of ground is just an ordinary cotton field. Um in multiple tests over the years had found no radiation leakage, no contamination in the area. That's weird. The plutonium and uranium are encased far underground, and the soil itself shields any radiation.

27:04 Okay. Plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life and it will be decaying underneath the ground for that long. That's crazy. Locals continue to farm the land with a rule that they aren't allowed to dig more than five feet deep when plowing. There's even a North Carolina highway historical marker nearby that matter-of-factly commemorates the event, noting where two atomic bombs fell in 1961. I mean, you gotta make some tourist money somehow, I suppose. Yeah. Hey, come visit the atomic bomb site site.

27:45 So yeah, it's really too bad that the three people died, obviously. That's really sad. Um it's just wild that they had hovering fucking bomb atomic bombs at the ready during that. I know, isn't it crazy? Yeah. Because what the the Cuban missile crisis was then the next year or two, 63? 63, right? Or 60. It's I know because it was around JFK, so I mean, I get it. Yeah. Because holy shit, but that's just crazy. Like uh, hey Martha, we almost blew up. I know it. Okay, so I don't do impressions, I'm not good at North Carolina.

28:28 I was just gonna let it pass. Um, but um, so Faro is near um Raleigh. Oh, sure, okay. Um, and it's approximately um an hour, just an hour away by car. Okay. So pretty close. The only thing in the area that that is kind of a landmark other than that sign on the highway, yeah, is like a group of trees. Oh. And the group of trees just kind of tells you north of this site. Gotcha. North of the trees is where it is. Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Oh, that's weird. Yeah, I'm really glad they didn't explode. I know, isn't that crazy? Yeah, because just could you imagine like the fallout, like how long it would take for it to clear out?

29:15 I'm not even sure how long that would be, but I feel like it would be a long time. I mean, it's probably no Chernobyl, but who knows? I I don't know. I'm not, I'm not sure on how that all works, but yeah. Oh, that is really weird. Yeah, I didn't know that we dropped atomic bombs on North Carolina. Yeah in an accidental way. Isn't that crazy? That's really weird. Isn't that a good story though? Yeah, and I've never, never, ever heard of that before. So that's pretty cool. But yeah, no, that's awesome. So Operation Chrome Dome began in 1960 and went to 1968. Oh, so yeah, you got that right though. Um, it officially ended in 68 after near misses and accidents happened, Goldsboro in 1961.

29:57 Yeah, um, a crash in Spain in 1966, and in Greenland in 1968. And at that point, the Pentagon was like, Maybe we should let's rein it in a little. Let's let's pull this operation. It's just bleeding money. Yeah, isn't that crazy? It is crazy. That's fucking weird. I mean, no, I mean, just think how close some people were to just literally getting obliterated. Obliterated, and who knows how populous it was there, but yeah, one person, 20,000 people, doesn't matter. Yeah, that would have been fucked up. Yeah. Did you hear grandpa got blown up by an atomic bomb? Welp, I suppose.

30:39 All right, buffoons. That's it for today's episode. Buckle up because we've got another historical adventure waiting for you next time. Feeling hungry for more buffoonery? Or maybe you have a burning question or a wild historical theory for us to explore? Hit us up on social media. We're History Buffoons Podcast on YouTube, X, Instagram, and Facebook. You can also email us at history buffoonspodcast at gmail.com. We are Bradley and Kate, music by Corey Akers. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and turn those notifications on to stay in the loop. Until next time, stay curious and don't forget to rate and review us. Remember, the buffoonery never stops.