Nuclear Bombs Fell on North Carolina 64 Years Ago. How Disaster Was Narrowly Averted

Two nuclear bombs fell from the sky 64 years ago, putting North Carolina one step from disaster.

A military plane was carrying the weapons when it exploded over a rural area, killing three people and sending the bombs plunging toward the ground Jan. 24, 1961. The “safety interlocks on the weapons failed, having gone through all of the steps to detonate, save one,” state historians said.

Here’s what we know on the anniversary of the incident, remembered as “one of the closest near-disasters” of the Cold War.

How ‘nuclear blast’ was averted in NC

Billy Reeves told National Geographic he was a teenager when he saw a plane with a missing wing come down near his farm house.

“Everything around here was on fire,” Reeves told the magazine in 2021. “The grass was burning. Big Daddy’s Road over there was melting. My mother was praying. She thought it was the End of Times.”

Three of the eight crew members died when the B-52G Stratofortress bomber crashed about 10 miles from Goldsboro, southeast of Raleigh, according to the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and the U.S. Air Force.

B-52s were used during the Cold War, a decades-long period of tension between the United States and the former Soviet Union. When tensions worsened, “U.S. policy was to keep armed nuclear aircraft in the air at all times in the event of a conflict,” historians said.

The ill-fated plane was preparing to land at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro when it exploded, releasing the two bombs.

One of the bombs “touched down essentially undamaged,” falling toward the ground with a parachute. The other weapon’s parachute didn’t deploy, and it “broke apart on impact” as it “slammed into a muddy field at over 700 miles per hour,” state historians and the National Archives wrote in blog posts.

“Seven of the eight arming, fusing and firing switches and devices in one bomb automatically activated,” historians wrote. “Only a crew-controlled switch prevented a nuclear detonation.”

The uranium-filled bomb that landed on the field weighed several tons and sank as first responders tried to retrieve part of it. The Air Force bought land near the crash site and reports “no detectable radiation or hazard in or around the area.”

“The consensus is that the weapons were capable of exploding and delivering a nuclear blast sufficient to level homes in a five-mile radius and cause third-degree burns and set houses afire within nine miles,” state historians wrote on their website.

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