Eastern North Carolina’s near brush with a thermonuclear catastrophe

BURGAW, NC (WECT) - John Fitzgerald Kennedy took the oath of office to become our 35th President on Jan. 20, 1961, and delivered these famous words during his inauguration speech

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” said President John F. Kennedy.

At that time, the United States was in a cold war with the Soviet Union, and the Strategic Air Command kept B-52 bombers, armed with nuclear warheads, in the skies 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Three days after Kennedy took office, one of those bombers was attempting a refueling effort when crew members discovered the plane was rapidly leaking fuel. The plane was directed to fly off the North Carolina coast in order to burn off the remaining fuel on board but the fuel loss became so great, the crew was ordered to return to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base to attempt an emergency landing.

But just twelve miles away from landing, the plane’s right wing detached from the aircraft, resulting in the bomber crashing into a field near the Wayne County community of Faro. Three of the eight crew members onboard died, five of them survived.

As the plane was breaking apart, two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs separated from the aircraft and fell toward the ground.

One bomb was discovered in a tree, saved from hitting the earth by its parachute. The second bomb slammed into a muddy field at over 700 miles per hour and didn’t detonate. The impact left 20 foot crater.

Despite assurances from the government that there was no danger of an explosion, Burgaw filmmaker Mike Raab, while making a recent documentary, discovered the second bomb actually came pretty close to detonating.

“What happened, there are five fail safes that keep the bomb from detonating. Those five have to be utilized to explode. But upon impact, four of the fail safes ceased, but there was one left, and as Robert McNamara said, except for two wires about this far apart, that hydrogen bomb would have gone off” said Raab, who produced the documentary Ground Zero: Goldsboro which examines the near catastrophe.

The McNamara that Raab mentioned was Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at that time.

The bombs were each 260 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. If one of the bombs detonated, an estimated 28,000 people would have been killed instantly and nuclear fallout would have reached all the way to Philadelphia.

The local fire department responded to the crash site.

“They called the Faro Fire Department to come to the fire scene because the plane crashed and burned in the field. And they didn’t say ‘we have a fire out here, we need help,’ but they didn’t also say ‘by the way, we have a hydrogen bomb in the ground.’ So it was all hush hush in 1961” said Raab.

The real story about what happened during the crash wasn’t publicly known until eight years ago when author Joel Dobson managed to get the complete details of the incident thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Raab has been showing his documentary at a variety of film festivals and civic groups and says the reaction to what happened that day in Goldsboro is the same every time he shows the film.

“A lot of people are saying I have lived in this area all of my life and never knew about this, now they are finding out” said Raab.

And the rest of the country may get a chance in the future to learn what actually happened over eastern North Carolina back in 1961. David Permuth, the producer of the film Hacksaw Ridge has purchased the rights to Dobson’s book about the crash and hopes to produce a feature film about it.

“If you look at it as a film, a plane breaks apart, a hydrogen bomb falls into a field, I mean this is a great story for a movie, right?” said Raab.

In the meanwhile, after days of digging, excavation of the second bomb was abandoned as a result of groundwater flooding. Most of the thermonuclear stage, containing uranium and plutonium, is still buried some 180 feet below the surface and each spring a farmer plants a crop over the site.

Raab continues to show his documentary, in an effort to educate people about what happened 57 years ago and covered up by the federal government, an incident that could have left eastern North Carolina as one giant crater.

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