To understand why the Air Force was routinely flying nuclear weapons around, you have to consider the national mindset of the time, he said. was making almost 20 nuclear weapons a day. Schwartz said by the year after the bomb fell on South Carolina, the U.S. government a permanent easement to a plot of land near Goldsboro, N.C., where an atomic weapon remains buried in the soil. A few planes were kept aloft 24 hours a day, ready to drop bombs on the Soviet Union.Īnd then there was the sheer number of weapons being made, which created more opportunities for things to go wrong.Ī 1962 property deed grants the U.S. Schwartz said a wave of serious accidents in the late 1950s through 1968 was partly due to programs that kept the U.S. "Most of which were not as serious as the 32 we know about, but some of them were quite bad," he said. The military's name for serious nuclear weapons mishaps is "broken arrow." The Pentagon has officially acknowledged only 32 broken arrows, but evidence compiled by the government shows there were thousands more accidents involving nuclear weapons, Schwartz said. The radioactive fallout could have endangered millions more as far north as New York City. It was 260 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and could have instantly killed thousands of people. A secret government document said three of its four safety mechanisms failed, and only a simple electrical switch prevented catastrophe. The parachute bomb came startlingly close to detonating. The other floated down on a parachute, planting its nose in the ground beside a tree. One buried itself so deeply into a tobacco field that some of its parts were never found. came apart in the sky, and the two armed nuclear bombs it was carrying fell into a farming community northeast of the base. Two years later, in 1961, a B-52 bomber flying out of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base near Goldsboro, N.C. The blast injured six members of a nearby family and damaged their home beyond repair.Įarlier that same year, just one state farther south, a jet fighter collided with a bomber during a training exercise, and the crew jettisoned a bomb into coastal waters near Savannah, Ga. The core containing the nuclear material was stored separately on the B-47 bomber it fell from, but the high explosives that were used to trigger the nuclear reaction exploded on impact, digging the crater estimated at 35 feet deep. A fading plywood cutout that someone put up − apparently to lure more tourists − is the size and shape of the Mark 6 nuclear bomb that was dropped there by accident. The circular pit is as big around as a small house, with a pond of tea-colored water at the bottom. "I think it's on some kind of map or something." "It's the hole from where the bomb had dropped, years ago," Sanders said. Strangers pile out and tromp around to the scrub oak forest just behind his back yard to gaze down at an odd tourist attraction. "We're actually celebrating − celebrating is probably the wrong word − but we're marking the 60th anniversary of no fewer than eight nuclear weapons accidents this year," Schwartz said.Įvery couple of weeks, Maurice Sanders gets a reminder of one of those 1958 accidents when a car with out-of-state tags parks in front of his house just outside Florence, S.C. Schwartz singled out 1958 as a particularly notorious year. "If you go through some of the archival evidence publicly available, it seems like once a week or so, there was some kind of significant noteworthy accident that was being reported to the Department of Defense or the Atomic Energy Commission or members of Congress," said Stephen Schwartz, a long-time nuclear weapons analyst. It injured six people on the ground, destroyed a house, and left a 35 foot deep crater. American Homefront A homemade marker stands at the site where a Mark 6 nuclear bomb was accidentally dropped near Florence, S.C.
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