Bill Hand: A single switch saved New Bern and the region in 1961

Published: Sunday, September 22, 2013 at 17:23 PM.

About 50 years ago, three out of four switches failed to do their job. If that last one had failed as well, Goldsboro would be a crater today and New Bern would probably have giant ants and a lot of three-eyed people.

It was around midnight on Jan. 23, 1961, when a B-52G Stratofortress, based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, was doing a mid-air refueling over the Atlantic when the tanker noticed the B-52 had a fuel leak.

We’re talking a major fuel leak, here. They were ordered to stay out to sea until most of the fuel was gone and then head for home, but the pilot reported they had lost 37,000 pounds of fuel in three minutes. I never knew there was anything big enough to hold 37,000 pounds of fuel. They were told to head for home, pronto.

As they neared their base, the pilots lost control of their bird and, at 9,000 feet, the captain ordered his eight-man crew to abandon ship. Six did, five of whom survived the jump, and two went ingloriously down with the jet.

Now, this model of B-52, built in 1952, was designed purely to carry nuclear weapons, so it should be no surprise that our B-52 had a couple of nuclear eggs in her basket.

These were Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs. This nifty little device was 260 times more powerful than “Little Boy” that fell into Hiroshima. About 66,000 people died in that blast, and another 69,000 were injured. That glow-in-the-dark eggplant had a kill radius of (as in, if you are any closer than this, it’s a sure thing you’re dead) of 1,000 feet, according to AtomicArchive.com.

The Mark 39 has a kill radius measured in miles, and its fallout from Goldsboro would have reached Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City. Now, I’m pretty sure New Bern is closer to Goldsboro than New York City.

Well, anyway, when the jet broke up, these bombs were let loose. One simply dropped to the earth where it buried itself in pieces in a farmer’s field. The Air Force was only able to recover part of that bomb, and the radioactive part is still buried in that field somewhere, probably about 150 feet deep according to one source.

So, that’s right, we have the glowing remains of a radioactive barn in a field somewhere. The government bought that chunk of land so no one could dig holes in it and set off something unpleasant and, to this day, according to a USA Today article, they still test it for radiation levels.

And somewhere, 150 feet down, are glowing mutant earthworms big enough to eat houses. I know this is true because I’ve seen the movie “Them.”

The other bomb floated gently to earth on a parachute —not a good thing, really, since that’s exactly what they do when they drop these things with the idea of killing people.

There were four fail-safes that are designed to keep that floating bomb from going off. Three, we know from government reports, failed. The last, according to one article, was a switch in the jet itself that required the pilot to throw it.

Or a flying piece of debris as the jet was breaking up.

Parker Jones, a Sandia National Laboratories engineer in Albuquerque, N.M., wrote in a 1969 government report, recently declassified, that “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.”

In his book, “The Goldsboro Broken Arrow,” author Joel Dobson quoted the commander of the explosive ordnance team who was at the crash site and put it in much scarier terms: “How close was it to exploding? My opinion is damn close. You might now have a very large Bay of North Carolina if that thing had gone off.”

I’ll be dreaming about Dr. Strangelove, with Slim Pickens riding a bomb and yelling “Yahoo!” tonight.

After all, one little switch, and our town would have been an unpleasantly different place today.

Contact Bill Hand at newbernhistory@yahoo.com.


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