An American atomic bomb 260 times more powerful than that of Hiroshima nearly exploded in January 1961 in North Carolina, according to a document “declassified” resumed Friday September 20 by the Guardian.
According to this report obtained by journalist Eric Schlosser under the Right to Inform Act, a B-52 bomber then broke up in flight, releasing two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs over Goldsboro.
One of the two behaved exactly as if it had been intentionally dropped, despite the security mechanisms. His parachute opened and the firing process began. The catastrophe was averted with extreme precision with a modest low voltage switch.
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Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even New York could have been affected, which represents several million inhabitants. At the time, the incident sparked intense speculation as to its seriousness, but U.S. officials have consistently denied that lives were at risk due to insufficient security measures.
In the report written eight years later, Parker Jones, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories responsible for mechanical safety of the nuclear arsenal, wrote that three of the four devices supposed to prevent accidental firing had not worked properly.
“The MK 39 Mod 2 bomb did not have the appropriate safety mechanisms for airborne use on board a B-52”, he concludes in this report titled “Goldsboro Revisited, or how I learned to beware of the H-bomb” – with reference to the film’s subtitle Doctor Strangelove. Eric Schlosser discovered it during research for the writing of a book on the arms race, specifies the Guardian.
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