Of all the peculiar places
we’ve perused on this channel, this is quite possibly the least impressive,
at least on the surface. I mean... it's a field. But believe me - this is
no ordinary patch of farmland. Take that odd little copse of trees, for example
- isn't it strange that the farmer never bothered to clear it? You'd think it would make working the
field easier, and increase planting area. But it turns out the farmer never touches that particular
bit of land, in fact - he doesn't even own it. This specific circle of conspicuous conifers
in the centre of a North Carolina field was quietly bought by the United States Army
in 1961. Which begs the question - why did the most powerful military on earth
buy a random patch of turf? Well, it wasn’t the land itself the army was
interested in - but what lay beneath. You see, this seemingly nondescript field in North
Carolina hides a terrible secret. A secret that just over 60 years ago, almost murdered tens of
thousands of innocent Americans as they slept. This is the story of the Goldsboro Incident
- the scariest close shave in history. Just before midnight on January
23rd, 1961 - 3 days after JFK was sworn in as president - a B-52
Stratofortress strategic bomber was docking with a refuelling plane
somewhere over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Mid-air refuelling is a dangerous business, but
these pilots were pros, so there was no problem. Until there was a problem. The crew on the
refuelling tanker noticed that the B-52 was leaking fuel from one of its wings.
The operation was aborted immediately, and the bomber‘s pilot was advised to
land at a nearby airbase post-haste. The trouble was, the B-52 was too heavy
to land safely. It's a little-known fact outside of aviation circles that most
planes take off significantly heavier than they're safely rated to land thanks
to the extra weight of a full tank of fuel. The B-52 was no exception - it's a colossal craft, capable of holding up to 150,000kg of jet fuel
- that's about 22 hefty African bull elephants - which is the Civil Aviation Authority’s
official yardstick for jet fuel, I promise. Anyway, the plane was still laden with fuel,
so the pilot flew a holding pattern to burn some off before landing. But as the seconds
slipped away, so did the oil - every minute, thousands of litres fell into the soil. What
initially appeared to be a minor operational issue was now a full-scale emergency. The pilot
tried to land fervently, but the plane was damaged irreversibly - it was going down, and
there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. Losing any aircraft is a big deal, but losing this particular B-52
was a potential global catastrophe. Because bundled within the belly of the bomber
were two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs each containing 200 times the explosive force of Fat
Man, the nuclear bomb that obliterated Nagasaki. Now, before I get onto what happened
next, you might be wondering just what the hell the US airforce was doing
flying hydrogen bombs over home soil. Good question, and I can answer it
with just two words: Chrome Dome. Yes, that’s a playfully offensive term for
a bald man, but it was also the very silly name for a deadly black ops mission run
throughout the 1960s by the US air force. Chrome Dome was what you
might call a doomsday program, created with one simple aim in mind
- to intimidate the Soviet state. Remember this was the middle of the Cold War
when nuclear tensions were at an all-time high. World peace relied on a
highly sophisticated strategy inspired by school playgrounds: if you
blow me up, I’ll blow you up big time. Sounds good on paper, but in practice, the
whole 'mutually assured destruction' thing had a pretty serious flaw - namely
that if it ever came to nuclear war, whoever landed the first blow would
have one hell of an advantage. Suppose the Soviets were able to destroy or
disrupt a significant portion of the United State's command infrastructure in a single strike,
it could render a retaliatory attack impossible. Hence, destruction was neither mutual nor assured. And that's where Chrome Dome came in.
This operation ensured multiple B-52 bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons
were in the sky at all times. That way, even if the Soviets bombed North
America back to a radioactive Stone Age, the president could *still* rain fiery death on
Russia, far from home, all thanks to Chrome Dome.. Sure, it was a solid plan - but allow me to paint
a precarious epigram. Weapons that could murder millions, were being flown over the heads
of unwitting civilians. And this happened 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
for 8 straight years in the 1960s. Flying is one of the safest ways to travel but put enough aircraft in the sky for long enough,
and eventually, fate will deal a fatal fluff. Which brings me neatly back to January 23rd
1961 and our battered bomber plummeting toward the ground alongside two of the
most powerful weapons ever built by man. The mighty plane broke apart as it fell,
and the nukes were thrown clear. The first drifted slowly down to earth after its integrated
parachute deployed. But the second was speedier, accelerating to 700 miles an hour before smashing
into the ground with the force of a meteor. As it happens, only one of the two
bombs ever came close to detonating, and it’s probably not the one you'd expect.
The nukes were equipped with four different safety mechanisms designed to deter incidental
detonation. In the case of the second bomb - the one that crashed into a field at close to the
speed of sound - these mechanisms worked exactly as intended. As for the first bomb, well, let’s
just say things played out a little differently. You probably presumed the parachute
I mentioned was some kind of safety feature to protect the
bomb in the event of an accident, but in reality, it was a key part of the weapon's
detonation sequence, designed both to give a pilot time to escape after dropping his payload and
to facilitate an 'airburst' explosion - one where the bomb detonates at a set altitude
to ensure maximum destruction on the ground. In other words, the fact that the
first nuke’s parachute deployed at all was a very ominous sign indeed
because it was preparing to explode. When a bomb disposal team arrived
at the site the following day, they found the 3.5 metre, 3000-kilogram
weapon standing perfectly upright and intact, its tip buried in the ground. It
was an alarming sight all round, although admittedly it was quite a bit better than
the alternative, a giant crater of death and fire. In the years after the incident,
there was plenty of debate as to just how close this weapon had come to exploding.
Publicly, the US government played things down, claiming both nukes were deactivated and
that there was never any risk to the public. It probably won’t surprise you one
bit that this was utter bullshit. In 2013, a newly declassified report revealed
that three of the four safety mechanisms built into the first bomb had failed and that only
an electrical switch in the 'off' position had prevented a firing signal from reaching the
nuclear core. In other words, a solitary switch is all that prevented a full-scale detonation -
one that would have killed tens of thousands of sleeping Americans in an instant and risked the
lives of millions more through nuclear fallout. It's worth pointing out that,
despite dodging a nuclear apocalypse, the Goldsboro crash was by no means victimless. There were 8 servicemen aboard the bomber when
it went down. 8 servicemen... but only 6 ejector seats. 3 of the crew died, though remarkably
one of those not in an ejector seat - Lt. Adam Mattocks - somehow managed to survive by flinging
himself out of the plane's top hatch and deploying his parachute. To this day, this big-balled
badass remains the only person in history to have bailed out of a B-52 cockpit without
an ejector seat and lived to tell the tale. In the days and weeks after this nearest of
misses, disposal work commenced. The first bomb that almost murdered thousands, proved to
be the easiest since it was still in one piece. So, they used an incredibly complex atom
bomb disposal technique: They picked it up and stuck it on the back of a
big lorry - very, very carefully. But things were a bit trickier
when it came to the other bomb. Having smashed into a swampy field
at a smidge under the speed of sound, the 3-tonne weapon had burrowed 6 metres into
soft ground, tearing itself apart in the process. The bombs contained two separate nuclear
cores apiece to ensure maximum destruction on detonation. The recovery crew quickly
located the first and largest of these cores, but the second was never found, despite calling
in a fleet of industrial excavation vehicles. After weeks of fruitless digging, a
decision was made for the hole to be re-filled and flattened, and basically
pretend the whole thing never happened. As you might have guessed, that lost core is the
little ‘secret’ I mentioned at the start of this video - to this day, a 6-kilo rod of weapons-grade
plutonium lies somewhere underneath those trees. That’s why the US army purchased that particular
patch of property - to ensure nobody ever forgot what lies beneath and decided to build a
house on it or something else really stupid. Remarkably, the rest of the field
is still farmed to this day. What’s also remarkably … stupid, is that the US
Airforce was well aware of the issue that brought the bomber down that fateful night - Boeing
had figured out that a recent modification they'd made to the wings could, under certain
conditions, cause them to literally tear off. I'm no aviation expert, but I
think that's pretty serious. The bomber in question had already been booked
in for a refit to fix the issue, but apparently, the Airforce decided that ferrying thermonuclear
weapons across the northern hemisphere was a totally reasonable thing to do in the
meantime, and, well, the rest is history. In some ways you could say this story
is a bit of a non-event - I mean, aside from the tragic loss of 3 crew
members, nothing actually happened. And yet, for my money, the Goldsboro incident is one of the
most fascinating sliding doors moments in history. A single electrical switch decided the
fates not just of millions of Americans, but very possibly the entire world. After
all, a 3.8-megaton hydrogen bomb exploding on American soil in the middle of the Cold War
could easily have had some… dire consequences. If the Americans thought they were under
attack, the response would have been immediate and devastating, and even if they
realised the nuke was one of their own, would the American government really have
admitted to accidentally murdering tens of thousands of its own citizens? Or might
JFK, on his first week in the job remember, have been tempted to point the finger at
the Soviets? I guess we’ll never know. Thanks for watching.
