text: One of two nuclear bombs that fell near Raleigh, N.C., during a military accident more than 50 years ago came frighteningly close to detonating, newly-released documents reveal. 
   
   It has long been known that a pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs fell from a stricken B-52 as it broke apart over Goldsboro, N.C., on Jan 24, 1961, at the height of the Cold War. But documents just released by the National Security Archive show that one bomb's arming mechanism switched from "safe" to "armed" on impact, while the other bomb fluttered under a parachute and would have exploded in the sky if two cockpit wires had happened to touch as the plane disintegrated. 
   
   "This bomb had the potential to make the one used in Hiroshima look like the work of a cap gun," said Eric Schlosser, who obtained the documents approximately a year before they were obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 
   
   "It behaved as though it was dropped over the Soviet Union at the time." - Eric Schlosser, author of book on "The Goldsboro Incident" 
   
   Schlosser, who wrote about the incident in his 2013 book, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety," said the bomb brought to Earth by parachute, dubbed "Weapon I," was actually the one that came closest to detonating, even though its arming mechanism remained on "safe." The explosive performed just as a nuclear weapon is designed to function in wartime, completing five of the six steps to detonation, and only a single low-voltage switch prevented the explosion. 
   
   "It behaved as though it was dropped over the Soviet Union at the time," Schlosser said. 
   
   Other experts agree. 
   
   "When the B-52 disintegrates in the air it is likely to release the bombs in a near normal fashion," wrote Parker Jones, who analyzed the incident at the time for the Sandia National Laboratories and wrote a report entitled "How I learned to mistrust the H-Bomb." 
   
   As it turned out, the bomb that fell to the ground at 700 miles per hour did the most damage, burrowing some 12 feet into the ground. Unlike the other bomb, it was never in danger of detonating despite the impact moving its arming mechanism to the "armed" position. Jack ReVelle, who was an Air Force weapons disposal specialist in charge of disarming the two 11 1/2 -feet bombs, remembered when his men reported seeing the switching device as they dug their way down into the crater formed on impact. 
   
   “Until my death I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, ‘Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch,’” ReVelle told students at East Carolina University in 2013. “And I said, ‘Great.’ He said, ‘Not great. It’s on arm.” 
   
   The fact that the arming mechanism on the second weapon moved on impact prompted the military to order new switches immediately. 
   
   “So even though weapon 2 was further from detonation, the fact that the switch used to arm the weapon could be altered by an impact, shows its safety shortcoming,” William Burr, an analyst from the National Security Archive said. 
   
   The B-52 had been on a routine 12-hour mission and suddenly lost 19 tons of fuel pressure within minutes, according to local reports. The pilot was able to straighten the plane at 10,000 feet and aimed it for nearby Seymour Johnson Air Force Base until its right wing broke off. One witness described the plane as streaking through the sky like a Roman candle. 
   
   The pilots survived, and no one was killed on the ground. But had either bomb detonated, history would have been made in the worst possible way. 
   
   "It would have created a crater eight football fields wide," ReVelle said. "It would have destroyed every structure within a four-mile radius. There would have been a 100-percent kill zone for eight and a half miles in every direction." ||||| In a scenario that could’ve been extremely devastating, the United States narrowly averted a nuclear disaster in 1961 when an atomic bomb nearly detonated after falling out of a B-52 bomber that broke up in the sky. 
   
   According to the Washington Post, the incident took place on January 21, 1961 – less than 20 years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and is explained further in a recently declassified report published by the National Security Archives. 
   
   When the US Air Force aircraft went into a tailspin and broke up, the two bombs fell towards Goldsboro, North Carolina. The parachute for one of the weapons failed to deploy, and the plane crash had actually pushed the bomb into “armed” mode by the time it hit the ground. Luckily for North Carolina, the plane’s destruction also damaged the switch necessary to trigger detonation 
   
   “The report implied that because Weapon 2 landed in a free-fall, without the parachute operating, the timer did not initiate the bomb’s high voltage battery (“trajectory arming”), a step in the arming sequence,” wrote Bill Burr of the National Security Archives. 
   
   “For Weapon 2, the Arm/Safe switch was in the “safe” position, yet it was virtually armed because the impact shock had rotated the indicator drum to the “armed” position. But the shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to detonate.” 
   
   Burr noted in his report just how fine the line was and is between safety and destruction. 
   
   “Perhaps this is what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had in mind, a few years later, when he observed that, ‘by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted,” he wrote. 
   
   These details are just the latest to surface about the incident, which was first revealed by nuclear weapons expert Eric Schlosser last year in a book titled, “Command and Control.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Schlosser was able to obtain documentation regarding the incident for the first time, and helped shed light on just how close the Air Force came to witnessing an atomic bomb explode on US soil. 
   
   As RT reported last year, the documents revealed that three of the four safety switches on the other bomb failed to work properly, meaning, as Schlosser noted, that only "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.” The parachute on this one deployed, but when the bomb struck the ground the final firing signal triggered, only to be halted by that fourth safety switch. 
   
   The bombs contained a payload of four megatons each and could have generated explosions 260 times more powerful than the one that occurred in Hiroshima. 
   
   Before the documents related to the Goldsboro incident surfaced, the US government had denied that its nuclear weapons stockpile had ever put the nation at risk. 
   
   “The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy,” Schlosser told the Guardian. “We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here’s one that very nearly did.” ||||| Story highlights Goldsboro one of 32 pre-1980 accidents involving nukes 
   
   Weeks after Goldsboro, there was another close call in California 
   
   The weapons came alarmingly close to detonation 
   
   They were far more powerful than the bombs dropped in Japan 
   
   On a January night in 1961, a U.S. Air Force bomber broke in half while flying over eastern North Carolina. From the belly of the B-52 fell two bombs -- two nuclear bombs that hit the ground near the city of Goldsboro. 
   
   A disaster worse than the devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have befallen the United States that night. But it didn't, thanks to a series of fortunate missteps. 
   
   Declassified documents that the National Security Archive released this week offered new details about the incident. The blaring headline read : "Multi-Megaton Bomb Was Virtually 'Armed' When It Crashed to Earth." 
   
   Or, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it back then, "By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted." 
   
   It's difficult to calculate the destruction those bombs might have caused had they detonated in North Carolina. 
   
   A mushroom cloud rises above Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, after an atomic bomb was dropped on the city. The bombing by American forces ended the second world war. 
   
   A picture taken in 1971 shows a nuclear explosion in Mururoa atoll. 
   
   What might've been 
   
   The website, nuclearsecrecy.com , allows users to simulate nuclear explosions. It says that one bomb the size of the two that fell in 1961 would emit thermal radiation over a 15-mile radius. Wind conditions, of course, could change that. 
   
   The blast today, with populations in the area at their current level, would kill more than 60,000 people and injure more 54,000, though the website warns that calculating casualties is problematic, and the numbers do not include those killed and injured by fallout. 
   
   It's also worth noting that North Carolina's 1961 total population was 47% of what it is today, so if you apply that percentage to the numbers, the death toll is 28,000 with 26,000 people injured -- a far cry from those killed by smaller bombs on the more densely populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. 
   
   University of California-Los Angeles researchers estimate that, respectively, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had populations of about 330,000 and 250,000 when they were bombed in August 1945. By that December, the cities' death tolls included, by conservative estimates , at least 90,000 and 60,000 people. 
   
   Wayne County, North Carolina, which includes Goldsboro, had a population of about 84,000 in 1961. The state capital, Raleigh, is 50 miles northwest of Goldsboro, and Fayetteville -- home of the Army's massive Fort Bragg -- is 60 miles southwest. 
   
   The Goldsboro incident 
   
   The B-52 was flying over North Carolina on January 24, 1961, when it suffered a "failure of the right wing," the report said. 
   
   As the plane broke apart, the two bombs plummeted toward the ground. The parachute opened on one; it didn't on the other. 
   
   "The impact of the aircraft breakup initiated the fuzing sequence for both bombs," the summary of the documents said. 
   
   In other words, both weapons came alarmingly close to detonating. 
   
   Weapon 1, the bomb whose parachute opened, landed intact. Fortunately, the safing pins that provided power from a generator to the weapon had been yanked -- preventing it from going off. 
   
   Weapon 2, the second bomb with the unopened parachute, landed in a free fall. The impact of the crash put it in the "armed" setting. Fortunately -- once again -- it damaged another part of the bomb needed to initiate an explosion. 
   
   While it's unclear how frequently these types of accidents have occurred, the Defense Department has disclosed 32 accidents involving nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1980. 
   
   There are at least 21 declassified accounts between 1950 and 1968 of aircraft-related incidents in which nuclear weapons were lost, accidentally dropped, jettisoned for safety reasons or on board planes that crashed. The accidents occurred in various U.S. states, Greenland, Spain, Morocco and England, and over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. 
   
   Another five accidents occurred when planes were taxiing or parked. 
   
   Two months after the close call in Goldsboro, another B-52 was flying in the western United States when the cabin depressurized and the crew ejected, leaving the pilot to steer the bomber away from populated areas, according to a DOD document . The plane crashed in Yuba City, California, but safety devices prevented the two onboard nuclear weapons from detonating. 
   
   Catastrophe averted 
   
   The Goldsboro incident was first detailed last year in the book " Command and Control " by Eric Schlosser. The documents released this week provided additional chilling details. 
   
   Eight crew members were aboard the plane that night. Five survived the crash. 
   
   "I could see three or four other chutes against the glow of the wreckage," recounted the co-pilot, Maj. Richard Rardin, according to an account published by the University of North Carolina 
   
   "I hit some trees. I had a fix on some lights and started walking." 
   
   The MK39 bombs weighed 10,000 pounds and their explosive yield was 3.8 megatons. Compare that to the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: They were 0.01 and 0.02 megatons. 
   
   But Rardin didn't know then what a catastrophe had been avoided. 
   
   "My biggest difficulty getting back was the various and sundry dogs I encountered on the road."
target: – A part of North Carolina came dangerously close to being obliterated in 1961. A newly declassified report discusses a US bomber that broke in half while flying over the state in January of that year, causing the two nuclear bombs it was carrying to plummet to the ground near Goldsboro—and reveals that those bombs came much closer to detonation than was previously known. A parachute opened for one of the bombs, which landed intact; the safing pins that conducted power from a generator had been pulled, preventing a blast. Still, it completed five of the six steps to detonation, Fox News reports. Had two cockpit wires touched as the plane disintegrated, it could have exploded. As for the second bomb, it landed in a freefall, which caused the switch to flip to the "armed" position, RT reports. What kept it from going off? "The shock also damaged the switch contacts, which had to be intact for the weapon to detonate," the National Security Archive's Bill Burr explains. The incident was first mentioned in a book by Eric Schlosser last year, but the report confirms just how close the US came to devastation. As CNN points out, the MK39 bombs had an explosive yield of 3.8 megatons; the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 0.01 and 0.02 megatons, respectively. "There would have been a 100% kill zone for 8.5 miles in every direction," said the Air Force weapons specialist tasked with disarming the bombs. "By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted," Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said at the time. (This scientist's mathematical model could help you survive should a nuclear bomb strike.)