 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. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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. “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. 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. The pilots survived, and no one was killed on the ground. 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.
– 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.)