Captain Rardin, the senior pilot, landed in the trees, but he was able to extricate himself from the tangled chute harness and put both feet on the ground. He could see some lights, and he started walking across a large field. By the time he got to the road, his further progress was slowed by the convergence of “various and sundry dogs” demanding to know who he was and what he was doing here.[214]
By morning, the Air Force had taken over the town. Everyone was cleared out, the area was cordoned off, and nobody, particularly a stray journalist, was allowed in. Residents could not help but notice as they were removed that the Air Force was very interested in the crater in the field. They were told that it was caused by a seat that had fallen out of the plane.
The first order of business was to secure the MK-39 thermonuclear weapons, with their valuable cores. The one that had landed with its parachutes was easy. Specialists opened the access port on the side of the bomb, pinched off the tritium injection tube, and removed the tritium tank. Without that component, there was no way a nuclear explosion could occur.
The other bomb was a problem. It was buried somewhere down in a crater made in soft, swampy ground. At 1:30 P.M. on January 24, specialists from the explosive ordnance disposal squadron began digging in the crater. They had burrowed down eight feet, resorting to shovels by the end. They found a piece of the nose section. The next day, they were down 12 feet, and they found the top of the parachute pack. It rained the next day, making the swampy ground even softer and less stable, but they were able to completely expose the rear section of the bomb. The arming rods had definitely been pulled out, starting the arming sequence. The internal structures of an MK-39 were mostly made of plastic, and they found broken pieces of it embedded in the mud. On the 27th, they were able to pull out the entire back end of the bomb, containing mostly parachutes, and they found the tritium cylinder. It was full. The bomb was never fully armed, and it would not have gone off.
By the 28th, they were down another 10 feet, using mechanical shovels, and the diameter of the hole had grown considerably. Water was filling up the crater, making further digging impossible, and 16 gasoline-driven pumps were used to drain it. At this depth, they could see that the primary, the fission-implosion bomb used to start the fusion process, had broken free of the bomb and the ball of chemical explosive was smashed to pieces. At the end of the day, they found the MC-772 Arm-Safe Switch. It was in the armed position. A question came up: Why had the MK-39, with its arming rods out and the switch in the armed position, not gone off?[215]
On they dug, with the walls of the crater now collapsing and mud sliding onto the workers. On the 30th, the hole was 22 feet deep, 50 feet wide, and 70 feet long, and it was becoming dangerous to dig. They found the plutonium shell of the primary, which was fairly intact, and more fragments of the high explosives, detonators, and tangled-up sections of electrical cable.
The secondary, the part that made it a high-yield hydrogen bomb and not just an A-bomb, had obviously broken free and shot through the front of the bomb like a bullet, burying itself deep into North Carolina. The secondary was a hollow cylinder, 14 inches in diameter and 34 inches long, made of uranium-238, filled with lithium-deuteride powder, with a plutonium-239 rod running down the center. It weighed a little less than 200 pounds, and, believe it or not, it was encased in molded Styrofoam, the stuff used to make disposable coffee cups.
On February 7, the team gave up digging at a depth of 42 feet. The hole was now 130 feet wide at the surface, and cave-ins and water leaking in were exacerbated by rainy weather. It was not worth the effort to find the lost secondary unit, and the hole was filled in. Later simulations indicated that it was probably 120 feet below the surface. It is still there, somewhere. The Air Force paid $1,000 for the easement for a circle 200 feet in diameter in the field and will permit no digging on the property. On July 2, 2012, a historic marker was unveiled on Main Street in Eureka, North Carolina, commemorating the Goldsboro Incident, which actually happened about three miles down the road, in Faro. It reads:
NUCLEAR MISHAP. B-52 transporting two nuclear bombs crashed Jan. 1961. Widespread disaster averted: three crewmen died 3 mi. S.
The last survivor of the crash, Adam C. Mattocks, was on hand. The young inhabitants of Eureka dismiss the story, finding it about as believable as a local version of the Loch Ness sea monster. To them, it is just another ghost story.
These accounts of air disasters with nuclear weapons could go on for another three volumes and start to get repetitious, but from this small sampling a general trend begins to form. Here is one last, fascinating tale before we move on. It is a little-known accident, occurring in Greenland near Thule Air Base on January 21, 1968. Pronounced “Too-lee,” Thule, located well north of the Arctic Circle at the intersection of three moving glaciers, has long held the prize, unofficially, as the most miserable air base on the planet Earth. Rather than list its deficiencies as a vacation spot, I offer the following anecdote:
Late on a dark winter’s night, an Air Force general, high up in the Strategic Air Command, landed at Thule Air Base in his flying command-center/palace for a surprise inspection. As the plane taxied off the runway, the general asked his pilot to radio the tower and have equipment sent out to empty the latrine on board the plane. Its waste-holding tank was full.
The tower radioed back that this would be accomplished right away, but the aircraft could not proceed to the disembarkation point until the latrine service truck had done its business and disconnected. Understood. We shall wait.
The general, who was by disposition opposed to waiting for something to happen, sat fuming in the cabin as time ticked away. After a 30-minute wait, he was fit to be tied. He exited the plane through the rear door so that he could pace up and down on the tarmac and give the tardy airman a lecture about promptness. Finally, the honey wagon showed up, approaching in no particular hurry. After making absolutely sure that his parka was all zipped up, the airman ambled over to the back of the truck, unrolled the hose, eventually connected it to the waste port on the plane’s fuselage, and stuck his hands into his parka.
“Airman!” the general screamed. “You are intolerably late, and your lack of enthusiasm is obvious! This will go down in my report, and you will regret your slovenly performance here!”
The airman, barely awake, squinted so as to see who was talking. “General,” he began, “it’s 27 degrees below zero. I’m pumping shit out of an airplane. I’m at Thule. What exactly are you going to do to me?”[216]
It is always cold at Thule, but 35,000 feet over Thule in the dead of winter, Sunday, January 21, 1968, it was even colder than usual. The crew in the downstairs compartment aboard the B-52G strategic bomber, “HOBO 28,” were freezing, and they called upstairs begging for more heat.
Gone were the halcyon days of SAC, the Strategic Air Command, when they kept a dozen bombers in the air at all times in “Operation Chrome Dome,” ready to counter-strike a Soviet threat at a minute’s notice. There were too many accident opportunities, and it was terribly expensive even if nothing crashed into anything. On January 17, 1966, a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker plane had a fender-bender over Palomares, Spain, and managed to spill the contents of the bomb bay over land and sea, this time in a foreign country.[217] It was the latest in a number of loud wakeup calls, and the number of planes to be in the air at once was cut back to three. By 1968, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) was up and running in Greenland, and there was enough planet-killing power available underground at the throw of a switch in missile silos or in submarines to give airborne weapons a back seat.
214
Captain Rardin’s concise report reads in its entirety: “I could see three or four chutes against the glow of the wreckage. The plane hit ten or twelve seconds after the bail out. I hit some trees. I had a fix on some lights and started walking. My biggest difficulty was the various and sundry dogs I encountered on the road.”
215
This question was answered when the parts were sent back to Los Alamos for inspection, but that does not stop the recurring concerns that the bomb
216
This bit of Air Force lore was given me by Colonel Eric Conda Murdock, USAF retired. It might even be true.
217
In the Palomares incident, a B-52 overran his tanker in a refueling operation over southern Spain. Both the bomber and the tanker broke up and crashed, killing seven of the 11 crewmen and scattering the four MK-38FI thermonuclear weapons. Two of the bombs were destroyed on impact by detonation of their primary explosives, one landed safely by parachute on a tomato farm, and one sank in the Mediterranean Sea. With great effort the sunken bomb was recovered, and 1,400 tons of soil and vegetation contaminated with fissile uranium and plutonium were dug up and shipped to the United States for controlled storage.