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Historians tend to record big, dramatic events. It is easy to understand why. Big, consequential events capture the imagination and often have major, long-term consequences that are easy to qualify in the empirical record. Even when historians go off the beaten path and seek ignored and marginalized histories and stories, these events and lived experiences still happened and had their respective impacts. My particular, niche interest is events that did not happen and were not ultimately consequential, but they could have been and in the most extreme sense. History is full “ what ifs“, and I believe I have come across a whopper! What if the U.S. Air Force accidentally nuked North Carolina on January 24th, 1961?
The U.S. Military calls a major accident involving a nuclear weapon a "Broken Arrow," and it has officially recognized thirty two since 1950. Yes. Thirty-Two. There have been that many close calls and oopsies with weapons of mass destruction at the hands of the American Armed Forces.
At the height of the Cold War, the United States Air Force had bombers circling the continental United States ready at a moments notice for disaster to strike. They were an insurance policy against a first strike attack by the Soviet Union. In the early hours of January 24th, 1961 a B-52G Stratofortress with two large nuclear weapons tucked into it’s belly broke up over Goldsboro, North Carolina and accidentally dropped its armed payload over an unsuspecting Wayne County. Each of those Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs was 12 feet long, weighed over 6,200 pounds and could detonate with the energy of 3.8 million tons of TNT. The Bomber broke up about 2,000 feet above the ground. Some of the servicemen on board were able to bail out, but three sadly died in the accident. As the plane broke apart, the two bombs plummeted toward the ground. A parachute opened on one of the devices and it ended up caught in a tree, but the other crashed into a muddy swamp.
Specialists studied the bomb debris and learned that six out of seven steps to detonate one of the devices had engaged. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in a declassified 1963 memo that it was only "by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.".
If any number of things had happened differently that morning than the history of the latter half of the 20th Century could have been very different. The human, environmental and economic costs of such calamity would have devastated the eastern seaboard and the United States as a whole, but that could very well be the best case scenario. The confusion and chaos induced by such a disaster might have triggered a thermonuclear war.
Is there a point to this speculation? Despite being a darkly, interesting thought experiment, it serves to show that history is far from deterministic, and a moment, or two faulty wires, could be a game changer in the outcomes of human affairs.