08/25/2026
📌 Goldsboro Nuclear Bomb B-52 Accident Site
📍 35°29′34.08″N, 77°51′31.33″W — Faro, North Carolina
Somewhere beneath this ordinary farm field, part of a 3.8-megaton thermonuclear weapon has been sitting since 1961, and only one safety switch stood between this being a quiet news story and something far worse.
On January 24, 1961, a U.S. Air Force B-52G carrying two Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear bombs broke apart in the sky near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Each weapon carried a maximum predicted yield of 3.8 megatons, hundreds of times the explosive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The bomber, based at nearby Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, was flying as part of Strategic Air Command's airborne nuclear-alert program when it developed a serious fuel leak. The crew lost control while trying to return to base, and the B-52 began breaking apart around 9,000 feet. Five crewmen survived. Three were killed.
As the aircraft disintegrated, the two bombs fell separately, and what happened to each was strikingly different. The first descended almost as if it had been deliberately dropped, its parachute deployed, its arming rods pulled, and several stages of its firing sequence activated. Its 42-second timer even completed its countdown, and the contact switch closed when it hit the ground. But one crucial component remained set to SAFE, the Arm/Safe switch, which prevented the firing circuitry from completing the sequence that could have triggered a nuclear detonation.
The second bomb had a very different fate. Its parachute never deployed, and the roughly 9,000 to 10,000-pound weapon slammed into the farmland at high speed, punching a crater about nine feet across and five feet deep while much of it continued burrowing deep underground. Recovery crews dug through the muddy soil and found the bomb's primary nuclear component about 20 feet down, but groundwater, unstable soil, and collapsing excavation walls made the work increasingly dangerous, and the digging was eventually abandoned. The thermonuclear secondary component was never recovered, later estimates placed the remaining material roughly 180 feet underground.
In 1962, the federal government secured a perpetual 200-foot-radius easement over the site. The land can still be farmed, used for timber, or grazed, but excavation deeper than five feet and any construction within the restricted area are prohibited.
The LiDAR and aerial comparison here is what makes the location so interesting. From above, it looks like an ordinary North Carolina farm field, with a small isolated grove of trees standing in the middle of otherwise cultivated land. LiDAR strips away the vegetation and highlights the subtle shape and disturbances of the underlying terrain, though it's worth noting the grove itself isn't the precise burial location, the federal easement over the unrecovered material actually sits about 250 feet north of it.
More than six decades later, there's almost nothing visible on the landscape to hint at what happened here. But deep beneath this quiet farm field, part of a 3.8-megaton thermonuclear weapon has remained buried since 1961.
Special thanks to James Sandlin, Chuck Heumader, and Darrell Brown for recommending this site.
