Two nukes outside Goldsboro, North Carolina

Declassified documents show that in 1961, the United States Air Force accidentally dropped two armed nuclear bombs near the outskirts of Goldsboro, North Carolina, and came breathtakingly close to melting North Carolina’s east coast.

Between 1950 and 1968 there were 700 accidents and incidents in the United States involving 1,250 nuclear weapons. “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,” journalist Eric Schlosser wrote in his book “Command and Control” of this startling lack of candid accident response preparedness. “We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating …”

Actually, there was. And the east coast of North Carolina was very nearly annihilated by not one but two Mark 39, 4-megaton hydrogen bombs that dropped just north of Goldsboro on January 24, 1961.

A four-megaton device is the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT, and is 500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

While the accidental dropping of an unarmed smaller nuclear weapon on a farm owned by the…