Secret government report reveals when the United States nearly detonated a hydrogen bomb on itself

IT'S the nuclear nightmare that actually happened: A 1960s US bomber broke up in mid air, a warhead dropped - and automatically armed itself. And this was over North Carolina. 

A declassified document, part of a new book titled Atomic Gaffes by Eric Schlosser, reveals how a defective hydrogen bomb, some 260 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, came dramatically close to flattening a large swathe of the US county of Goldsboro on January 23, 1961.

This was just three days after President John F Kennedy had made his inaugural address as President.

The radioactive fallout could have affected millions as it drifted over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and even New York.

Two Mark 39 four-megaton hydrogen bombs were aboard a B-52 bomber which encountered difficulties shortly after taking off from the Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro.

The heavy, multi-engine jet went into a tail-spin and broke up in mid-air during a live Cold War deployment.

The two bombs broke free.

One of the free-falling weapons automatically deployed its parachute and armed its trigger mechanism. There were four "fail-safe" devices built into the bomb. Three of them failed.

All that prevented the plummeting super-weapon from going off was a single electronic switch.

Both hydrogen bombs ended up burying themselves deep in fields in the North Carolina countryside.

The document, obtained through a freedom of information investigation, reveals the lie behind persistent US Government denials that American lives have ever been put at risk through safety flaws with its nuclear arsenal.

A senior engineer responsible for the safety of nuclear weapons conceded in a secret 1970s study into the accident: "One simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe".

This final line of defence could easily have been shorted by a simple electrical spark, he wrote.

The engineer, Parker F Jones, wrote his secret report "Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb" some eight years after the accident.

The title was a reference to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

news.com.au 21 Sep 2013

IF a person would say this information publicly, one would be 'shut down' by that very government they spill the beans on, ridiculed by the corporate media as a 'nut job' or 'conspiracy theorist'.I

The government then would deny any such event ever occurred and one would spend the rest of one's natural life in a government facility drugged up, and used as a lab rat for experiments.

This is the reality of whistle-blowers and there are many more than Assange or Snowden, prepared to expose the atrocities of abuse of power of governments.

There are many more articles of this calibre that should surface, on order to enlighten the masses as to what really goes on behind the closed doors of government which is payed for by the taxes of the masses.