What the article neglects to mention is that after months of searching, they never found the bomb. It's still somewhere under the silt near Tybee island, biding its time.
Holy crap. They don't even know for sure if they were real bombs? For that matter, why is carrying real nuclear weapons on a practice run even a possibility?
You think carrying bombs on this flight is extraordinary? You don't know the half of it. They were dragging bombs all over the place, all the time, to a ridiculous extent. The practice run could turn into nuclear war while the planes were in the air.
And some of the terminology-fiddling is Fun: when they told people things like "the bombs were not armed", they meant that were only a quick switch away from being armed. in related news, the NSA doesn't have "direct access" to Google servers. :P
US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental
proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were
accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina
on 23 January 1961
The plane was carrying 2 of those bad boys. But it sounds like the whereabouts of both may have actually been determined.
The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke
up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved
precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave
in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms
engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented
untold carnage.
As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs
it was carrying became separated. One fell into
a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute
draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted
into a meadow off Big Daddy's Road.
