Brush with Catastrophe?
The Stockholm Institute has called the Goldsboro incident "perhaps the single most important example in the published literature of an accident which nearly resulted in a catastrophe." This claim appears to be founded upon yet another hair-raising claim in the 1961 Lapp book.

Lapp wrote in Kill and Overkill that each device involved in the Goldsboro incident was equipped with "six interlocking safety mechanisms, all of which had to be triggered in sequence to explode the bomb." Lapp said that "five of the six interlocks had been set off by the fall..." and thus, "only a single switch prevented the bomb from detonating and spreading fire and destruction over a wide area."

UNC's Schroeer is skeptical that either bomb could have gone off accidentally.
[see video]

However, Lapp's claim that the Goldsboro accident nearly caused a nuclear detonation has found support from some very high sources.

Daniel Ellsberg, famously of the Pentagon Papers case, was quoted in the April 1981 issue of Mother Jones as saying that during his time at the Pentagon he saw "a classified document" about the Goldsboro incident which verified Lapp's claim. Ellsberg stood by his story in a telephone interview for this project, and repeated his 1981 assertions that when the behavior of safety features in both bombs involved in this incident are taken into account, every kind of safety interlock had failed.

Owing to his place in history, Ellsberg is a somewhat controversial figure, but he is very knowledgable about nuclear weapons. Leitenberg said, "However some people may feel about him politically, on this subject Ellsberg is a very credible witness" who was highly placed in the national-security echelons and deeply involved in U.S. weapons-control policy during the years following the Goldsboro accident.

Lapp and Ellsberg have other support in their claims that only a single switch prevented one of the devices from detonating. In September of 1983, Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said at a press conference: "The bombs' arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go through to detonate, and it went through all but one, we discovered later" (Greensboro Daily News, 16 September 1981, pg. A1).

When asked by this project in an email exchange about the story of the failed safety devices, and on which of the two bombs the most of them had failed, Hansen wrote the following on 21 November 2000:

The parachute-retarded weapon came closest to firing; the official reports claim that three of four arming steps were completed. Since the aircraft commander had not thrown the arming switch in the B-52 cockpit, and since that switch was not activated accidentally when the aircraft broke up, it was impossible for the weapon(s) to fire, regardless of how uncomfortably close they came to doing so. This was a very dangerous incident and I suspect that steps were taken afterwards to prevent any repetition of it. I do not now know of any other weapon accident that came this close to a full-scale nuclear detonation (which is not to say that any such incident did not occur later).

Indeed, steps were taken soon after Goldsboro to reduce the threat from accidental detonations. President Kennedy was alarmed by the numbers of nuclear-weapons accidents being brought to his attention. Leitenberg says, "I know that we didn't report them all publicly. We never reported the ones in other countries, or, we only reported the ones that we had to report."

In an effort to reduce the accident threat, the Kennedy administration reduced SAC airborne alert activity. Leitenberg says that the accident rate then "dropped sharply."

President Kennedy also ordered that more elaborate mechanisms be installed on all U.S. nuclear weapons to enhance command and control capability. These peripheral command units are now called permissive action links (PALs) -- an "engineering artifice" which permits detonation only by secret code, and about which Steven M. Bellovin of AT&T Labs Research has prepared an informative page.

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Last Updated: 10 December 2000