January 24, 1961, a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber carrying two powerful hydrogen bombs suffered a catastrophic failure high above North Carolina. The massive aircraft broke apart in mid-air, sending its crew and its nuclear payload plummeting towards the ground near the town of Goldsboro. One of the bombs plunged into a muddy field at over 700 miles per hour, its tail found buried 20 feet deep. The other bomb’s parachute deployed, a sign that its automatic arming sequence had begun. It drifted down and snagged in a tree, its warhead largely intact. Later analysis would reveal a terrifying truth: of the multiple safety mechanisms designed to prevent an accidental detonation, all but one had failed. A single, low-voltage switch was all that prevented a nuclear explosion that would have dwarfed the Hiroshima blast.

This harrowing event was not an isolated incident. It was an example of what the U.S. military officially calls a “Broken Arrow”—an accident involving a nuclear weapon. Between 1950 and 1980, the Pentagon officially acknowledged 32 such accidents. This history is not just a collection of close calls; it’s a story of how the strategic doctrines of the Cold War made these events almost inevitable, a chronicle of human and mechanical failures in a system of unimaginable power, and a testament to the hard-won safety lessons that emerged from the wreckage.