Because the official narrative rarely tells the whole story.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2026
From Jones’s memo to the newspaper
16,039 DAYS
OCT 22, 1969  →  SEP 20, 2013
RAY COULTER THE FILE
A B-52 lost two hydrogen bombs over North Carolina in 1961, and one low voltage switch kept the first from going off
Weapon No. 1, a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb, as Air Force teams found it near Faro, North Carolina, in January 1961
Weapon No. 1 as the recovery teams found it near Faro, North Carolina, January 1961 (Photo: U.S. Air Force)
I keep thinking about the letter Jack ReVelle tried to write his parents in January 1961…
Both of the hydrogen bombs he handled that month hit the ground unexploded. Sandia’s own 1961 report said the safety switch on the first one worked as designed.
ReVelle was a 25-year-old Air Force lieutenant out of Wright-Patterson, on the edge of Dayton, Ohio, where I was in the sixth grade that winter. After eight days in a North Carolina field, he sat down, wrote “Dear Mom and Dad,” and watched his hand start to shake.
I know that kind of letter. My brother Denny mailed them home from Vietnam in 1968: two pages on the heat, the food and the Reds, with a hole in the middle where the war should have been.
In 2019, NPR aired ReVelle telling his part to his daughter Karen. The two pages that explained how close North Carolina came stayed classified from 1969 to 2013.
What did the first bomb finish?
Weapon No. 1 fell from about 9,000 feet under its parachute. Which of these steps toward a nuclear blast did it complete?
Its arming rods pulled free, the same way a planned drop pulls them.
A pulse generator fired and woke the low voltage battery.
Its 42-second timer ran all the way down.
Every contact in the altitude switch closed.
The high voltage battery came on.
Crystals in the nose crushed on impact, closing the contact fuze.
Answer at the bottom of this letter.
“Yeah, it would have been bad news — in spades.”
PARKER F. JONES, SANDIA CORPORATION, OCTOBER 22, 1969
The file
Document
“Goldsboro Revisited or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb”
Dated
October 22, 1969
From
Parker F. Jones, supervisor of nuclear weapons safety, Sandia
Subject
The B-52 crash at Faro, N.C., January 24, 1961
Length
Two pages, marked Secret
Made public
The Guardian, September 20, 2013, after a FOIA request by Eric Schlosser
To see what ReVelle walked into, you have to go back to a few minutes past midnight on January 24, 1961.
A B-52G out of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, near Goldsboro, North Carolina, was losing fuel from a leak in its right wing. Major Walter Tulloch was trying to get it back to the runway.
At about 12:30 a.m., the bomber broke apart over the tobacco and cotton fields at Faro, 12 miles north of Goldsboro. Two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs fell out of it, each rated at 3.8 megatons.
Weapon No. 1 rode its parachute down and stood up nose first among the trees. ReVelle said it looked like the Washington Monument.
Weapon No. 2 kept its parachute packed. By ReVelle’s account, it hit a swampy field at 700 miles an hour and buried itself.
His crew of ten dug for it in snow and rain, part of the time on their hands and knees.
Partway down, one of ReVelle’s sergeants came up with the bomb’s arm/safe switch. Speaking at East Carolina University in 2013, ReVelle gave the sergeant’s report word for word: “It’s on arm.”
You can picture the next few seconds in that hole…
Here is where the file clerk in me slows down. The paper tells it a different way.
Sandia’s post-mortem found the crash had turned the switch’s dial to ARM and torn its contacts loose, so it was never armed in the wiring. That bomb’s timer had run 12 to 15 seconds of its 42, too short to charge the firing set.
The bomb that kept Sandia up at night was the one under the parachute.
Eight years later, on October 22, 1969, a Sandia safety supervisor named Parker F. Jones sat down to answer a book. The physicist Ralph Lapp had written that a single switch kept a 24-megaton bomb from going off over North Carolina.
Jones answered him line by line, with Lapp’s paragraph in one column and his corrections in the other. Four safety devices, Jones wrote, not six, and one of those did nothing in the air.
He called it an accident, not an incident, and he called Lapp’s report short on objectivity and accuracy.
Then he agreed with Lapp’s last line. One “simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.”
In his next breath he went further than Lapp. The Mk 39 Mod 2, he wrote, “did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52.”
That January, the Strategic Air Command had just doubled its airborne alert to 12 bomber flights a day. The Goldsboro B-52 was one of them.
Goldsboro got a different story. Wire reports the morning after the crash called the bombs unarmed and said there was no immediate danger of a nuclear blast.
In public, Washington kept saying its bombs had never put Americans in danger.
That is the cost I keep landing on. The men in that hole, and the farm families around Faro, were told one thing while Sandia wrote down another.
Eric Schlosser, a reporter writing a book on nuclear accidents, pried the memo loose with a Freedom of Information Act request. The Guardian printed it on September 20, 2013.
In June 2014, the National Security Archive posted the 1961 Sandia studies, which the Department of Energy released after the Archive asked for them.
SANDIA CORPORATION
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
S E C R E T   DECLASSIFIED
GOLDSBORO REVISITED
or
HOW I LEARNED TO MISTRUST THE H-BOMB
or
TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT
There was no jettison. The aircraft broke up in flight            were inadvertently dropped.

There is no need to do a safety analysis of the Goldsboro caper. That was amply covered by deMontmollin and Hoagland in 1961*. But, in today’s atmosphere, one more conclusion would have been drawn. The Mk 39 Mod 2 bomb did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52**.

*SC-DR-81-61, Analysis of the Safety Aspects of the Mk 39 Mod 2 Bombs Involved in B-52G Crash Near Greensboro (sic), North Carolina.
Made public
20 SEP 2013
FOIA / Schlosser
 
Parker F. Jones, Sandia Corporation, October 22, 1969. Excerpts from pages 1 and 2 as released; the bar marks a passage stamped DELETED. Obtained under FOIA by Eric Schlosser; published by The Guardian, September 20, 2013.
From the Faro field to the front page
January 24, 1961: A B-52G breaks up over Faro, N.C. Two Mark 39 bombs fall.
February 1961: Sandia’s crash reports credit the MC-772 switch with stopping Weapon No. 1.
October 22, 1969: Parker F. Jones writes “Goldsboro Revisited.”
April 26, 2013: Rep. Loretta Sanchez honors ReVelle in the Congressional Record.
September 20, 2013: The Guardian publishes the Jones memo, obtained by Eric Schlosser.
June 9, 2014: The National Security Archive posts the 1961 Sandia studies. Weapon No. 2’s secondary is still under the Faro field.
Ray’s note
Twenty-six years of routing slips, and I never saw a memo laid out like this one: Lapp’s paragraph in one column, Jones’s answers in the other. A safety chief grading a physicist like homework, over a hydrogen bomb.
Line of the Day
“If a short to an ‘arm’ line occurred in a mid-air breakup, a postulate that seems credible, the Mk 39 Mod 2 bomb could have given a nuclear burst.”
Parker F. Jones, “Goldsboro Revisited,” Sandia Corporation, October 22, 1969, page 2
Obtained under FOIA by Eric Schlosser; published by The Guardian, September 20, 2013
The answer
All six. Weapon No. 1 went through every one of those steps on the way down. The step it skipped was the MC-772 arm/safe switch, which stayed on SAFE, so the firing set never charged. That is Sandia’s own finding from February 1961, and it is the switch Jones wrote about eight years later.
What should the Air Force have told Goldsboro the morning after?
Tap one. Your answer comes to me as a short email, with your choice in the subject line.
Each button opens an email to the desk. Totals stay with the desk.
Hit reply and tell me about a letter home in your family that skipped the hard part. I read them at the dining room table, next to the file boxes my wife Marilyn wants off it.
The request desk
Name a file and I will go looking for it. A date, a base, a ship or a name is enough to start.
NAME A FILE →
What I still cannot find
Here is what the 2013 and 2014 releases left shut, as far as I can find.
▪  Weapon No. 2’s secondary. The Air Force stopped digging at 42 feet in 1961, and it is still in the ground at Faro.
▪  Two passages on page 1 of the Jones memo, stamped DELETED.
▪  The name of the sergeant who found the switch on Weapon No. 2. ReVelle’s 2019 interview leaves it out, and I have not found it.
▪  What Sandia did with Jones’s footnote, which said the same verdict fit the B28FI, the B53 and the B41.
I hope ReVelle finished that letter to his folks, and I have no way to know if he did.
Denny’s letters sit in the second file box on our dining room table. Every one of them opens the same way: Dear Mom and Dad.
Talk tomorrow,
Ray
Further Reading:
“Dear Mom and Dad.” ReVelle tells his daughter Karen about the eight days, aired by NPR in 2019: The Man Who Disabled Two Hydrogen Bombs Dropped in North Carolina.
“Bad news — in spades.” The Guardian’s September 2013 report on the Jones memo: US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina.
“In itself highly vulnerable.” The National Security Archive on the Sandia studies released in 2014: New Details on the 1961 Goldsboro Nuclear Accident.
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.”
JAMES MADISON, LETTER TO W. T. BARRY, AUGUST 4, 1822

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