A thermonuclear bomb slammed into a North Carolina farm in 1961 — and part of it is still missing

In 1961, a US nuclear bomber broke up over North Carolina farmland, killing three of eight crew members.
The accident dropped two powerful hydrogen bombs over the area, but they did not detonate.
The military fully recovered one of the bombs.
While the second bomb was mostly recovered, one of its nuclear cores is likely still buried in up to 200 feet of mud and dirt.

Disaster struck early in the morning of January 24, 1961, as eight servicemen in a nuclear bomber were patrolling the skies near Goldsboro, North Carolina.

They were an insurance policy against a surprise nuclear attack by Russia on the United States — a sobering threat at the time. The on-alert crew might survive the initial attack, the thinking went, to respond with two large nuclear weapons tucked into the belly of their B-52G Stratofortress jet.

But the jet airplane and three of its crew members never returned to base, and neither did a nuclear core from one of the bombs.

The plane broke up about 2,000 feet above the ground, nearly detonating one of the bombs in the process.

Had the weapon exploded, the blast would have packed about 250 times as much explosive power as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Broken arrow over North Carolina

A major accident involving a nuclear weapon is called a "broken arrow," and the US military has officially recognized 32 since 1950.

A mysterious fuel leak, which the crew found out about as a refueling plane approached, led to the broken arrow incident over North Carolina in 1961.

The leak quickly worsened, and the jet bomber "lost its tail, spun out of control, and, perhaps most important, lost control of its bomb bay doors before it lost two megaton nuclear bombs," according to a two-part series about the accident by The Orange County Register. "The plane crashed nose-first into a tobacco field a few paces away from Big Daddy Road just outside Goldsboro, N.C., about 60 miles east of Raleigh."

However, the parachute of the other bomb failed, causing it to slam into a swampy, muddy field and break into pieces. It took crews about a week of digging to find the crumpled bomb and most of its parts.

The military studied the bombs and learned that six of seven steps to blow up one of them had engaged, according to The Register. Only one trigger stopped a blast — that switch was set to "ARM" yet somehow failed to detonate the bomb.

It was only "by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted," a declassified 1963 memo described Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense at the time, as saying.

"Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and as far north as New York City — putting millions of lives at risk," according to a 2013 story by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.

Here's a Nukemap simulation of what the blast radius and fallout zone of the Goldsboro incident might have been:

The thermonuclear core no one recovered

Each bomb was a thermonuclear design. So instead of just one nuclear core, these weapons — the most powerful type on earth — had two.

In the moments after the first core, called a primary, explodes, it releases a torrent of X-ray and other radiation. This radiation reflects off the inside of the bomb casing, which acts as a mirror to focus it on and set off the secondary core. The one-two punch compounds the efficiency and explosive power of a nuclear blast.

While the US military recovered the entire Goldsboro bomb that hung from a tree, the second bomb wasn't fully recovered. Its secondary core was lost in the muck and the mire.

Reports suggest the secondary core burrowed more than 100 feet, possibly up to 200 feet, into the ground at the crash site.

The missing secondary is thought to be made mostly of uranium-238, which is common and not weapons-grade material — but can still be deadly inside a thermonuclear weapon — plus some highly enriched uranium-235, or HEU, which is a weapons-grade material and a key ingredient in traditional atomic bombs.

Business Insider contacted the Department of Defense to learn about the current status of the site and the missing secondary. A representative said neither the Defense Department, Energy Department, or US Air Force had "any ongoing projects or activities with this site."

The department representative would not say whether the secondary was still there. However, they forwarded some responses by Joel Dobson, a local author who wrote the book "The Goldsboro Broken Arrow."

When asked about the still missing secondary, Michael O'Hanlon, a US defense strategy specialist with the Brookings Institution, said there should be little to worry about.

"Clearly, having a large part of a nuclear weapon on private land ... is a bit unsettling. That said, I'm not suggesting anyone lose sleep over this," O'Hanlon told Business Insider in an email.

"It would take a serious operation to get at it, requiring tunneling equipment and a fairly obvious and visible approach to the site by some kind of road convoy, presumably," O'Hanlon added. "Moreover, a secondary does NOT have a lot of HEU or plutonium ... which makes it less dangerous because you can't make a nuclear weapon out of it from scratch."

But O'Hanlon said he at least hoped the Defense Department and others had thought through "the possibility of someone trying to steal it."

"After all, digging and tunneling equipment has continued to improve over the years — and there is apparently no secret about where this weapon is located," O'Hanlon said. "On balance, I'd rather it not be there — but don't consider it a major national-security risk either."