Evidently so.
I wonder what the yield on that sucker was…?
This was ‘61 so that was a real monster, I’d wager….
Attack? How about accident?
Fascinating. I’ve never read this on FR before, except for the other 1213 times that it was posted in the last few months. LOL! :)
Though I'm not a big JFK fan (except for the tax cuts:), I'll concede it must have been less than pleasant to have to deal with this during his first full day in office.
1961. Wow. That’s just.........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Dude, that was like 53 years ago.
My smell detector is calling BS on this STORY.
What people today fail to appreciate is how hard SAC pushed itself in those days. In ‘61 we lost an average of one B-52 a month, -in training-.
Two days before this incident another B-52 “Felon 22” broke up and went down over a remote area in southeast Utah. It was January 19th, 1961. An airman who was able to bail out and made it to the ground, gathered his parachute around him to try to protect himself from the bitter cold. He froze to death shortly before the rescuers located him.
As he laid freezing under that tree in a wasteland, JFK gave his inaugural speech in DC. This is the “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any challenge,,,,, Ask not what your country can do for you speech”.
The next day this one went down over North Carolina. Today in the USAF crashes are more rare than ever. But in those days, they were out there over the edge, pushing the limits of men and machines. SAC was a national hero, and is sorely missed today.
Active Duty/Retiree ping.
I wonder what the reaction would have been if the thing would have detonated. I’m SURE the communications between countries back then was nothing compared to what they are today. Would we have launched an all out retaliatory strike against the USSR, assuming they struck us first?(though their apparent first strike target would have made no sense at all)
Would we have retaliated even knowing it was an accident, as a face-saving measure? I tend to doubt it, as history would have been VERY unkind to such a thing, but worse things have probably happened. Of course, this is also assuming the .gov was as crooked back then as it is today.
Dealing with this type of incident was part of a program called “Broken Arrow”. There were photos of the nuc swing from a tree by the parachute.
God was protecting us!
"...weighed .03 megatons combined..."
Gadzooks! Matt Bradwell... 
is an idiot!
Does anyone at military.com know their right hand... 
from shinola!
God was watching over the folks of North Carolina.
my impression is that at least the older 1st generation nukes were designed to be armed manually during flight and not until the need arose (specific target identified, weather path clear, etc). otherwise you could drop one on the runway while loading it and it would go off at the air base.
so i wonder how much of this story is actually true and how much of it is politically motivated. if it is politically motivated, who benefits? what powerful entity is pushing, for example, for unilateral disarmament and destruction of our nukes?