I know it’s kind of strange to be proud of their homeland for such a reason, but you need to understand that American patriotism has a rather different flavor from, say, European, French or English.
It’s like with Italians when they are proud of something – maybe some quaint local pub called ‘The Cheerful Guinea’ where a moustachioed Giovanni makes delightful pizzas with no less delightful mozzarella.
Why? Because the entire ground in the neighborhood of ‘The Cheerful Guinea’ is larded with historical relics – because in the house opposite Pope Saint Leo I stayed and in the belltower next door Leonardo da Vinci made sketches, and down the same road Hannibal’s elephants walked.
For locals, all this is not just a reason for pride; it attracts tourists, too, like honey attracts bees. But of course nectar is also needed for honey, and that’s where moustachioed Giovanni with his pizza comes in.
But in America – not only in North Carolina but all states – there are occupation layers where you find charcoal from a fire the Apaches started no longer ago than the 18th century. So in effect, we are like immigrants to another planet where there was no human history before, only Martian, vague and little understood.
Probably, if the Lord had done things differently – if the Mayan pyramids stood in the State of Washington, and Machu Picchu was in Boston – then we too might be a little different. But our ancestors had only the ‘five civilized tribes’, and all the rest were ‘savages’. Yes probably not such blood-thirsty devils as they’ve sometimes been painted, but still savages.
However, even this Indian component was enough for us to make a cult of it. White boys and girls ran with plastic tomahawks, wearing carnival costumes of Indian chiefs, and on Independence Day they shoot bows in the park at targets stylized as pumas and bisons.
It is natural that in this earth, poor in historicity, then in each state, in each county and each district there are constant searches for something that can be lifted on to the board of the imagination and proudly proclaimed: ‘Here, look, we are also a part of world historical process!’
And so the ‘Mayflower,’ ‘the pilgrim fathers’, ‘the Salem witches’, ‘the Thirteen Colonies’, ‘the Boston Tea Party’ and others have become symbols of real resonance, and Trenton, Princeton, Yorktown and Saratoga are revered no less than Waterloo or Austerlitz in Europe.
Of course, sometimes these desperate searches for reasons for pride get rather comical, and you’ll find a set of attractions like ‘The biggest cord hank in the world’ in remote places in America, monuments to ‘The most gigantic teflon frying pan’ or ‘the house museum of local hunter John Smith who killed the largest beaver on the planet.’
However, the story of the North Caroline Armageddon has no relation to this provincial exotic. It is real and awful because of its reality.
What I’m talking about is the so-called ‘Goldsboro accident’ or ‘the crash over Goldsboro’. It occurred in 1961, on 23rd January. I remembered this date for life thanks to Pa, who once said:
‘Josh, all residents of our state have to consider this day our second or maybe our main birthday.’
My Pa would never speak frivolously, he wasn’t that kind of a person, and for this reason 23rd January was etched in my memory forever.
1961: it was a hard and heavy time. The CIA had tried an invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba which ended in humiliating failure. A year later there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which both the USA and the Soviets, as the journalists say, ‘developed muscles’ as they limbered up for World War 3.
B-52 bombers with nuclear weapons on board were constantly plying the East coast at that time. In the event of armed conflict and attacks by Soviet ships, they had to destroy them in the ocean away from the United States.
I read the secret report prepared by Parker Jones, an employee of the Sandia national nuclear laboratory who headed the department to ensure operational safety of nuclear weapons. The report was written on the basis of a thorough investigation of the incident. It said that all of us, I mean the United States, miraculously managed to avoid a ‘catastrophe of monstrous scale.’
At first, there were no signs of trouble – the B-52 rising from the Seymour Johnson base near Goldsboro, made a planned flight along the coast and circled back to its turn point, ready for mid-air refueling. On board at the time were two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs with a capacity of four megatons each.
During refuelling the patrol-tired crew lost control of the huge plane, and as a result the B-52’s wing came off. Still flying at high speed, the bomber began to fall apart. Three of the eight crew members were killed instantly, and five escaped by parachute.
Both hydrogen bombs dropped right out of the bomb bays and plummeted to earth. One fell on heathland near the settlement of Faro without any harm; but in the second one detonation mechanisms activated.
A special landing parachute had deployed over the bomb. The surviving pilots, seeing it, begun to pray – they were sure that in several moments there would be a vast explosion.
In Parker Jones’s report, it is stated that three out of the bomb’s four safety mechanisms failed, apparently because of the concussion of the crash. So when the bomb hit the ground near one of the neighboring farms, a detonator activated and the process to detonate the bomb’s core was almost launched. Millions of lives were saved only by the last, fourth, fuse, the so-called low-voltage switch.
One can imagine what the locals thought when they saw the crash of the B-52, and then the descent of the bomb on a parachute. At that time in our country there was real hysteria – they were all afraid of Soviet attacks and nuclear war. People dug shelters, stored weapons, daily necessities, and other things. But they just didn’t know enough about the consequences of a nuclear explosion– many hoped to go into the forest, into remote areas and thus survive.
Perhaps farmers, seeing the bomb on the parachute, took it to be the first signs of a Russian invasion. Maybe they thought of gathering their relatives, maybe, even their cattle, and heading for the trees, without even suspecting that if a nuclear device activated, they wouldn’t outrun the blast wave even in racing cars.
The Mark-39 hydrogen bomb was, of course, not as powerful as the Soviet AH602 ‘Tsar bomb’ with which Khrushchev threatened the whole world. The power of ‘Tsar bomb’ was fifty eight megatons, and the Mark-39’s only four – but even this four was two hundred times more than the power of the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
And if the Mark-39 which fell near a North Carolina farm had blown up, not only would numerous villages and towns nearby have been destroyed, but also Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and even New York. The report’s author estimates that the number of dead would rise beyond one million and if you add the wounded and the victims of radiation, then there would have been tens of millions of casualties.
Naturally, all information on the incident was at once coded. The Mark-39 was deployed five more years, despite its unreliable system of protection against accidental triggering of the detonators. This, I found out, was down to the fact that at that time we just had no other powerful nuclear bombs.
However, all this was long before I was born and is now ancient history.
Because Wilmington stands between two rivers flowing into the ocean bay, there are many channels , islands and moorings. From the windows of our house, especially from the second floor, you could always see ships sailing past Cape Fear and they constantly reminded me that everything in this world is changing, moving – that nothing is permanent, except time, which, as I said, exists regardless of our knowledge of it.