This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show.

On January 23rd, 1961, just four days after President John F. Kennedy was sworn into office,

a B-52 bomber crashed near Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina.

Two H bombs, each 250 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on

Japan, marking the end of World War II, were thrown out and fell at a velocity of 700 miles

per hour and crashed into Goldsboro, North Carolina. Information about this event was kept classified until 2013.

This is the true story of that mission

as told by the man who actually dismantled the hydrogen bombs

in the aftermath of an accident

that could have been the worst man-made disaster in history. He was Earl Smith with the true story of the Goldsboro Broken Arrow.

Well, I graduated high school in 1956 in Hatton, Alabama.

And like everybody else around there, the day after you graduate high school, you go to Kalamazoo, Michigan. So I go to

Calamazoo to visit my brother. I had a brother and two sisters live there, and my brother had a

neighbor about my age, and so we decided to go downtown on a Saturday morning just to fool around,

and so there was a recruiter station. I said, let's go and make that thing. I think we're going to join. So it was in the morning and we were down there. So by 3 o'clock that afternoon, we was pulling out on a train for the processing station in the Air Force. So anyway, when I went back, my brother named was about to have a heart attack, you said, you did what?

I said, I joined Air Force.

No, you didn't.

Yeah, yeah, I did.

I got to leave this afternoon.

And I left.

We signed up on a buddy plan, and after that I never saw my buddy again.

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