Goldsboro B-52 crash: A bomber carrying two H-bombs breaks up in mid-air over North Carolina. The uranium core of one weapon remains lost.

The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash was an accident that occurred near Goldsboro, North Carolina, United States, on 24 January 1961. A Boeing B-52 Stratofortress carrying two 3.8-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs broke up in mid-air, dropping its nuclear payload in the process. The pilot in command, Walter Scott Tulloch, grandfather of actress Elizabeth Tulloch, ordered the crew to eject at 9,000 ft (2,700 m). Five crewmen successfully ejected or bailed out of the aircraft and landed safely; another ejected, but did not survive the landing, and two of them were killed in the crash. Information declassified since 2013 has shown that one of the bombs was judged by nuclear weapons engineers at the time to have been only one safety switch away from detonation, and that it was "credible" to imagine conditions under which it could have detonated.

A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H-bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon, utilizing nuclear fusion. The most destructive weapons ever created, their yields typically exceed first-generation nuclear weapons by twenty times, with far lower mass and volume requirements. Characteristics of fusion reactions can make possible the use of non-fissile depleted uranium as the weapon's main fuel, thus allowing more efficient use of scarce fissile material. Its multi-stage design is distinct from the usage of fusion in simpler boosted fission weapons. The first full-scale thermonuclear test was carried out by the United States in 1952, and the concept has since been employed by at least the five NPT-recognized nuclear-weapon states: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and France.