I would like a little bit of an explanation of how the Mk-39 hydrogen bomb ended up buried about 185 feet in the soil (as I was told) of Goldsboro NC. As far as I know, there was an incident where a plane had crash. I would also like to know why bombers were carrying armed nuclear bombs over the east coast of the United States in the first place.
/u/restricteddata had a pretty cool blog article from a while ago about this accident
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/27/final-switch-goldsboro-1961/
This video produced by Sandia National Labs explains the crash very well (it is not long). It was basically just a "routine" sort of accident, the sort of thing that happens every so many hours of planes flying around.
The really interesting question is the second piece, why there were nuclear-armed bombers flying around in the first place. The plane in question was part of the "Airborne Alert," a program that for a decade in the 1960s had at least a dozen B-52s with H-bombs in the air at all times, 24 hours a day. The idea was that if the USSR did do some kind of surprise attack, there would always be planes ready to attack it.
In retrospect it was a classic blunder — that's over 200 B-52 missions a week, and around 145,000 flying hours a year. Like all technologies, B-52s have a failure rate, and it is about one major failure every 20,000 hours of flying time. So you'd expect about seven major accidents a year by the numbers alone.
So there were numerous significant accidents in this period, including Goldsboro, but also accidents in Palomares, Spain, and Thule, Greenland. After the Thule accident they ended the program and the number of accidents involving airplanes loaded with H-bombs dropped to almost zero.
Schlosser's Command and Control has great discussions of these kinds of issues.