The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History

Twenty-four hours earlier, across the ocean, Captain Charles Wendorf sat in Saint Luke's Methodist Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, teaching his weekly Sunday school class to a group of lanky teenagers. Thirty years old, blue-eyed, and athletic, Wendorf sported a blond buzz cut and a relaxed confidence that belied his years. Wendorf had it all — a wife, three kids, a house, and a great job flying B-52 bombers. He also held a deep, earnest faith in God, America, and the U.S. Air Force, a faith tempered by an easy, self-deprecating manner and a gentle sense of humor. He had the disarming habit of starting sentences with the phrase “Well, I guess …” When asked if the kids in his Sunday school class looked up to him, a hotshot pilot, he chuckled and said in his aw-shucks way, “Well, I guess I suppose they did.”

When the class finished, Wendorf got into his car with his wife, Betty, for the drive back to their home on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. It was early in the afternoon. Wendorf had to be at squadron headquarters for a preflight briefing at 3:30 p.m., and he wanted to get home in time for a quick nap. In the car, Betty spoke up. She had a bad feeling about tonight's flight and wished Charlie could get out of it. Wendorf reassured his wife; he had flown this mission more than fifty times before, it was perfectly routine, there was nothing to worry about. She dropped the subject. There was no point in arguing; they both knew that the Air Force always won.

Wendorf had been in the Air Force his entire adult life, starting with ROTC when he was a student at Duke. He had entered flight training right after graduation and earned his wings in October 1959.

His Air Force supervisors called him a born pilot. Wendorf had spent the last five and a half years behind the controls of B-52s, logging 2,100 flying hours in that plane alone. Initially disappointed to be assigned to the lumbering B-52, rather than a glamorous fighter plane, he eventually came to believe it far more challenging to manage a seven-man crew than a fighter plane and rose to become the youngest aircraft commander in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), his part of the Air Force. He also came to love his plane. “The airplane is huge, it's mammoth,” he said. “But if you could fly that airplane like I could, you could thread a needle with it.”

Wendorf got home from church around 2 p.m. and took his nap. When he woke up, he put on his olive green flight suit, grabbed his flight gear and briefcase, and headed to squadron headquarters.

There, he checked his box for messages, found nothing, and met up with the rest of his crew for the preflight briefing. On this mission, Wendorf would be sharing pilot duties with two other men. His copilot was twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Michael Rooney. Only four years junior to Wendorf, Rooney had a hard-partying lifestyle that made him seem younger. One writer described the pilot as a jolly bachelor who enjoyed chasing skirts in nearby Raleigh. Rooney said the writer should have included Durham, Charlotte, and Goldsboro as well. His bachelor status made him a fish out of water in SAC, where most of the airmen were married with kids. SAC wives like Betty Wendorf fussed over the young man, inviting him for dinner and stuffing him with home-cooked food. Rooney's close friendship with the Wendorf family led to a lot of easy banter between the two men. Rooney had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a longtime rival of Wendorf's Duke, and for the two pilots, trashing the other's alma mater was an endless source of amusement.

Like many young men, Rooney had joined the Air Force with dreams of becoming a fighter pilot.

His grades in flight school had put that dream out of reach, at least temporarily. He respected the B-52 but didn't enjoy flying it; it was too much like driving a truck.

That morning, while Wendorf was teaching Sunday school, Rooney, a practicing Catholic, went to Mass. (“I may have been doing something wild the night before,” he said, “but I'm not telling.”) Then he changed into uniform and drove his big, white 1963 Chevy Impala convertible to headquarters. The parking lot was nearly empty that Sunday, so he parked illegally in a senior officer's spot. He figured he'd be back before the officer showed up for work.

The third pilot that day was Major Larry Messinger, at forty-four the oldest and most experienced member of the crew and less inclined to joking around. He was on board as the relief pilot, standard practice for long flights. Messinger had served in the Air Force for more than twenty years, collecting a cluster of medals along the way. When the United States entered World War II, he signed up for the Army Air Forces right away and was soon rumbling over Germany in a B-17