OK, history students. Which of these things actually happened in 1961?

John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as president.

East Germany built the Berlin Wall.

The first U.S. astronaut, Navy Cmdr. Alan Shepard Jr., took a 116.5-mile rocket flight.

A nuclear bomb hit the city of Goldsboro, N.C.

The answer is — all four.

The Goldsboro incident happened on a January night when an Air Force bomber let loose with not one, but two, nuclear bombs.

A newspaper headline put it succinctly: “Multi-megaton bomb was virtually ‘armed’ when it crashed to earth.”

We knew it happened, but that was all we knew, until a couple months ago when the National Security Archive offered details of the event.

“The bomb would emit thermal radiation of a 15-mile radius. The blast today, with populations in the area at their current level, would have killed more than 60,000 people.” And, of course, there would have been many deaths from fallout.

Damage by the bombs that hit Japan was astronomical — 150,000 in Hiroshima and 75,000 in Nagasaki.

Those are large, frightening statistics. Also frightening is the fact that those bombs that hit Japan were smaller than the two that fell on Goldsboro, according to information from The University of California-Los Angeles.

The bomb came from a B-52 that suffered “failure of the right wing” (nothing political intended). The plane tore apart, and the two bombs fell to the ground. The parachute opened on one, but not the other. The government explained: “The impact of the aircraft break-up initiated the fusing sequence for both bombs.”

Putting it bluntly — both weapons came alarmingly close to detonating. The bomb with the parachute landed intact. The safety pins that provided power from the generator to the weapon had been yanked; the second bomb had an unopened parachute and landed in free-fall. The impact of the crash put it in the “armed” setting, but fortunately damaged another part of the bomb that needed to be detonated to initiate an explosion.

CNN reported there are at least 21 declassified accounts between 1950 and 1968 of aircraft-related incidents involving nuclear bombs that were lost, and/or accidentally dropped.

Eight crew members were on the plane that crashed, and five survived. Co-pilot Richard Rardin gave an account to the University of North Carolina.

“I hit some trees,” he said. Later, “I had a fix on some lights and started walking. My biggest difficulty getting back was the various and sundry dogs I encountered on the road.”

Those Goldsboro bombs were far more powerful than the two dropped in Japan. Each Goldsboro bomb carried a payload of four megatons — equivalent to four million tons of TNT explosive.

Had the device detonated, fallout would have been deposited over Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York City.

The frightening kicker is this, according to one news account, the bombs “were inadequate in their safety controls. The final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst.”

One bomb fell into a field near the community of Faro, and the other plummeted into a meadow just off Big Daddy’s Road.

One expert noted that, “nuclear weapons are the most dangerous weapons ever made. This technology has never been under our control since the very beginning.”

Jack ReVelle of the University of Oklahoma, said, “as far as I’m concerned we came damn close to having a Bay of North Carolina. The nuclear explosion would have completely changed the Eastern seaboard if it had gone off.”

Naturally, a movie is planned. It will be based on a book, “The Goldsboro Broken Arrow,” written by former Air Force officer Joel Dobson.

During a 60-year career spanning newspapers, radio and television, Frank Roberts has been there and done that. Today, he’s doing it in retirement from North Carolina, but he continues to keep an eye set on Suffolk and an ear cocked on country music. Email him at froberts73@embarqmail.com.