You have to wonder whether, during the 1962 crisis over Cuba's missiles aimed at America, the man in charge of the nation's defense ever thought about the time the year before when his department almost blew up part of eastern North Carolina.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who died Monday, shocked the state in 1983 when he revealed that a B-52 bomber crash in 1961 near Goldsboro was one switch from detonating a 24-megaton hydrogen bomb.

The bomb was about 1,800 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. It was capable of destroying everything within a 10-mile radius.

McNamara was defense secretary from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In his later years, he was a proponent of nuclear disarmament. In a 1983 news conference in Washington, he cited the Goldsboro incident as an example of the need for reducing nuclear weapons.

"The bomb's arming mechanism had six or seven steps to go through to detonate, and it went through all but one, we discovered later," he said. (N&O)