The Bomb in the Cabbage Patch: America's Closest Call with an Accidental Nuke

A faulty light and a misplaced hand aboard a B-47 bomber led to the U.S. Air Force accidentally dropping an atomic bomb on a family's backyard in 1958. The nuclear payload was missing, but the resulting explosion revealed just how close the Cold War came to disaster at home.

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A Perfectly Normal Tuesday

For six-year-old Helen Gregg and her nine-year-old sister Frances, March 11, 1958, was an afternoon for their backyard playhouse. Their sleepy community of Mars Bluff, South Carolina, was a place where nothing much ever happened. As they played with their cousin, a low rumble grew into a piercing roar overhead. It was a familiar sound in the Cold War era—the sound of a B-47 Stratojet bomber from a nearby base. But this time, the sound was followed by a silence, and then an impact that felt like the world cracking open.

Trouble at 30,000 Feet

High above the Gregg family's property, the crew of that B-47 was having a bad day. They were part of Operation Snow Flurry, a training exercise designed to simulate the deployment of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. As they flew from Georgia towards the UK, a single warning light blinked on the instrument panel. It indicated that the locking pin securing their primary payload, a 10,000-pound Mark 6 atomic bomb, was not properly engaged. The captain ordered his navigator and bombardier, Captain Bruce Kulka, to investigate.

The Handle

Kulka made his way to the bomb bay. He had to physically check the pin to ensure the bomb wouldn't accidentally deploy over the Atlantic. Reaching for a solid handhold in the cramped space, he grabbed what he thought was a support bar to pull himself up. It was not. He had mistakenly grabbed the emergency bomb release handle. Instantly, the bomb bay doors snapped open and the Mark 6, armed with 7,600 pounds of conventional explosives, detached from its shackle and began its silent plummet toward the unsuspecting farmland below.

The Sky Falls

The Gregg children never saw it coming. The bomb, stripped of its nuclear core for safety during transport, was essentially a massive conventional weapon. It slammed into Walter Gregg's vegetable garden, just yards from the house. The resulting explosion was immense. It blasted a crater 70 feet wide and 35 feet deep, vaporizing trees and demolishing the family home. The playhouse where the children were moments before was obliterated. Miraculously, though injured by the blast and flying debris, the entire family survived. Walter Gregg, running from his workshop, found his dazed and bleeding family in the ruins of their yard.

A Crater in the Cold War

Initial reports were chaotic. Locals assumed a plane had crashed. But when Air Force personnel in radiation suits descended on the property and cordoned it off, the truth began to emerge. The United States Air Force had accidentally bombed its own citizens. In official terminology, the Mars Bluff incident was a Broken Arrow—the codename for an accident involving a nuclear weapon that does not create a risk of nuclear war. This one was frighteningly close.

The Price of an Accident

The Gregg family, their home and livelihood destroyed, sued the federal government for their losses. They were eventually awarded a settlement of $54,000, the equivalent of just over half a million dollars today. The crater, a permanent scar on the landscape, became a local curiosity and a stark reminder of the day the war came home by mistake.

The Unseen Fallout

The story of Mars Bluff is more than just a bizarre historical footnote. It is one of at least 32 documented Broken Arrow incidents during the Cold War. These events, from bombs falling into the sea to planes carrying nuclear payloads crashing on land, paint a terrifying picture of the era's hidden dangers. They reveal a reality where the greatest threat wasn't always an enemy missile silo thousands of miles away, but a faulty light and a simple, human mistake just a few miles overhead.

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