Retired EOD technician talks about the time he disarmed two hydrogen bombs

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Nearly 60 years ago, a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying two hydrogen bombs broke apart over rural North Carolina.

The bombs fell into a tobacco field. They didn't go off, but if they had, each 3.8-megaton weapon would've been 250 times more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Lt. Jack ReVelle, then a 25-year-old Air Force munitions expert, was called to the scene. His job: make sure the bombs did not explode.

"What the status of the weapons were at that time was unknown, so we were working in the dark," Jack, now 83, tells his daughter, Karen, 47, at StoryCorps.

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