Earlier this week declassified documents from the National Security Archive were released and revealed an incident back in 1961 that could have resulted in the decimation of a North Carolina town.

On Jan. 24, 1961, a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber carrying two nuclear bombs while flying over Goldsboro, N.C., broke in half after it suffered a "failure of the right wing," according to the report.

The two bombs were released from the belly of the plane as it split apart. The parachute opened for one of the bombs, but the other parachute didn't, allowing it to freefall toward the Earth, CNN reported.

"The impact of the aircraft breakup initiated the fuzing sequence for both bombs," the report read.

The first bomb, landed intact thanks to its parachute inflating and didn't detonate because the safing pins that powered the bomb from a generator had been pulled out. The impact from the second bomb that landed without the parachute put the weapon in the "armed" setting but the impact also damaged another part of the bomb that was necessary to detonate.

"By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted," said then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

At the time, the population living in Wayne County, N.C., which includes Goldsboro, was roughly 84,000. Raleigh, the state capital, is 50 miles northwest of Goldsboro, while the Army's Fort Bragg base in Fayettvile is 60 miles southwest, according to CNN.

Had the two nuclear bombs detonated, it's estimated that about 28,000 people would have died and another 26,000 more could have been injured. The Univeresity of California-Los Angeles researchers estimated that the initial blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed 330,000 and 250,000, respectively. By December, the two cities' death tolls reached to an estimated 90,000 and 60,000 people.

The Defense Department's declassified documents also revealed that the Goldsboro incident was just one of 21 similar incidents to occur between 1950 and 1968. The department has also disclosed that between 1950 and 1980, there were 32 incidents involving nuclear weapons, CNN reported.

The 21 incidents between 1950 and 1968 included mishaps where a nuclear weapon had either been lost, accidentally dropped, jettisoned for safety reasons or was aboard a plane that crashed. The accidents happened in Greenland, Spain, Morocco, England and various U.S. states as well as over the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.