On the recordJanuary 29, 2018
today I wish to honor the legacy and heroic service of Mr. Earl Smith. An Alabama native and unsung American hero, Smith's willingness to put himself in harm's way saved an untold number of lives. More than 50 years ago, as a young officer in the U.S. Air Force, Smith was the on-call explosive ordnance disposal, EOD, technician at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, NC. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred throughout his shift on the evening of January 23, 1961, when the 24-year-old Smith received an alarming phone call. He was informed that two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs had broken loose from a B-52 bomber and landed in a field just outside of Goldsboro. He was told the general location of the bombs, but other details were unknown. Upon arriving to the crash site, Smith and other EOD technicians found that one bomb had crashed at such a speed that it was buried underground, but the other was visible and appeared to be intact. Although the protocol was to alert the Atomic Energy Commission before inspecting the bomb, Smith's instinct was to act quickly. Dr. Ralph Lapp, a physicist involved in developing America's first nuclear bombs as part of the Manhattan Project, stated in his review of the Goldsboro incident that ``one simple, dynamo-technology low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.'' Smith graduated from the U.S. Navy's EOD school just 9 months prior to the incident.…
