America's 32 Missing Nukes - The Many Broken Arrow Incidents

On a chilly southern night on February 5, 1958, two pieces of Cold War hardware were flying over the sleepy marshlands of Savannah, Georgia.One was a B -47 bomber loaded with a 7 ,600 -pound thermonuclear bomb, a Mark 15 with a potential yield of several megatons.The other was an F -86 fighter jet on a training mission.In the darkness and rain, the two aircraft collided.The bomber's pilot, Colonel Howard Richardson, felt the shock as the left wing of the fighter ripped through his plane.The fighter pilot ejected safely, a miracle.

The bomber continued flying, but one of its wings was leaking fuel and its bomb bay doors had been damaged.If the bomb broke free on landing, it could have detonated its high explosives inside the fuselage.Richardson faced an impossible choice.Try landing with a 3 .8 megaton weapon hanging precariously under his damaged aircraft, or jettison it and hope for the best.He chose the latter.And somewhere over Wausau Sound, near Tybee Island, he released the Mark 15.

The bomb plunged into the dark water and vanished.In the hours that followed, U .S.Air Force crews scoured the beaches and inlets around Tybee Island.I don't think I have to explain to you how dangerous it is to let a nuclear bomb set around inside of the continental United States.Divers combed the seafloor.

Sonar pings mapped the mud.The search lasted weeks and cost millions of dollars, and in the end, it failed.The government claimed the weapon lacked its plutonium core and could not produce a nuclear detonation.Decades later, congressional testimony suggested that the bomb might have been fully assembled, and the original claims that it didn't have its plutonium were simply to make the public feel better.In 2001, a hydrographic survey found an anomaly buried beneath 5 to 15 feet of silt, an object roughly the size of a Mark 15.The U .

S.Air Force politely deniedto avoid dragging their nets over the spot. AsAs the years went on, locals continued to swim in the ocean and sunbathe at the beach.And to this day, Savannah's water hides a nuclear bomb.Tybee Bomb is not the prologue from a Mission Impossible film.

It's one of dozens of accidents the U .S.military refers to as broken arrows.A broken arrow is a, quote, unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of the weapon.Oscar Morgenstern once warned that with thousands of nuclear weapons in existence, quote, the danger of a nuclear accident in the world is unquestionably increasing.That assessment appears to be the right one because since 1950, the United States has acknowledged 32 broken arrow incidents and six of those are still missing.

I mean, what do you even do with that information?We have lost a total of 32 nukes, and six of them are still out there somewhere.Good luck, I guess.Well, don't worry, because today we're following the yellow radiation sign down a path aligned with Cold War paranoia and some truly head -scratching decisions.We'll explore how the frantic pace of nuclear deterrence created a culture in which bombers flew 24 hours a day, armed with weapons designed to incinerate cities, and how in that environment, Human error, mechanical failure, and sheer bad luck produced moments that make the Tybee bomb look lame in comparison.This is a story about the tension between a civilization's desire for security and the enormous risks it was willing to accept to achieve it.

Even if one of those risks was having a nuclear device go missing within your own border.Or I guess I should say, nuclear devices.Because as mentioned, there were a lot.So hello everybody.Today we're talking about the United States, many broken arrows and it's 32 missing nuclear bombs.Again, six of which are still somewhere.

Every now and then I'll come across a topic that I'll hear about and I'm like, Oh, okay, well that's probably overstated or like, you know, exaggerated for the sake of interest or whatever.But then you look into it and you're like, Oh no, it is really that bad.Great.Well, today is certainly one of those topics.So if you want to become worried about something else, then you're in the right place.And if all that sounds interesting to you, then stick around after the ad as we talk about the many Broken Arrow failures.

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place you right at the helm of the most powerful war machines of our time.Join a worldwide community of over 95 million players in epic PvP battles today and delve into the breathtaking experience that is War Thunder.With an unmatched wealth of high quality content to discover, there's simply no game better suited for fans of military history.We're going to go ahead and get into it, but as always...Thank you for watching.To understand how bombs end up in swamps and plowed into tobacco fields, we should first talk about the operating culture of the early Cold War.

From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the United States built a nuclear deterrent based on speed, readiness, and dispersal.Strategic Air Command, or SAC, trained bomber crews to penetrate enemy defenses, survive interceptions, and deliver nuclear weapons under wartime conditions.This meant that B -47s and B -52s took off at odd hours, flew low -level routes over deserts and oceans, and practiced in darkness and storms.Nuclear weapons were integrated into live military operations.Bomber crews set alert at the end of runways with hydrogen bombs in their bays.Fighters drilled with nuclear air -to -air rockets.

Transport aircraft ferried warheads around the world.If this sounds like a horrible idea, then you're not alone.Even some generals were nervous of these conditions.Jet aircraft of the era were marvels of engineering and harbingers of danger.The B -47 represented a huge leap in speed and range over World War II bombers, but it was a chore to fly.Pilots wrestled with thin wings and complex fuel systems, the aircraft had to be precisely balanced, and it required mid -air refueling, often at night.

Add live nuclear weapons to that mix and the consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic.Yet safety procedures, while extensive, existed within a culture that prized readiness above all else.Crews removed locking pins from bomb release mechanisms during takeoff and landing so they could jettison a weapon in an emergency.And those pins occasionally came out at the worst possible moment.If you're like me, you're probably hearing all this and thinking, why not just do these practice runs without an actual nuclear bomb?You could put like a fake plastic one in there that can even be really heavy.

If you want it to be, just, you know, don't put the nuke inside the plane.Well, practice missions like that were ran, but at a certain point, the United States is developing a lot of bombs, and they want to have them on the ready.I mean, with moments throughout the Cold War, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States thought that they would have to respond to a nuclear event within an hour.So after pilots and crews underwent a lot of training, they began to carry the live munition.With the idea being, any of these practice runs could become a real run in a matter of minutes if need be.It's still kind of absurd and a huge liability, hence the topic of the video today, but it's the same thought process as if you're going to have soldiers stand at guard with guns, the guns might as well be

Just, you know, rather than a lead bullet, now it's a weapon that can destroy an entire city.

You know.

Potato tomato.But to make sure we're all on the same page, and for the five of you who watch this channel and didn't watch Oppenheimer, what is in the bomb itself?A crucial distinction in any discussion of nuclear weapons is between the high explosives that surround the nuclear core and the nuclear core itself.A bomb's high explosives can detonate even if the nuclear core is absent.They're designed to compress the core to start a chain reaction.But if the core isn't there, then the explosion is conventional.

In other words, your standard explosion with a charge that blows up, as opposed to the point of a primed nuclear weapon where the explosion is simply there to make the nuclear core react and go nuclear.Many Broken Arrow incidents involved weapons without their cores, which can also be referred to as capsules.In these cases, the crash scattered high explosive fragments and sometimes bits of depleted uranium, but no nuclear explosion was possible.In other incidents, the core was present but not inserted into the bomb, reducing but not eliminating the risk of nuclear yield.This distinction is why, despite 32 broken arrows, none has resulted in an unintended nuclear detonation.At least, you know, not yet.

Fingers crossed that those fishermen don't, you know, drag their nets too far across the bottom of the river.It's also why the Tybee bomb remains contentious.The official narrative says the Mark 15 lacked its plutonium pit, but a 1966 congressional testimony released in 1994 suggested otherwise, noting that the Tybee bomb, quote, was indeed a complete, fully functional bomb with a plutonium pit.If that's true, a bomb with a yield of 3 .8 megatons, about 190 times more powerful thanThe 32 acknowledged Broken Arrow incidents include bombs jettisoned from burning aircraft, weapons blown apart by conventional explosives, and lost warheads sitting at the bottom of oceans.Six of these weapons have never been recovered.

From Alaska to the Mediterranean Sea, from rural South Carolina to the Azores, the accidents span the globe.Each has its own flavor of absurdity and bureaucratic denial, of course.But it all starts with the first broken arrow.The Cold War hadn't even reached its 10th birthday when, on February 13, 1950, a B -36 bomber departed Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska on a simulated combat mission to Carswell AFB in Texas.Six hours into the flight, the aircraft developed serious mechanical difficulties and lost three of its six engines.Icing conditions quickly made an already bad emergency worse, and the crew couldn't maintain altitude.

With mountains looming, the crew did what their procedures told them to do.they headed out over the Pacific and dropped their weapon from 8 ,000 feet.Witnesses reported a bright flash and a shockwave.The bomb's high explosives detonated on impact.The plutonium core was not installed.Thank God.

So the only explosion that went off was the explosives that were intended to set off a plutonium core had it been in there.The B -36 then limped towards Canada.Eventually, the crew bailed out in the aircraft crash on Vancouver Island as the weapon sank somewhere into the dark ocean waters.This was the first time the United States had jettisoned a nuclear bomb and, unfortunately, it wasn't the last.If dropping a bomb in the ocean wasn't enough, later, on April 11, 1950, a B -29 crashed into a mountain near Manzano Base, New Mexico, minutes after takeoff.The crash destroyed the bomb's casing and scattered

high explosives, but because the nuclear capsule was not inserted, there was no risk of a nuclear yield.A few months later, a B -50 on a training mission plowed into the ground near Lebanon, Ohio, killing 16 crew members.The high explosives detonated, but again, no nuclear material was aboard.Seven years later, a B -36 was ferrying a nuclear weapon from Texas to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.As it approached the base at about 1 ,700 feet, the bomb simply fell out of the bomb bay, taking the doors with it.Which, I'm not a plane expert, obviously wasn't in the Air Force, and I understand these bombs are designed to be released quickly if need be, but I feel like...

Maybe they're designed to release a little too quickly?If they can just fall out sometimes and take, you know, the doors underneath the aircraft with them.Just a thought.The weapons parachutes deployed, but the altitude was too low and the bomb hit the ground south of the airfield, detonating its high explosives.The resulting crater was 25 feet wide and 12 feet deep, with debris scattered nearly a mile away.Fortunately, the nuclear core was not inserted.

But why did the bomb drop?Well, standard procedure at the time required removing the locking pin so the crew could jettison the weapon quickly if needed.The crew was preparing to land, the pin was out, and well, you know.It's a big, heavy bomb, so gravity did the rest.Remember kids, if your job ever involves carrying a thermonuclear weapon in an aircraft for some reason, maybe secure them with more than a single pin.About a month after the Tybee bomb, which we talked about at the beginning of the video, another B -47 accidentally jettisoned a nuclear weapon, this time near Florence, South Carolina.

March 11, 1958, the bomber had just leveled off at 15 ,000 feet when the navigator reached to secure the bomb's harness.Somehow, he triggered the emergency release installation.over the United States.The Mark 6 bomb fell through the bomb bay doors and plummeted towards the countryside, where it landed in the backyard of the Gregg family and exploded, blasting a crater 35 feet wide.to imagine.Like what was the day like before?

Were they like eating breakfast or were they just hanging out you know talking about work that day and then the United States Air Force drops a nuke in their backyard like they didn't do anything.There's no way you can prepare for that eventuality.No one is prepared for the Air Force just dropping a nuke in your backyard.The explosives demolished a farmhouse and injured several people.Fortunately, the bomb's nuclear capsule was not on board.The Gregg family received about $55 ,000 in compensation, which is roughly $600 ,000 today.

I would find the most expensive attorney in the world and I would get millions.The U .S.dropped a nuke in my backyard?You're paying for my great -grandkids' college.The event became known as the Mars Bluff Incident.

The Gregg family would eventually appear on the television show, I've Got a Secret, in 1969.and stump the panel trying to guess what their secret was.And I'm pretty sure no one would have believed them had they not had the checks from the government to prove it.If you really want your stomach to drop, then consider the events of January 24th, 1961.A B -52 Stratofortress was flying over North Carolina when it developed a fuel leak in the right wing.The leak caused a structural failure and the bomber broke apart mid -air.

The aircraft was carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, each with a yield of 3 .8 megatons.Not even one nuclear bomb, two hydrogen bombs?As the plane disintegrated, the bombs fell free.One slammed into a muddy field at over 700 miles per hour and buried itself more than 180 feet deep.The second deployed its parachute and executed its disarming sequence exactly as designed.What followed was the failure of several safeguards designed to prevent a catastrophe.

All of the bomb's internal systems were still armed, and this bomb was about to blow up in North Carolina.But by the miracle of engineering, and probably the conventional miracle of, you know, God, a single low -voltage switch prevented the bomb from detonating.The supervisor of nuclear weapon safety at Sandia National Laboratories later remarked that if not for that one switch, the United States would have suffered a quote, major catastrophe in spades.This is the kind of horror that really gets under your skin.The bombs that could have gone off, but didn't.Just imagine how different life could be right now had one of these broken arrow incidents gone differently.

Lucky for us, the Mark 39 had six interlocking safety devices.Four had failed, one was damaged when the bomb hit the ground, but it was the last one that saved the day.Recovery teams dug up as much of the water as they could.could, but part of the secondary, which is the part containing uranium and the thermonuclear fuel, remains under the field to this day.The Air Force bought and fenced the land.North Carolina residents occasionally joke about having a built -in nightlight.

On the bright side, you could argue that the bomb worked flawlessly.It fell, armed itself, and would have exploded over its target had it not been for that one little safety switch.So, you know, all according to plan, right?Not all Broken Arrow incidents involve strategic bombers.In December of 1965, the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga was conducting a nuclear weapons loading exercise near Okinawa.An A -4E Skyhawk jet was being moved from the hangar to the flight deck when it rolled off an elevator and into the ocean.

On board the jet was one megaton B -43 nuclear bomb.The aircraft, pilot, and weapon sank to the bottom of the Philippine Sea, an incident which remained classified for decades.So a pilot dies, an aircraft is lost, and a nuclear weapon is now at the bottom of the sea because someone forgot to lock the brakes on the jet, I guess.When it came to light in 1989, it caused an international uproar because U .S.policies supposedly prohibited nuclear weapons from Japanese territory.

Japan promptly insisted that the U .S.never bring nukes into its ports again.And that bomb is still down there, waiting.You know, it's just... some potential nuclear components surrounded by a high explosive that would set them off at the bottom of the ocean.I'm sure that will never go wrong, ever.

The most famous broken arrow may be the one that took place on January 17th, 1966, near the fishing village of Palomares in Spain.A B -52 was refueling from a KC -135 tanker at 31 ,000 feet when the two aircraft collided.The tanker exploded.The B -52 brokeThat's right, four.Bomb 1 landed in a dry riverbed.

Its parachute did not deploy, and the bomb's high explosives detonated on impact, scattering plutonium over the surrounding farmland.Bomb 2 landed nearby and also exploded, contaminating hundreds of acres.Bomb 3's parachute worked, and it landed intact in the countryside and was recovered quickly, while Bomb 4 drifted out to sea.Locals quickly dubbed it La Bomba.For weeks, the U .S.

Navy combed the Mediterranean with submarines and deep -sea trawlers.Spanish fishermen joined the search, motivated by reward money and by, you know, not wanting a hydrogen bomb in their backyard.The search zone was roughly the size of Rhode Island.On April 7th, about eight days after the accident, Navy divers located the bomb at a depth of 2 ,550 feet and halted up.The explosions at Palomares did not produce nuclear yields, but the conventional detonation spread plutonium dust across about 558 acres of farmland.U .

S.and Spanish crews scraped away 1 ,400 tons of contaminated soil and shipped it to a nuclear waste site in South Carolina.At one point, U .S.Ambassador Angier Biddle -Duke and Spain's tourism minister staged a swim off the beach to prove it was safe.Which, spoiler alert, plutonium doesn't dissolve in seawater.

So today, Palomares remains one of the most heavily studied radiological sites in Europe.In 2015, nearly 50 years later, the U .S.and Spain signed a memorandum to remove the remaining contamination.Sometimes, when you break an arrow, it takes half a century to clean up the splinters.another B -52 was flying a chrome dome mission, one of those 24 -hour airborne alerts meant to keep nuclear bombers constantly in the air.

This one was surgery near Toole Air Base in Greenland, watching for Soviet missiles.Inside, a seat cushion in the navigator's compartment caught fire.The fire grew and filled the cockpit with smoke.The crew attempted an emergency landing, but were forced to bail out.The plane crashed onto the sea ice of North Star Bay, breaking apart and burning for hours.The aircraft carried four hydrogen bombs.

The fire detonated their high explosives, scattering radioactive debris over the ice and into the bay.The tool cleanup was an engineering nightmare.Workers wearing protective gear scraped up 237 ,000 cubic feet of contaminated ice, snow, and debris and shipped it to the United States for disposal.They built a temporary camp on the ice, complete with a bar nicknamed The Pole Inn, where off -duty soldiers drank beer while watching the Northern Lights.The absurdity of all that needs to be taken into account.You are cleaning up another country's nuclear disaster, on the ice as you drink at a makeshift bar under the northern lights.

Life can be so strange sometimes.Meanwhile, Danish politicians demanded accountability because similar to the incident near Japan, Denmark had banned nuclear weapons from its territory.And before you correct me in the comments, Greenland was a Danish territory at the time.The U .S.had quietly stationed nuclear -armed bombers there anyway.

The Thule crash forced Washington to end Chrome Dome flights.So, if you ever watched Doctor Strangelove and thought to yourself, surely nothing like that ever happened, well, reality, as it seems from the rest of this video, is alarmingly close to fiction sometimes.Not all missing nuclear weapons are bombs.Some are torpedoes.On May 22nd, 1968, the Nuclear Attack Submarine USS Scorpionfailed to return from a patrol in the Atlantic.

The Navy searched for months.In October, the wreck was found on the seafloor, 400 miles southwest of Azores.All 99 crew members, sadly, were dead.And the Scorpion had been carrying two nuclear -tipped torpedoes.Amongst the worst possible deaths that could happen to you ever, dying in a submarine has to be up there.The official investigation concluded that a mechanical failure likely caused an internal torpedo explosion.

But some sailors speculated that the submarine had been torpedoed by a Soviet vessel.Declassified SOSUS, or sound surveillance system recordings, captured a loud underwater explosion just before contact with the Scorpion was lost.Whatever happened, two nuclear weapons sank with the boat, and the Navy continues to monitor the wreck for leakage.So if you're ever considering swimming in that area, Don't.By the 1970s, the pace of broken arrows slowed, thankfully, but they didn't stop.In 1979, a Titan II missile at a silo near Rock, Kansas collapsed after a fire, causing the missile to fall to the bottom of the silo.

Thankfully, in that case, the nuclear warhead was recovered intact.To give you an idea of how fragile these things can be, Less than a year later, in September of 1980 at Damascus, Arkansas, a maintenance technician dropped a socket from a ratchet wrench.The socket punctured the fuel tank of another Titan II missile, causing a volatile fuel leak.That's right, someone just dropped a socket, and somehow that can puncture the side of a nuclear weapon.Hours later, a spark ignited the fuel.The missile exploded with the force of several kilotons.

The 740 -ton silo door was thrown into the air.The nuclear warhead landed in a ditch about 100 feet away.The safety mechanisms worked.Well, you know, relative safety mechanisms worked.No radioactive material was released.One airman died and 21 were injured.

The Damascus incident later became the subject of the book and film, Command and Control.Because it illustrated that even highly engineered systems can be undone by something as small as a drop socket.So you know, sleep soundly tonight thinking about that.That all it takes is one maintenance guy to drop a wrench for, you know, a nuclear bomb to go off.The last widely publicized nuclear mishap in the United States occurred on August 29th, 2007.Personnel at Manoa Air Force Base in North Dakota loaded six AGM -129 cruise missiles onto a B -52, thinking the weapons were unarmed training rounds.

When in fact, six of the missiles contained W -80 nuclear warheads.The people that are carrying them should probably know the severity of what they've got.The bomber flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where the nuclear -armed missile set unguarded on the tarmac for 36 hours, because again, everyone else thought that they weren't nukes.No one noticed until a maintenance crew checked the serial numbers.An investigation blamed complacency and a breakdown in procedural discipline.And heads, obviously, rolled.

Even in the 21st century, with all our technology, the most dangerous point of failure is still sometimes a disinterested human with a clipboard.Nuclear weapons are complex machines designed to explode only under very specific conditions.Modern nuclear weapons require precise timing, correct arming codes, and the right environmental cues, such as barometric pressure changes, to detonate.Early weapons relied on removable nuclear cores that could be inserted only after takeoff.Safety engineers implemented multiple redundant locks, safing rods, and environmental sensors to ensure that accidentscould not produce a nuclear yield.

After the Palomares and Thule incidents, designers introduced unique signal codes so that no single electrical pulse could arm a weapon.Which again, It's the kind of thing I don't think you have to have multiple nuke incidents to realize, but whatever.They also developed insensitive high explosives that are less likely to detonate from shock or fire.The result is that in every broken arrow incident, the high explosives detonated without triggering the nuclear core.That said, safety systems don't always work as intended.Technology can lower the probability of disaster, but it cannot reduce it to zero.

As mentioned, many broken arrows occur due to human factors.fatigue, miscommunication, complacency, or pressure to meet training requirements.In the early Cold War, the Strategic Air Command's emphasis on readiness led to routine flights with live weapons.The culture of secrecy also exasperated airs.Many of these incidents were classified, meaning pilots and maintenance crews often couldn't discuss accidents with others, even those who might learn from them.Lessons were sometimes slow to propagate.

You can't repeat history if nobody knows the history.After Palomares, the Air Force improved weapon safeties.After Thule, they ended continuous airborne alerts.But there was no comprehensive public accounting.It wasn't until the 1990s, when researchers filed requests using the Freedom of Information Act and the Air Force Declassified Summaries, that the public learned just how many times we almost detonated or lost bombs that could have leveled an innocent town or destroyed water supplies.Thankfully for all of us, the legacy of broken arrows isn't all bleak.

each incident prompted technological reforms.After early crashes, the Air Force improved bomb release mechanisms and introduced secure locking pins.Which again, I think I would have thought of that beforeThe Goldsboro near -miss led to the adoption of permissive action links, or PALs, coded switches that require correct codes to arm a weapon.After Palomares and Thule, weapons designers moved away from highly sensitive high explosives and added unique signals to ensure that stray electrical currents could not arm a bomb.The Damascus incident spurred upgrades to missile silo maintenance protocols and the eventual retirement of Titan II missiles.

Cause you know, probably a bad idea if these things can go off because again, someone dropped a wrench.Organizational culture evolved as well.SAC's airborne alert missions ended in 1968 after the Thule crash.Bombers were moved to ground alert, reducing the number of flights with live weapons.Maintenance practices improved.The military established the Defense Nuclear Agency and, later, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to oversee safety.

Nuclear safety inspections — no -notice evaluations of units that handled nuclear weapons — became more stringent.The 2007 Minnow -Barksdale incident resulted in a temporary stand -down and the dismissal of several senior officers.Airmen who work around nuclear weapons now undergo rigorous training and psychological screening.The result is that the number of broken arrows has decreased dramatically since the 1980s.Or at least you know.The incidents that we know about.

Yet, complacency lurks.Decades after the Cold War, it's still possible to load nuclear weapons onto a bomber without anyone noticing.In 2013, reports resurfaced that the Air Force had failed a nuclear safety inspection because of low morale and disciplinary issues.For one, it's nice that they're looking for things that specific.It keeps the safety protocols higher.But also, you're telling me that there were nukes given to groups that had, quote, disciplinary issues?

As long as nuclear weapons exist, the possibility of a broken arrow is a possibility.And yet still, the physical remnants of some of these accidents remain part of our landscape.A Mark 15 sits under Georgia's coastal mud.A plutonium -contaminated field in North Carolina is fenced off by the U .S.government.

Spanish tomato farms at Palomares are still periodically tested for plutonium.Thule's icy bay contains traces of American weapons.The wreck of the Scorpion slowly corrodes on the seafloor.And the human impact should not be forgotten.Airmen died in crashes and cleanups.Families lost homes and livelihoods.

Villages were exposed to radiation.And there's the psychological toll.The knowledge that your backyard or coastline could be hiding a bomb powerful enough to destroy a city.If all these stories make you want to build a bunker, then take solace in this.Despite the mishaps, none of the Broken Arrow incidents resulted in an unintended nuclear detonation.That is not an accident.

Weapons designers built layers of safety, and in every case those layers held or mitigated the damage.Nuclear weapons are more robust than pop culture suggests.They do not explode like firecrackers when dropped.Some accidents came terrifyingly close, like with Goldsboro's lone switch, Palomar's scattered plutonium, or Damascus's warhead thrown from its silo, but they did not cross the final threshold.However, we should resist the temptation to declare the system foolproof.As the historian Eric Schlosser argues, the safety record is, quote, mixed.

To say, it never happened, therefore it never will, is to misunderstand probability.Each near miss is evidence that our margin for error is not infinite.Think of aviation.The airline industry has a remarkable safety record, but that doesn't mean planes never crash.When they do, investigators identify the cause and design fixes, which the writer for this script, Logan, put, this is a wonderful thing to think and write about while I'm about to do a cross -country flight tomorrow morning.Well, guess what, Logan?

I haven't heard that you're dead.So, looks like you were fine.grow up.Nuclear weapon accidents follow a similar pattern, but with higher stakes.Another analogy is chemical plants.They often operate for decades without incident, until a combination of equipment failure and human error produces a disaster like Chernobyl.

When these disasters happen, they reshape entire regions and sometimes even the world for generations.Nuclear weapons are designed to release unimaginable energy, where even one mistake could devastate a region.Safety culture must therefore be relentless.Naturally, whenever a story like this becomes public, Hollywood can't stop its temptation to capitalize.John Woo's Broken Arrow features stolen nuclear weapons and a rogue pilot.The 1996 movie, Executive Decision, references a missing bomb in the Atlantic.

Video games like Fallout play on the backdrop of a post -apocalyptic world littered with nukes.Reality is both less spectacular and more disturbing.The actual incidents involve no villains plotting world domination.only tired crewmen, mechanical failures, and bureaucratic mishaps.If anything, the boring simplicity of these accidents is what makes them so terrifying to think about.There was no villain scheming some kind of master plan, there was just a pilot jettisoning a bomb to save his crew, or a technician simply dropping a wrench.

In the 1950s, Oscar Morgenstern predicted that with thousands of nuclear weapons, accidents were inevitable.And he was right.Broken arrows are features of a system that prize deterrence above safety.Even the most sophisticated technologies are vulnerable to human error and mechanical failure.There's a poetic irony to the idea that some of the most powerful weapons ever created now lie quietly under mud and ice.The Tybee bomb rests in its silt bed, a relic of a fevered era when the U .

S.and U .S .S .R.prepared for a war that never came.

The Goldsboro field grows soybeans above a buried thermonuclear secondary.Spanish farmers can land on it.once glittered with plutonium.Greenland's ice sheet slowly melts above fragments of American bombs.The broken arrows are reminders of the times we almost erased our own cities by accident.So if you're ever on the beaches of Tybee Island, imagine the Mark 15 resting quietly under the mud.

Fishermen pass overhead, children build sandcastles, and pelicans dive for fish.Somewhere down there lies 3 .8 megatons of potential energy.It's a macabre treasure, and a reminder that sometimes the scariest bombs are the ones we forget about.The ones that didn't go off, but could have.And that is a rundown of America's 32 missing nuclear bombs.Some of which are just there, and there's not a lot we can do about it.

Isn't that comforting?As mentioned near the end, I really think the most disturbing element of this is that there was no ill will.It wasn't some grand design that overdid our grand design of safety.It was just that our design of safety isn't always so grand.There's obviously downsides to the modern information age, you know, and the fact that everyone, like, is constantly inundated with information about everything all the time.But it's also nice because I feel like situations like this would be much harder to cover up.

Now, there seems to be more accountability due to public opinion when things like this happen, and that is comforting.But it's also just not great that things like this happen, and happen with such frequency.But if our modern standards make you feel comfortable, or just the knowledge that these things happened in the first place is terrifying, either way, you're welcome.

And I believe that should do it for now.

And above all else, we just want to say thank you for watching.Let me know if you like content like this over on this channel, kind of just like a series of small stories that relates back to one theme.There's some other topics that on their own, like the individual story would only be like a few minutes long, but I've thought about grouping a bunch of them together for a video topic like this, so let me know if you're into that.Everyone who made this video possible.including Logan, who wrote the script and didn't die in a plane crash, I think, will be credited in the description, so be sure to show them some love.Uploads here Mondays at noon, hypothetically, except for this video, which I took a vacation on beforehand, so I was really late to getting it.

My bad.Typically uploads here Mondays at noon, and then content once or twice a month over on Wendigoon, and then whenever I decide to you know, actually play video games again, content over on Winter Glitch.And before you go, make sure to check out today's sponsor, War Thunder, and blow up some tanks.Play the game now for free on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, or mobile using my links in the pinned comment or video description.Those of you who haven't played War Thunder yet or are returning after a break of at least six months will receive a massive bonus pack on PC and consoles, including premium vehicles, 100 ,000 silver lions and seven days premium account.All in all, I believe that should do it for now.

But before I go, we just want to say thank you for watching.We hope that you enjoyed and we'll see you in the next one.But, you know, I do wonder if one of these nukes fell into my backyard and then, you know, the government comes to take it.Could they?You know, because now I have a nuke.And I could be standing over it with like a hammer and they're like, hey, can you give us the nuke back?

And I'm like, what are you going to do?I have a nuke in a metropolitan area.So I think now I get to do the negotiating.So maybe this is my nuke now.I'll make it into like a lawn ornament or something.