When I wrote about the Titanic someone asked me what’s my next cheerful topic going to be – nuclear disasters? That came back to me recently when I found out about the IndieWeb Carnival topic No Way?! hosted by Alex Hsu.

When it comes to nuclear accidents, everyone knows about Chernobyl and Fukushima, but there have been interesting cases of nuclear warheads getting lost as well. Broken Arrow is not only a 1996 movie starring John Travolta and featuring missing nuclear weapons, but an actual US military codename for nuclear accidents. It’s rather disturbing that such a concept even needs its own codeword, given that nuclear weapons are one of the last things you want to have accidents with. It turns out, however, that people are human and humans make mistakes even when the stakes are high, so here we are.

Some of the most famous of these Broken Arrow cases are:

The 1966 Palomares accident. During the Cold War it was customary for the US bombers to fly around with nuclear weapons, because while in the air those weapons were considered to be safe from a surprise attack by the Soviet Union, and the bombers could also easily be sent for a counterattack in that case. This was called Operation Chrome Dome.

In January 1966 one of these bombers collided mid-air with a tanker while attempting to refuel. The bomber was carrying four thermonuclear bombs. One of the nuclear bombs fell into the sea and the rest to the land near the village of Palomares. The nuclear bombs didn’t go off but the conventional explosives inside two of them did, breaking the weapons apart and distributing radioactive material widely around the area. The US and Spain jointly removed a whopping 1750 tons of radioactive soil and shipped it to the US for disposal. Wikipedia still reports that as of 2025 some contaminated land still remains. All the bombs and their parts were, according to public information, properly recovered though – the one that fell into the sea after almost three months of searching.

Almost exactly two years later, in January 1968, the very similar Thule accident took place. A bomber crashed on ice in Greenland and the conventional explosives inside the weapons spread the radioactive material again, leading to yet another massive cleanup and recovery operation. This time a major part of one of the bombs may even have been left behind, but without the rest of the weapon it poses no realistic danger today. After the Thule accident the US stopped the Chrome Dome flights, because the risks outgrew the perceived benefits.

But it’s not only foreign countries that the US has accidentally almost nuked! In Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961 the crew lost control of a bomber armed with two nukes when there was a massive fuel leak. The crew had to abandon the aircraft, which then broke apart in the air and released the nukes it was carrying. One bomb buried itself deep in muddy farmland and could never be fully recovered. The other progressed almost all the way through its arming sequence but thankfully had six different fail-safe systems to prevent it from exploding by mistake, because five of them failed and only a single little system prevented the big disaster!

If all of that wasn’t disturbing enough yet, let’s check one more incident: the 1980 Damascus accident. This one didn’t even involve a plane, but something much more mundane: a dropped wrench. Unfortunately this particular wrench was quite heavy, and it was dropped into an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silo, damaging the fuel tank of the super powerful Titan II ICBM within it. The fuel tank then started leaking, and after about nine hours the silo exploded, catapulting the missile out into a nearby field. Thankfully the safety measures worked perfectly and not even any radioactive contamination took place this time.

So what can we learn about these incidents? Probably not much, except that you should play responsibly around nuclear weapons. So far, good luck has been involved in many of these Broken Arrow incidents, but relying on that is not a viable long-term strategy.