Wait, you lost a nuclear warhead?!

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,…