Nuclear Nightmares

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Nuclear weapons vanish without a trace. Soviet submarines prepare to launch. False alarms flash across screens in Moscow bunkers. The Cold War was more dangerous than most of us ever realized.

We reveal the shocking truth that at least six American nuclear weapons have been lost since the 1950s and never recovered. These aren't training devices or empty shells—they are fully operational thermonuclear bombs, some capable of yields hundreds of times more powerful than Hiroshima, scattered across oceans and buried in remote locations. The military's clinical term—"broken arrow"—masks the terrifying reality of what these missing weapons represent.

Our survival through the nuclear age wasn't guaranteed by presidential speeches or diplomatic maneuvering. Twice, we came to the brink of nuclear war, and twice, we were saved not by world leaders but by mid-level Soviet officers who refused to follow protocol. Vasili Arkhipov prevented nuclear torpedo launches during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Stanislav Petrov declared a computer warning of American missiles a false alarm in 1983 rather than initiating Soviet retaliation. These men risked everything—careers, freedom, even their lives—to prevent nuclear catastrophe.

The stories are hauntingly specific: A B-47 bomber colliding with a fighter jet over Georgia in 1958, dropping a hydrogen bomb near Tybee Island that remains lost to this day. A B-52 breaking apart over North Carolina in 1961, with investigators later revealing that only a single low-voltage switch prevented detonation of a weapon that could have wiped out much of the eastern seaboard. Four hydrogen bombs scattered across Spain in 1966, two rupturing and spreading plutonium across the countryside.

As nuclear tensions rise again across the globe, these forgotten incidents remind us of an uncomfortable truth: the world's most destructive weapons aren't always under the perfect control we imagine. Our nuclear history isn't about stability—it's about survival by chance.

Listen now and share your thoughts on this eye-opening episode. Email your feedback to [e-mail] and let me know what other hidden historical revelations you'd like explored in future episodes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is a special edition of Things I Want to Know
Voices.
Since the 1950s, the UnitedStates alone has lost at least a
half a dozen nuclear weapons,and they were never found.
Not disarmed shells, not testdummies, real bombs still
missing.
The military calls it a brokenarrow, a term that sounds neat,

(00:25):
contained, clinical, but inreality it means a nuclear
weapon gone astray, lost inoceans, buried in swamps,
forgotten in places no one wassupposed to know.
And all of this unfolded againsta backdrop of paranoia.
The Soviet Union was expandingits reach, testing missiles,
putting Sputnik into orbit.
In Washington, politicianswhispered of missile gaps and

(00:49):
surprise attacks.
Every mistake carried theweight of politics, the fear
that Moscow would seize onweakness, that Congress would
demand answers and that thepublic would panic if the truth
spilled out.
Secrecy became policy Mistakes,buried as quickly as the bombs
themselves.
The fear wasn't just American.

(01:11):
After the Soviet Unioncollapsed decades later,
archives revealed just howparanoid Moscow had been.
Soviet leaders, men like NikitaKhrushchev, who once pounded a
shoe at the United Nations,believed the United States might
launch a first strikeunprovoked.
They built secret bunkers,deployed doomsday weapons and
pushed their people intoconstant readiness, convinced

(01:33):
that Washington was preparing topull the trigger In the West.
American presidents from LyndonJohnson to Ronald Reagan stared
back across the divide, eachtrying to project strength.
Their arsenals, they knew, werefar from perfect.
And in truth, both nations weretrapped, staring across the

(01:54):
abyss, each convinced the othermight be the one to start
Armageddon.
And one time they nearly did.
In 1962, during the CubanMissile Crisis, the world edged
closer to nuclear war than everbefore Soviet submarines

(02:18):
cornered by US Navy ships armedwith nuclear-tipped torpedoes
prepared to fire.
Orders were confused, tensionswhite-hot.
What stopped it wasn't Moscowor Washington, not Khrushchev or
Kennedy, but a mid-level Sovietofficer named Varsely Arkhipov.
Arkhipov refused to consent tothe launch.

(02:39):
His single act of restraintstopped the Atlantic from
erupting in thermonuclear fireand, in effect, saving the world
.
Picture yourself there sittingin that submarine heat, rising
men shouting the weight ofhistory pressing down.
One man's hand hovers over thekey your hand.

(03:03):
Would you turn it or would youhold back, knowing that once you
reached port, a KGB officer ora GRU man might be waiting,
Because your defiance could costyou not just your career but
your freedom, your family andeven your life?

(03:23):
And then it happened again, twodecades later, in 1983, with
Reagan in the White House andtensions rising after NATO
exercises, soviet early warningsystems lit up with what looked
like an incoming US nuclearmissile strike Protocol,
demanded retaliation.
But Stanislav Petrov, alieutenant colonel in the

(03:45):
command bunker outside of Moscow, made a choice.
He declared it a false alarm.
He broke the rules and in doingso stopped the Soviet arsenal
from answering phantoms withfire.
Twice, the fate of the worldcame down not to superpower
leaders, but to mid-levelofficers who refused to let
paranoia dictate the end ofhumanity.

(04:07):
And that truth should beshouted.
The world didn't survive theCold War because of presidential
speeches or Kremlin posturing.
It survived because two men onein 1962 and one in 1983, had
the courage to say no when themachines and the orders demanded
yes.
Twice, everything hung on theirdefiance.
Twice civilization was onetrigger.

(04:29):
Pull away from extinction,that's not stability, that's
survival by chance, resting onthe coincidence of men history
nearly forgot.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americanslived under a constant shadow.
Families dug out theirbasements, stocking them with

(04:55):
canned food and water.
Concrete and cinder blocks weresold as protection against the
fire of the atom.
In schools, children crouchedunder wooden desks as film
strips told them duck and coverwould save them.
This was theater, not safety,but it gave parents a ritual to
believe in something to cling to, while knowing deep down that
if the bombs truly came, therewas nothing they could do.

(05:17):
Fear became routine,preparedness became performance.
But the lost nukes?
What about them?
Well, it began in 1958.
Over the quiet skies ofSavannah, georgia, a B-47 bomber
collides mid-air with a fighterjet.
To survive, the crew jettisonsits payload a 7600 pound

(05:42):
hydrogen bomb.
It plunged into the water offtybee island and it never came
back up.
The navy searched for weeks,nothing.
The Air Force later concludedthere was no possibility of a
nuclear explosion and had a lowenvironmental risk if it was
left undisturbed.

(06:02):
But the truth is simpler theynever found it Somewhere under
those waves.
The Tybee bomb still waits.
Then, three years later, in thecold night sky over Goldsboro,
north Carolina, a B-52 comesapart in midair.
Two nuclear weapons fall withit.
One floats down safely byparachute, the other slams into

(06:26):
a swamp and vanishes.
Investigators later revealedhow close we came.
One low-voltage switch keptthat weapon from detonating.
Most of the bomb was recovered,but portions of a secondary
component remained buried inthat field to this day.
Imagine the politics if it hadgone off.

(06:47):
Kennedy, just days into office,forced to explain how his
country almost annihilated oneof its own states with a
thermonuclear blast, walking outthe next morning to find
twisted metal in his fields Notjust wreckage but a bomb that
could have erased him, hisfamily and half the state.

(07:10):
But the disasters kept coming.
In 1966, over the coast ofPalomares in Spain, a mid-air
collision scattered fourhydrogen bombs.
Yes, four.
Three hit the land, tworuptured and spread plutonium,
while one stayed intact.

(07:31):
The fourth disappeared into theMediterranean and for 80 tense
days divers scoured the seauntil they pulled it up.
The Spanish government demandedanswers.
Washington scrambled toreassure allies, and behind
closed doors, officials fearedMoscow's propaganda machine
would paint the accident asproof of America's recklessness.

(07:54):
But the truth Two of thosebombs split open and scattered
plutonium the very fuel ofthermonuclear fire across
Spanish soil.
Two years later, a bomber onairborne alert crashed into the
sea ice near Thule Air Base inGreenland.
The conventional explosives inits weapon ignited, spreading

(08:15):
plutonium across the ice andforcing a massive cleanup.
Danish politicians raged at thesecrecy, while the Soviets
accused America of hypocrisy,condemning Soviet risk while its
own arsenal lay scattered inthe Arctic snow.
This pattern was clear.
America's nuclear arsenalwasn't untouchable, it was
fallible, it was human, andevery time one was lost, the

(08:39):
silence around it was politicalarmor protecting reputations,
but not people.
Then the losses piled up.
Officials spoke the same wordseach time, but no immediate
danger doesn't mean safe.
It just meant they didn't know.
Nuclear bombs built to endcivilizations, scattered across

(09:03):
oceans, buried in mud, hiddenbeneath ice, weapons of
annihilation unaccounted for,still waiting.
It's very easy to just blamethe Americans, but the Soviet
Union, china and othersinevitably had the same losses,
just no one was told about them.
So Project Broken Arrow isn't amyth, it isn't conspiracy, it's

(09:26):
the record.
And the record says this theworld's most destructive weapons
aren't always where they'resupposed to be.
We survived by chance before.
Hopefully luck stays on ourside.
The weapons haven't gone away.
The United States, russia,china, france, britain, india,
pakistan, israel, north Koreaall hold nuclear arsenals, and

(09:49):
beyond them more than 20 othernations have claimed at one time
or another to pursue, possessor shelter nuclear capability.
And that shadow has only grownlonger With that submarine
commander refusing to turn thelaunch key.
Years later, petrov and hiseyes fixed on a console that is

(10:12):
blinking red and a childcrouched under a wooden desk
whispering into the silence,while outside the threat of
thermonuclear war loomed.
That is what the nuclear ageleaves us with Human faces
waiting in the dark, knowingthat fire could erase everything

(10:33):
and was only one decision away.
Thank you for listening.
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(10:53):
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