How did a nuclear warhead end up lying in a ditch in Arkansas?
The Damascus incident isn’t the only accident recounted in the movie, or the most frightening. In 1961 a nuclear-armed bomber broke apart over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One of the bombs was saved from going off by a single safety switch, of the kind you use to turn your lights on and off. And then there were the false alarms that almost led the United States or the Soviet Union to launch an all-out nuclear attack. In researching his book, Schlosser obtained a never-before released government assessment that revealed that between 1950 and 1968 alone there had been over 1,000 accidents, large and small, involving nuclear weapons.
