Nuclear Near Misses

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when a nuclear bomb is accidentally dropped onto foreign soil? Or when a nuke just goes missing? Rather worryingly, it happens more often that you would think.

There’s a special term for these nuclear near misses - ‘broken arrow incidents’. In this episode, James is joined by Warfare favourite and historian Alex Wellerstein, to explore these many broken arrow incidents spanning from the Cold War to the present day. They'll be finding out how close to disaster we’ve come over the years, and importantly where those missing nukes might be hiding.

Alex Wellerstein’s blog is here.

Senior Producer: Elena Guthrie. Assistant Producer: Annie Coloe. Edited and mixed by Stuart Beckwith.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Nuclear war.
0:05.0	Apparently I've been saying that word nuclear wrong my entire life and I'm not entirely sure why.
0:10.0	I've been working this topic forever.
0:12.0	Why has no one pointed this out? Well, this is one of the joys of being a podcaster,
0:16.2	is we get some amazing reviews, really nice ones. And every now and then, someone might comment on the way I pronounce something.
0:21.8	And this is one of the words that
0:23.2	enrages people we've got one review that says it makes their teeth itch and another
0:27.2	has asked if I could put more syllables into the word itself so I'm going to
0:31.4	correct this error in my ways and apologize. It is nuclear, nuclear war.
0:37.0	And I need to get it right for this episode because we're talking about nuclear near misses.
0:41.0	All those times during the Cold War that we had broken arrow incidents.
0:45.5	When planes might go down carrying nukes, where bombs almost detonated, or some simply
0:51.7	went missing. To take us through this topic we have the amazing historian
0:55.2	Alex Wellesteem back on the podcast. You will know Alex from his fantastic episode on the
1:00.1	world's greatest nuclear bomb, the ZAR bomber,
1:03.3	one of our most popular episodes,
1:05.0	so it's great to have Alex back on.
1:07.0	So sit back, relax if you can.
1:09.6	I mean, I wouldn't listen to this one before bed.
1:11.5	It's not gonna help you sleep particularly well, but here is Alex
1:15.5	Wellestine on nuclear near misses. Enjoy.
1:21.1	Hi Alex, welcome back to warfare. How you doing? I am doing very well. I'm doing very well James. How are you? I'm good. Yeah. Well, last time we had you on the podcast, we were talking about the world's largest nuclear bomb, the Tsar bomber, and how Khrushchev
	...

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