They call it Project Broken Arrow. A phrase meant to sound clean, contained, under control. But the truth is anything but. Since the 1950s, American bombers have dropped nuclear weapons into oceans, onto farmland, even across foreign soil. Some were recovered. Others… vanished.

The official line has always been the same: “no danger.” Yet behind those words lies a record of near-disasters, of one switch away from thermonuclear fire. At Tybee Island, Goldsboro, Palomares, and Thule, the United States came closer to catastrophe than it ever admitted.

And in the shadows, it wasn’t presidents or generals who saved the world, but mid-level officers whose decisions in seconds kept us all alive.

This is the story of the bombs America lost — and the terrifying truth that they’re still out there.

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