It is no secret that the US maintains a small nuclear arsenal - with nearly 2, 000 operational warheads - under its guard. And it would be normal to imagine that the maintenance of all these weapons is performed with the utmost care in the world, and that those involved, besides following strict safety protocols, certainly know what to do in an emergency, right? After all, these folks aren't dealing with ordinary firecrackers, right?

However, according to Javier Salas of El País, it seems that this is not quite the case - and caring about the US nuclear arsenal is not very efficient there. Salas cited as an example an episode that took place on September 18, 1980, which narrowly erased former President Bill Clinton's native Arkansas from the map.

Silly accident

According to Salas that day, about 20 young soldiers guarded a silo that held no less than the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile - or ICBM - Titan II in the city of Damascus, Arkansas. Then, after a long 12-hour shift, one of these boys was tasked with maintaining the "little one." By the way, take a look at the following missile:

This is the top of Titan II from above the silo.

As you saw above, the Titan II was no joke - and it was the equivalent of an eight-story building. For while performing maintenance on the top of the ICBM, the soldier let a tool about three pounds off his hands slip. This item plummeted from above, bounced to the ground and hit the bottom of the missile, causing a fuel leak.

That was when chaos broke out in the silo, because no matter how much they looked for a solution to the problem in the missile manual, it was not long before the frightened soldiers discovered that there was not one. In fact, according to one of those present, the “primer” did not provide any information on what to do in a situation like this, and apart from having a plan A, there was no plan B.

To make matters worse, as the hours ticked by and the Titan II fuel continued to leak, none of the military's superiors dared make a decision on how to deal with the problem. And as the inner tank emptied, it increased the risk that the missile would collapse on itself - if that happened, the consequences would be ... bombastic.

Booom

The consequences would be bombastic because, according to Salas, Titan II had a destructive power three times greater than the nuclear bombs used during World War II combined.

Look at the little one flying

Coincidentally, as soldiers freaked out about 80 kilometers from Damascus, a Democratic convention was being held in Little Rock, led by then-Vice President Walter Mondale and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

Convention participants were informed of the crisis in the silo, but the military declined to confirm whether or not there was a nuclear warhead at the site. And there was, of course.

In the end, no one made any decisions and the silo flew into the air - killing one of the soldiers. At first, the military thought that the explosion had been caused by the nuclear warhead, but luckily, that part of the missile was “spit out” of the silo and later recovered.

Tense moment

As you may know, the arms escalation that took place in the world during the Cold War led to the manufacture of thousands of atomic bombs. By the mid-1960s, the US had produced about 32, 000 of them, when in fact between 50 and 200 units would be enough to destroy the entire Soviet Union. The USSR, in turn, had 40, 000 such beauties in its arsenal!

President Reagan ordered the Titan II to leave the scene in 1982.

Of course with so many nuclear warheads and protocols for dealing with possible crises beyond failure, the risk of an incident happening was enormous, so think about the danger! What was created at the time was a false sense of security, and cases like what was recorded in Damascus were repeated thousands of times. The most recent, as far as we know, was one that occurred in 2014 that caused serious damage to a Colorado silo.

According to Salas, this is evident in a recently released documentary called Command and Control, based on the eponymous book - and Pulitzer Finalist 2014 - by Eric Schlosser. In it, it is the survivors of the episode involving the Titan II who tell this curious (and slightly scary) story that could have ended very badly.