The Near-Disaster in Arkansas

It was a wrench that slipped out of a mechanic's hands during maintenance work. Such mishaps happen often. But with the USA's largest nuclear warhead, something like that shouldn't have happened. The wrench fell so badly that the nuclear warhead was damaged, which led to a chain reaction that almost became the biggest disaster in the history of nuclear weapons.

Bill Clinton, then governor of the US state of Arkansas, was not prepared for a crisis of such proportions. This also reveals a major dilemma: nuclear weapons not only give you great global power, but also expose you to risks in your own country, because maintaining the large arsenal of nuclear weapons is complex and prone to errors.

The spectacular story of the Cold War is based on previously unpublished files and on the view of the soldiers in the silos who almost triggered the apocalypse with one wrong move.