Lost Nukes - Inside America’s Broken Arrows

How do you lose a hydrogen bomb – and just leave it there?

In this episode of History Declassified, we follow four thermonuclear weapons as they fall from a clear blue sky over Palomares, Spain, in 1966: two tearing plutonium across farm fields, one slamming into a dry riverbed, and one vanishing into the Mediterranean. We trace the frantic 80‑day hunt that ended with a tiny submersible called Alvin finding a live H‑bomb on the seabed, and the rushed cleanup that left plutonium in Spanish soil – and veterans fighting for recognition – decades later.

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Then we zoom out to the Cold War’s other “Broken Arrows”: the Mark 15 bomb still missing off Tybee Island, the B‑52 that dropped two hydrogen bombs over North Carolina, and the US military’s admission that at least six nuclear weapons were lost and never recovered. Along the way, we unpack the secret vocabulary of nuclear accidents, the gap between reassuring press lines and declassified documents, and what these lost nukes reveal about how much risk governments were willing to accept – and conceal.