Like the Americans, the Soviets Union has also lost many nuclear weapons.  In our first episode of season 3, I shared details of some of the Broken Arrow incidents involving American nuclear devices where they have been lost, stolen, or accidentally deployed or destroyed since the second world war.  In this Plus episode, a part of our Secrets of the Soviets miniseries, I go behind the Iron Curtain to learn about Slomannaya strela: Soviet Broken Arrows.

Otfried Nassauer the former director of the Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security and an expert on nuclear weapons told Der Spiegel in a 2008 interview, "It is believed that up to 50 nuclear weapons worldwide were lost during the Cold War." Some were recovered, some were not. Nassauer believes that most of these weapons are currently found in various locations on the ocean’s bottom.  The number might actually be even higher and today we will look at four broken arrow incidents in which the Soviet Navy lost nuclear weapons – at least three dozen of them over the years.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  If you’re listening to this, it means that you’re a Plus subscriber.  Thank you so much for your support!  I love creating My Dark Path and I’m grateful that you care enough to subscribe.  I know that every dollar you share with My Dark Path is precious…the result of your hard work.  I’m humbled that you’re willing to subscribe.

If you have a moment, please visit us on YouTube.  I’m starting to release videos frequently there.  At the time of this release, I’ve just released 2 full episodes: the Haunted Taipei Hyatt and the Second Life of Elmer McCurdy.  These video episodes always go up on Patreon so that our Plus subscribers get early access.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Plus episode 4 Slomannaya strela: Soviet Broken Arrows.

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PART ONE

In response to fears that Hitler would attempt to build a super weapon of some kind, most likely an atomic bomb, the United States initiated the Manhattan Project in 1942.  Hitler’s drive to create weapons that would change the course of the war are often called Wonder Weapons.  The secret US project the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers. While the project had other sites, the central lab set up in Los Alamos where Robert Oppenheimer led a team to design atomic bombs. Named after the New Mexico town which it sat near, the Los Alamos Laboratory brought together chemists, physicists, and engineers to build a weapon that would unleash the power of the atom.  Ultimately the creation of the atom bomb saved millions of American and Japanese lives by forcing the surrender of the Japanese but also ushered in decades of fear during the Cold War. 

In 1940, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley had discovered Plutonium. So the Los Alamos Laboratory was also placed under the aegis of the University of California, as much as the military.  All who worked there were sworn to secrecy.  The security around the Los Alamos lab is legendary.  Scientists who lived in Santa Fe would be picked up at 109 East Palace before being shuttled in secrecy to the lab.  Today, a small plaque marks the location, almost hidden amid the pricey boutiques that line the streets of Santa Fe today.

Two bomb models were proposed when the team began working: a gun-type fission weapon that used uranium to reach critical mass and create energy through breaking atoms apart and a more complex implosion weapon that used plutonium.  Although the Los Alamos Laboratory was the heart and head of the Manhattan Project, other sites were also deeply involved.  The Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for example, used a Graphite reactor to irradiate uranium, turning it into plutonium for use in the first atomic bombs. Labs at the University of Chicago and the Hanford site in Washington State were also involved in generating radioactive material for use in atomic weapons.  The resources of an entire nation, already on wartime footing since December 7, 1941, were put to use to develop what would be the ultimate war-ending weapon.

But scientists working on the bomb were not limited to the United States either.  Members of the Manhattan Project were sent to Germany to study the work of captured German scientists. Operation Alsos, as it was called, sent individuals working on the atomic bomb to the front in Europe, sometimes even behind enemy lines, both to gauge German progress on the bomb as well as to study and steal German research. While the British and American spy scientists employed by Operation Alsos focused on nuclear technology, they also sought out information on biological and chemical weapons as well. The men of Operation Alsos also interrogated German prisoners who were familiar with the atomic sites of Germany.  The prisoners revealed that uranium and thorium were being processed in Oranienburg, a town north of Berlin, so Groves ordered that it be bombed on 15 March 1945. In April of that year, as Germany was falling and allied armies fought their way Berlin from all sides, the Allies divided Germany into zones of occupation. The French zone included the area around Stadtilm, where the Nazi atomic project had been based, containing uranium and the components to build a reactor, along with all the documentation of the German program. General Leslie Groves demanded that the borders of the zones be shifted, so that the United States would occupy Stadtilm, but he would not tell the State Department why he wanted the borders shifted.  When the French refused to shift the border, Groves ordered American soldiers to race to Stadtilm ahead of the other allied armies and remove all technology and documentation of the Nazi atomic program so neither the French nor the Soviets could get it.  They also worked to delay the French army in order to allow the full evacuation of material and captured German scientists.  This material was then brought back to the United States, as were the captured scientists, ordered to bring their insights, knowledge and discoveries to the American atomic efforts.  Tangentially, Alsos is the Greek word for “Grove,” which tells you how central the general in charge was to anything atomic anywhere in the world in 1945.

However, while the United States worked overtime both to create atomic weapons and steal and use Germany technology, knowledge and people, the Soviet Union, recognizing that America was going to be a dominant force in the post war world wanted to even the playing field by any means necessary. The United States was worried about Axis spies and saboteurs, but it was the Soviet Union that was far more effective in stealing atomic secrets from America during the war.  If the race for post-war German science and technology is of interest, be sure to listen to Episode 39 called After Peenemünde, the Horror Moves Underground.  It shares stories of the Soviet kidnapping of German scientists.

So by 1943 it was obvious that Soviet spies were attempting to either steal American technology or flip scientists who would do it for them. Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash was assigned responsibility for counter intelligence as part of his role in the Western Defense Command.  He learned to his chagrin that attempts to sway scientists was occurring at the highest levels.  Robert Oppenheimer, for example, informed Pash that he had been approached by a fellow professor at Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier, about passing information to the Soviet Union. Spies such as Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and, perhaps most famously Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were uncovered, arrested and charged with various crimes, leading to the imprisonment of Fuchs, Gold, and Greenglass and the execution of the Rosenbergs. George Koval and Theodore Hall were American scientists turned Soviet spies who were not uncovered for decades, continuing to send nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.  David Holloway, author of the definitive Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956, argues that the work of the spies allowed the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb at least a year or two sooner than they would have otherwise. The espionage allowed Soviet scientists to skip over the experiments that did not work, as well as start from the success of the United States.  The USSR would have eventually developed an atomic bomb on their own, but stealing American secrets cut that time down greatly.

Soviet scientists, like other European and American scientists, theorized an atomic weapon in the 1930s, but the invasion of the Motherland by the Nazis in 1941 caused Stalin to prioritize making it a reality. Captured German scientists — the few not swept up by the Americans — and the aforementioned espionage in America also helped move the Soviet program forward.  After the United States used atomic bombs (one plutonium and one uranium) in Japan, Stalin aggressively pursued the bomb.  Nicknamed "First Lightning,” the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first successful weapon test on August 29, 1949. The bomb, called RDS-1 and nicknamed “Joe 1” after Stalin, was based on the American “Fat Man” model, a plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki.  As soon as the test proved successful, Stalin ordered the rapid production and deployment of atomic weapons, as well as rapid development and testing of even larger and more powerful bombs. It was important to Stalin that the Soviet Union become the foremost nuclear power in the world, or at least on a par with the United States.  The explosion over the Semipalatinsk Test Site in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (present day Kazakhstan) sent a tremor of panic through the United States and Western Europe, and the cold war had officially begun.  The United Kingdom and France developed the bomb in 1952 and 1960, respectively, in response to the Soviet Union’s bombs joined with the United States and the USSR to produce more and more weapons – bombs that could be dropped from planes, warheads to be placed on missiles, and even tactical nuclear weapons.  The problem is, anything that can be had can be lost, including weapons of mass destruction.

PART TWO: BROKEN ARROW 1: K-129

On March 8, 1968, a political crisis in Poland was sparked by student protests at the University of Warsaw, the first student protests seen in that nation since its Communist takeover.  The eyes of the world watched to see how the Polish government, firmly a part of the Eastern bloc at this time, and the Soviet Union responded to this direct confrontation of the myth of the contentment of the citizens of communist nations.

At the same exact time the crisis in Poland was unfolding, the Soviet Union secretly had a much bigger problem. On March 8, 1968 the diesel-powered Soviet submarine K-129 under the command of Captain First Rank Vladimir I. Kobzar was carrying out maneuvers in the Pacific.  The sub carried a crew of ninety eight as well as three ballistic missiles with one megaton nuclear warheads and several nuclear-armed torpedoes. It had completed two seventy day ballistic missile combat patrols in the previous year, fairly standard for Soviet nuclear-armed subs.  On February 24 of 1968 K-129 began another seventy day combat patrol, expecting to return to the base at Rybachiy on May fifth. After performing a test deep water dive on February 24, reporting that all was well, the sub descended and began its patrol of the Pacific.  Oddly, four subs were lost in early 1968.  In addition to K-129, the US Scorpion, the French Minerve and the Israeli Dakar were lost. 

It was standard Soviet policy at the time for submarines on Pacific patrol to radio in upon crossing the 180th meridian and again to confirm that the assign patrol area had been reached.  K-129 had neither of these check-ins. By early March, Soviet Navy commanders in Kamchatka were concerned about the radio silence of K-129, but by then, it was too late. The commanders coordinated search and rescue missions out of Kamchatka and Vladivostok, searching the north Pacific where K-129 was last expected to be, but found nothing.

The U.S. Navy reported a “significant acoustic event” on March 8, believed to be some kind of explosion on board K-129.  It is not known to this day what happened to the sub.  It was surmised the sub developed serious technical problems.  It disappeared and was not heard from again.  The assumption on the part of both the Soviet Union and the United States is that the sub ran into trouble, took on water, and sank to the bottom of the Pacific along with her crew and her nuclear payload, resulting in a serious Soviet broken arrow – nuclear-tipped torpedoes and that one megaton warhead atop a SS-N-5 Serb missile.

Such an event was catastrophic for a few reasons, not least of which the potential environmental impact when the weapons eventually degenerated or broke open from impact, spilling radioactive material on the ocean floor.  The damage to Soviet prestige and the potential for the Americans to acquire examples of Soviet technology were also concerns.  The sub lay three miles down at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, and the Soviet Union had been unable to locate its precise position. Additionally, the Soviet Union lacked the technology to recover the sunken sub at the time, and believed it impossible for the Americans to successfully recover the broken arrow.  A decision was made at the highest level to simply leave the sub where it sank.

However…The CIA learned where the K-129 was on the ocean floor and believed they could get to the sub and recover at least some Cold War intel. Using Navy sonar, the CIA was able to pinpoint within five miles the location of the “significant acoustic event” the navy had heard on March eighth.  The U.S.S. Halibut, towing “The Fish” – a device full of cameras and microphones and other sensing equipment – found K-129 approximately sixteen hundred miles northwest of Hawai’i. .

Given the codename Project Azorian, the CIA began to plan to get to the sub and salvage as much as they could from it.  The agency ordered a custom-built ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer.  As the name suggests, it was built by Howard Hughes. The US government decided the Navy would not participate in order to avoid an international incident.  The entire project would remain a “black op.” The CIA, working through Hughes, paid for the ship whose sole purpose was the recovery of K-129 and its broken arrows. Disguised as an ocean mining vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer departed Long Beach, California on June 20, 1974, and arrived at the recovery site on July fourth. The ship attempted to lift K-129 from the ocean floor using a large mechanical claw called the "Capture Vehicle" but affectionately dubbed “Clementine” by the men who used it.  The Hughes Glomar Explorer was built with a Moon Pool in its bottom – an opening to the ocean that would allow Clementine to descend the three miles to the bottom and pull K-129 and its cargo up to the Moon Pool where it could be brought onboard without anyone seeing.  It was yet another way of keeping the entire activity from Soviet eyes.  By the way, see photos on mydarkpath.com.

This turned out to be a wise precaution as someone (still unknown today) tipped off the Soviet Union that the CIA would be carrying out some kind of salvage operation, possibly involving K-129. The Soviet brass did not thing such an operation was possible, but still at least two Soviet ships sailed near the work site while the operation was going on.

Sadly, as the K-129 was being raised, Clementine experienced a catastrophic failure and two thirds of the sub broke off and sank back down to the ocean floor. Code books and other Cold War treasures and two nuclear-tipped torpedoes were recovered, but the one megaton warhead and remaining torpedoes sank with the remains of K-129 into the depths, left by both the Soviets and now the CIA to slowly decay on the bottom of the Pacific.  Somewhere, sixteen hundred miles northwest of Hawai’i, Soviet Broken Arrows sit on the ocean floor.

Tangentially, after stories had been published about the CIA's attempts to stop publication of information about Project Azorian, Harriet Ann Phillippi, a journalist, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CIA for any records about the CIA's attempts. The CIA developed what is now a standard response – We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of such documents or the events in question.  This type of non-answer reply has since come to be known as being “Glomarized,” after the ship built just to recover a sub and broken arrows, and is now the standard answer to questions on everything from Ray Epps, aliens and their technology in the government’s possession to James Bond-style secret operations occurring at the present.

The 1968 sinking of the K-129 submarine and the CIA’s Project Azorian to bring it to the surface also inspired works in popular culture, such as Clive Cussler’s novel and its 1980 film adaptation Raise the Titanic, in which it is reveal that the Titanic was transporting a rare mineral ore, stolen from then Russian mines, which could be used as the power source in a proposed weapons system that could take down any missile entering US airspace. The Americans and the Soviets race to raise the Titanic and get the minerals and the technology to give them a Cold War advantage. Similarly, The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy’s 1984 novel which inspired the 1990 film, tells the story of Captain Marko Ramius (played in the film by Sean Connery) faking an accident on his own sub, the Red October, in order to evacuate the crew, convince the Soviet authorities the Red October has been destroyed, and then defect to the United States with the aid of CIA agent Jack Ryan, played in the film by Alec Baldwin. The circumstances of the story, while not matching Project Azorian specifically, certainly carries echoes of that event.  It also inspired the 2013 film Phantom, which is very loosely based on the sinking of K-129.

PART THREE: MORE BROKEN ARROWS

Before the Americans even attempted to raise K-129, another sunken Soviet sub resulted in another broken arrow, and also might have more directly inspired The Hunt for Red October.  On April 12, 1970, K-8, a Soviet Type 627-class submarine, nicknamed November Class, was conducting maneuvers through the Bay of Biscay.  For those not familiar with European geography, the Bay of Biscay is a gulf of the Atlantic Ocean with France on the North and Spain to its South. It’s what makes the Iberian peninsula truly a peninsula. The European continental shelf extends under the bay, resulting in shallow waters and rough seas, which makes it a challenging environment to move a submarine through, made further challenging by the sheer number of wrecks on the bottom from both the First World War and the Second World War, not to mention centuries of trade ships and fishing vessels not surviving storms.  In short, it is a dangerous, crowded waterway.

K-8 was powered by two nuclear reactors and carried four nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and crewed by one hundred and four men.  It was participating in the Soviet Navy’s “Ocean-70” exercise.  It remains the largest peacetime naval exercise in world history.  The exercise involved eight-four surface warships, over eighty submarines (including fifteen nuclear powered), and forty-five more naval auxiliary and intelligence-collection ships, as well as several hundred aircraft.  On the evening of April 8, 1970, K-8 was operating  at a depth of around four hundred feet off Cape Finisterre, about three hundred nautical miles northwest of the Spanish coast when two fires started onboard. The submarine surfaced and smoke and poisoned gases forced the crew out of the sub and onto the deck. Both reactors shut down and the sub began to drift.

For the next three days the crew fought the uncontrollable fires and valiantly tried to save the K-8 as strong winds began to blow and the seas turned choppy. On April 12, the sub finally sank with thirty crew members trapped inside, as well as the nuclear weapons. Another twenty-two men drowned or died of exposure while waiting for rescue, and of the 104 crew when Ocean-70 started, only fifty two were eventually rescued by the Bulgarian and Soviet ships that finally arrived.

K-8 lies at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, 2.9 miles down. Its nuclear weapons are still onboard, which makes them the second set of broken arrows from the Soviet Union.

The third set of broken arrows was lost on October 3, 1986. K-219 was a Project 667A Navaga-class ballistic missile submarine, often called Yankee 1, carrying sixteen missiles armed with either two or three warheads (thus containing either 32 or 48 nuclear warheads).  K-219 was on a routine Cold War nuclear deterrence patrol in the North Atlantic approximately seven hundred miles northeast of Bermuda when it suffered an explosion and fire in one of its missile tubes. A seal on the tube had failed, so when the sub dove, high pressure seawater flooded in and ruptured the missile’s fuel tank which subsequently caught fire.  The event was controversial as the Soviet Union claimed the leak was the result of damage from a collision between K-219 and the American submarine U.S.S. Augusta. While the Augusta had been in the area at the time, both the captain of the Augusta and the captain of K-219 denied there had been a collision. Regardless, silo six experienced the leak and began burning and venting nitrogen dioxide gas into the sub. The weapons officer attempted to put out the fire by venting silo six directly into the Atlantic, which resulted in the explosion.  The captain ordered the sub go into “nuclear safe” mode, which means shutting down the ship’s nuclear reactors and ensuring the weapons could not be launched, and brought K-219 to the surface on battery power. Several crewmen were lost shutting down the reactors. The remaining crew attempted to contain the floods and leaks, and a Soviet freighter showed up to tow the sub back to its base at Gadzhiyevo.  K-219 was too far gone to even be towed and on October 6, she sank to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain, almost three and a half miles down. All of the surviving crew were saved, but all the missiles and warheads still sit at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Yet another set of Soviet broken arrows sit at the bottom of the Artic Ocean. On April 7, 1989, the Komsomolez, known colloquially as K-278, a Plavnik nuclear powered attack submarine was on patrol approximately seven hundred miles off the coast of Norway.  The sub had a crew of sixty nine under the command of Captain First Rank Evgeny Vanin and a payload of two nuclear-tipped torpedoes.  She was the only sub of her class, a fourth generation Soviet submarine, and had already set a record by diving 3,350 feet in the Norwegian Sea. Only six years old and on her third operational patrol of the Arctic Ocean. Without warning, a series of fires broke out in the aft compartments. Starting with a short circuit that began sparking, the fire quickly spread, burning through the electrical cables that powered the ship and controlled the sub’s nuclear reactor. K-278 was able to surface and remained afloat for almost five hours while the captain and crew attempted to get the situation under control. It then sank to a depth of a little over a mile in the Barents Sea.  Out of the crew of sixty-nine, forty-two died, including the captain.  Most died, not trapped in the sub, but from hypothermia from floating in the cold water waiting for rescue.

In June 1989, the Soviet navy located the wreckage of K-278 on the ocean floor and declared that the damage to the wreckage was insignificant and there were no leaks, and thus no threat to the environment.  A short while later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, separating into its component nations, with Russia taking the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. However, an expedition in 1994 revealed plutonium leakage around the wreck. The Russian navy sealed the hull fractures in Compartment 1 and covered the nuclear warheads, subsequently covering the entire wreck with a jelly-like substance designed to keep all radiation inside the wreck from escaping into the Barents Sea.

PART FOUR

Our trip today to the various ocean floors where Soviet broken arrows lie might seem a cause for worry.  After all, leaking radiation could cause serious damage to the environment, not to mention that as technology has improved, bad actors could work to get nuclear weapons from the wrecks.  These two issues are not actually cause for alarm.  First of all, most of the weapons are several miles down and unlikely to cause much damage to even their local environment if they leak.  They are also largely safe from recovery by bad actors as most are in some of the most inhospitable and difficult to reach places in the world. Neither the CIA nor the Russian navy have been able to get at the broken arrows. In some ways that may provide comfort, but as we see first-ever events over the last 3 years like SpaceX and global lockdowns, I’d hate to rely of “it’s never been done before” as the safeguard.  Still, the best we could do is seal a wreck that is only one mile down to prevent any further leakage.  Any attempts to actually recover the weapons are far more likely to end in the deaths of those involved in the effort.  These broken arrows have more or less lost their points.

In no way does this reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons, however. When the Soviet Union imploded and broke up in 1991, thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons remained at thousands of sites across the former Soviet Union.  Neither those in possession of the weapons nor the rest of the world knew how the situation could or should be handled, or if the Soviet Union was now not one nuclear power but fifteen separate nuclear powers.  As part of the negotiations that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of fifteen new nations from the old Soviet republics, Russia took over all of the old Soviet weapons.  Thirty-two hundred strategic nuclear warheads were in Ukraine, Kazakhstan (which was one of the primary Soviet testing centers, if you will recall), and Belarus. Most of those warheads were kept atop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) pointed at Western Europe and the United States, ready to be fired at a moment’s notice. By treaty, all of those warheads were deactivated and returned to Russia, where they were dismantled, the nuclear material further refined and blended down for use in civilian reactors.  The Soviet Union also had twenty-two thousand tactical nuclear weapons.  Strategic weapons are big – they sit on missiles and are designed not to be used, as the only possible outcome would be mutually assured destruction during a total nuclear way.  Tactical nuclear weapons on the other hand, also called “Battlefield nukes” are much smaller. They are designed for use in combat and tend to be much smaller with much lower yields.  Some are so small they can fit in a duffle bag or backpack and be carried by a single individual. Tactical nukes are on the wish list of every terrorist organization in the world.  All twenty-two thousand have also been given to Russia, leaving not a single nuclear weapon in fourteen of the fifteen soviet republics.  Only Russia still has them.  For the others, no nukes to lose means no more broken arrows.

Much of what is happening between Russia and Ukraine today is a direct result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States persuading the Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for a better trade relationship with the U.S. and the west.  Ukraine had wanted to hold on to some of the former Soviet weapons in its territory. Ukraine had a simple and intuitively compelling reason for wanting to retain a minimal nuclear deterrent: to assure its independence from Russia, its much larger neighbor. As Graham Allison observes in his history of post-Soviet nuclear arms, “Had Ukraine retained the strategic nuclear weapons it inherited from the former Soviet Union, it would instantly have become the third largest nuclear weapons power in the world.”  The United States, in the early days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not think it was in America’s or the world’s best interest to contend with multiple, smaller nuclear powers, and so convinced all former Soviet Republics, including Belarus, Kazakhstan and, yes, the Ukraine, to give the weapons to Russia.  Ukraine was more easily convinced not just due to America’s persuasive power, but because Chernobyl was located inside Ukraine.  Seven years before the dissolution one of the worst nuclear accidents in history took place on Ukrainian soil, and the area, despite having grown back from the disaster, is still mostly unlivable.  I was able to visit the public areas near Chernobyl a few years ago.  One of the final stories in our Secrets of the Soviets will cover the supernatural Black Bird of Chernobyl and some of the more measurable consequences of that terrible event.  Ukraine had no interest in the potential for further nuclear accidents.  Still, one wonders, thought, what might be happening in the world today if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons of its own.

In the early nineties, Russia and the United States worked collaboratively to reduce the number of nuclear weapons each had, as well as to secure all of the former Soviet weapons, especially tactical nukes. A total of 14,000 warheads were moved from the other post-Soviet states, most of them subsequently dismantled, and their nuclear cores transformed into fuel for reactors.  It is a tribute to both the Russians and the United States and the level of cooperation from 1991 to 1995 that not a single former Soviet nuclear weapon has ever been found in another country, for sale in an international arms bazaar, or even used by a terrorist group.  However, the Nuclear Threat Initiative also published a report in September 1997 that quoted former Russian national security advisor Alexander Lebed, who claimed that the Russian military lost track of upwards of 100 nuclear suitcase bombs during this period. None of the alleged 100 have been found, nor any evidence that they exist.  The world remains alert, however, to the possibility that rogue nukes might still be out there, and recent tensions from 9/11 twenty-one years ago to the current war in Ukraine always raises the specter that somehow nuclear weapons may become involved.

There has not been a broken arrow incident, that we know of at least, since the sinking of K-279 thirty-three years ago. Many people have worked very hard to secure and protect the former Soviet weapons, now in Russia’s hands, and America’s own nuclear arsenal.  The danger of broken arrows is not only the damage they can do to the environment or the site at which they are lost, but that the do not stop being dangerous nuclear weapons, simply because they are at the bottom of the ocean, or buried in mud, or on the side of an inaccessible mountain (for more on those, listen to our two episodes on American broken arrows).  While no one should lose any sleep over these arrows, we should also remain wary that, as I have noted several times, anything that can be had can be lost, and just because all the incidents of broken arrows in the past have worked out without serious repercussions does not mean things will always go well when a nuclear weapon is lost.  Plenty of our popular culture contains stories of what happens when a weapon is lost or stolen and the horrors that can follow.  Thankfully, the Soviet Union is no more, but its weapons are not.  We owe it to future generations, not to mention ourselves, to keep these arrows in the quiver forever. Spasibo i do svidaniya.

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Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by My Dark Path staff writer Kevin Wetmore. I’m so grateful for these two partners and the entire My Dark Path team.

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Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.