It’s for random articles like this that I absolutely love Wikipedia. Had you asked me before today if the US military had ever lost a nuclear weapon I would have confidently said no. Apparently, I’d also have been mistaken. And you know what else? I’ll leave this as an excercise to the paranoid, but there have been several so-called “broken arrows” in history—lost nuclear weapons. What do you suppose would happen if one managed to get sucked into a continental fault and then exploded when it hit the mantle? Or what if it just slowly released its nuclear material into nearby ocean waters—what would happen then?