During the Cold War, a flight crew had 15 minutes to get their nuke-laden plane in the air from the moment Soviet bombers were detected -- 15 minutes between the earliest warning of an incoming nuclear strike and the first flash of an enemy warhead. This is the chilling true story of the incredibly risky steps our military took to protect us from that scenario, including over two thousand loaded bombers that crossed American skies. They sometimes crashed and at least nine times resulted in nuclear weapons being accidentally dropped. A system would use timers and rockets to launch missiles even after everyone was dead. Disastrous atmospheric nuclear testing included a horrific runaway bomb that fooled scientists and put thousands of men in uniform in the center of a cloud of hot fallout. Here also are the people of the Cold War: the bomber pilots, the radar navigators, the signal-ferreting ravens, and thousands more who were tasked with testing, transporting, and delivering the bombs the scientists made.
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