The $8 Socket That Almost Nuked Arkansas | Titan II Damascus

In September 1980, inside Titan II Launch Complex 374-7 in Damascus, Arkansas, an eight-pound socket slipped from a mechanic’s hand.
Seventy feet below, a fuel tank thinner than a dime stood between that falling tool and a nine-megaton W-53 thermonuclear warhead.

This documentary walks step-by-step through how a routine maintenance job on a Titan II ICBM turned into the most dangerous nuclear accident on U.S. soil – and how the safety systems, and sheer luck, kept central Arkansas from vanishing off the map.

What you’ll learn in this video:

The exact physics of the 80-foot free fall and tank puncture
Why Titan II fuel tanks were *thinner than a dime* by design
How hypergolic propellants like Aerozine-50 and nitrogen tetroxide turned the silo into a fuel-air bomb
The decisions facing Airman David Powell, Jeff Kennedy, David Livingston, and the SAC chain of command
How the explosion launched a 740-ton silo door and threw a 9-megaton warhead into an Arkansas field
Why the Damascus incident helped kill the Titan II program – and what it still says about modern nuclear safety

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*Chapters*
00:00 Socket Drop in Silo 374-7
02:30 Inside Arkansas’s Hidden Titan II
05:45 Why the Tank Walls Were Thinner Than a Dime
09:10 Hypergolic Fuel: Designing for Instant Launch
12:45 A Silo Filling with Poison Vapor
17:10 No Procedures, Only Improvisation
20:45 Kennedy and Livingston’s Deadly Mission
23:30 The Explosion and the Flying Silo Door
27:10 Recovering the 9-Megaton Warhead
31:30 Investigation, Blame, and Tool Tethers
36:10 Retiring Titan II and the Lesson of Damascus
39:00 Could It Have Killed Millions?

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If you’re interested in Cold War technology, broken-arrow incidents, and how complex systems fail, consider subscribing for more declassified engineering disasters and nuclear near-misses.


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