One of the times was the ICBM that exploded near Little Rock. Blew the warhead completely out of the silo. Nothing happened to the warhead other than going for a very short flight. I was a teenager in Little Rock when this happened. We were completely freaked the F**K out. 9MT warhead 40 miles from our house, downwind.
Warhead ended up under this debris and wasn't found for QUITE SOME TIME. Lots of head scratching. Anyways...interesting times. Warhead was sent to Pantex and made into several W88 warheads I believe.
One Airman was killed when he inhaled the flames and suffocated and died half a day after the explosion. Another was wounded
RIP Sr Airman David Livingston
LOCAL AR Story on the TITAN MISSILE Explosion HERE
If this stuff interests you, there is a great book about there called
"Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima." Very well written, and talks about a variety of mishaps in the discovery of, nuclear power industry, weapons and military over the years. One is quite humorous, and makes me chuckle every time I read it. This is the dry, Wikipedia account of the Mars Bluff Incident:
On March 11, 1958 a U.S. Air Force Boeing B-47E-LM Stratojet from Hunter Air Force Base operated by the 375th Bombardment Squadron of the 308th Bombardment Wing near Savannah, Georgia, took off at approximately 4:34 PM and was scheduled to fly to the United Kingdom and then to North Africa as part of Operation Snow Flurry.[4][5] The aircraft was carrying nuclear weapons on board in the event of war with the Soviet Union breaking out. Air Force Captain Bruce Kulka, who was the navigator and bombardier, was summoned to the bomb bay area after the captain of the aircraft, Captain Earl Koehler, had encountered a fault light in the cockpit indicating that the bomb harness locking pin did not engage. As Kulka reached around the bomb to pull himself up, he mistakenly grabbed the emergency release pin. The Mark 6 nuclear bomb dropped to the floor of the B-47 and the weight forced the bomb bay doors open, sending the bomb 15,000 ft (4,600 m) down to the ground below.
The way the guy writes about it in the book, the pilot was irritated because the bomb locking pin light wouldn't go on, so the crap rolled downhill to the enlisted crewman, who was sent to the bomb bay to see if he could "wiggle the pin or something" to make the light go green. So this poor schlub goes down there, cussing the pilot, and has to take off his chute, because the opening to the bomb bay was so tight. He gets inside there, and the bomb is huge (something ridiculous like five feet in diameter) so he has no chute, and has to stretch across the top of the bomb, feeling around for "something" he can wiggle to make the light go green for the stupid pilot, and is completely overextended with much of his weight on the top of the bomb, feeling around.
His foot slipped, and he just involuntarily grabbed anything to get his balance, and...what do you think, of all available things to grab by accident, this poor schlub grabbed? The emergency bomb release handle. Which released the bomb.
The bomb fell, hit the bomb bay doors, which seemed to stop the bomb only for the briefest instant, before they tore away and the bomb fell out with him on top of it with no chute, a la Maj. T.J. "King" Kong in Dr. Strangelove.
He frantically grabbed at anything, and managed to grab some thing, and was able to watch the bomb and a canvas bag plummet to the earth. The conventional portion of the bomb blew up when hit the ground, destroying a family's garden, and nobody was seriously hurt. You can still see the crater today on Google Earth by typing in "Mars Bluff". Well, the crew was trying to speak in code to a civilian air traffic controller asking him to communicate with the base to tell them they "laid an egg" , and the ATC had no idea what they were talking about. While they circled up there, they discussed, in depressed tones, about possibly seeking asylum in Cuba, because they sure as Hell couldn't fly back to the base!