A Nuclear Error

During the Cold War (and even since), fiction has made some inaccurate assumptions about nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons policy. It made for more exciting drama when writers could pretend that it was easy for some American or Soviet General Ripper type to get control of his country's nukes. However, as the comments below indicate, actual policies changed quite a bit during the Cold War depending on which side one is talking about, so there can be a lot of factual leeway in such situations, especially since many of the facts below have come out only since the 1990s.

Types:

• Counter-city policies (Fail Safe): Only used by the larger powers in the early days of nuclear weapons ('50s-'60s), when there was no hope of guiding them to targets more specific than the general vicinity of the largest cities. Lesser nuclear powers like Britain, France, and the PRC continued these policies to make up for their smaller (less than 300 e.a.) number of weapons. The USSR and USA went on to target specific military and industrial targets ('Counter-Value' policy), but in practice there was little difference between nuking these and nuking cities — especially in places like the West Midlands of England, lower Yangzi, and Japan. While it is sometimes said that the US was less focused on hitting civilian targets than the USSR, this was actually because the Soviets built their military and industrial facilities as far from their civilian population centers as possible to minimize civilian casualties from 'Counter-Value' nuclear strikes ^note  Of course, this resulted in an awful lot of industries being concentrated in less-than-ideal-for-profitability-purposes areas . While the USA could have reciprocated, they considered the cost and morale-damaging effects prohibitive.
• A Soviet first strike (Threads and The Day After): the Soviet Union had a "No First Use" policy (= only use nuclear weapons if first attacked with nuclear weapons) in the 1980s. Before then, there were plans for first use, but only in response to an imminent Western attack. WarGames is correct in its usage, as there never was an actual first launch (it was all the military's computer playing a game of Global Thermonuclear War, with the first strike being made by a teenage hacker, unaware he's actually making the US think they're under attack).
  • During the Cold War and post-Cold War analysis of East German, Czech and Polish documents, many people confused the term "pre-emption" with "first strike". Pre-emption is like this: it is considered self-defense to draw and shoot if the other guy starts to draw his gun first.
  • Even the films referenced above don't play it exceptionally straight: while Threads makes mention of the fact that during the time the big nukes were flying, Western response times were slower than others, blame wasn't specifically placed on the USSR for shooting first. In The Day After, it's never made explicit who shot first strategically. (Though in both films, the events that lead to war are precipitated by Soviet armed forces expanding into regions like the Middle East, so...) This is partly excusable because there is/was a general public fear that any side could strike first contrary to stated policy (lookup Able Archer '83 for one nearly catastrophic example), and that one nuke's launch is enough to get the powder keg going.
  • While the Soviets had such a policy, there was certainly a fair amount of fear among NATO that the no-first-use policy was just PR, and that it could have been undone at the stroke of a pen by the Premier, so movies hypothesizing about a Soviet first strike aren't wholly irrational. In an actual fact the policy was genuine, and the Soviet leader could not change it on a whim (it was a Politburo-level collegial decision^note In fact, it was true even for a much less serious affairs, e.g. in both the Korean War and Afghanistan invasion the respective Soviet leaders were basically bluffed into greenlighting them by the hawkish security chiefs and overconfident allies), but there were a lot of strange ideas about how Soviet Union ticked in the West at the time.
• The rogue launch:
  • In general, Soviet Cold War weapons had coded locks (Permissive Action Link), requiring authorisation from the top commanders to be armed. During the Cuban missile crisis however, there were missile carriers capable of independent launch of armed missiles, and in 2002 a retired Soviet submarine officer revealed that a flotilla of Soviet attack submarines off Cuba during the incident had been equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes they were permitted to launch at their discretion. B-59 very nearly did just that on 27 October 1962 after they were cornered by the destroyer USS Beale, but flotilla commander Captain Vasily Arkhipov refused to authorize it, despite the insistence of both the sub's captain and political officer.
  • On the US side, until the 1990s, it would have required at least three people to launch an armed attack from a submarine (and a missile launch from a submarine would be damned near impossible without the full support of the crew). Other launch methods had the coded locks^note though until 1977, one could still make an unarmed launch with the code 00000000 and it was listed on all launch checklists. This system, however, only really existed after 1962.
  • In the UK, on the other hand, until 1998 the RAF's nuclear missiles were secured with nothing more than a cylindrical bicycle lock key^note Military humour being what it is, it was a running gag that this made the UK the safest place in the world to store nukes because the key would have been lost almost immediately and you'd need fifteen forms and three Warrant Officers' permission, plus a three week wait to requisition a pair of bolt-cutters. This is not entirely untrue as anyone with experience of the UK forces can attest. Royal Navy Trident submarines are still able to launch without a code since a mere ten minute warning meant that if a nuclear war had broken out, it is unlikely that there would be time to issue relevant orders to their submarine captains. Plus, no officer of the Royal Navy would ever consider acting without orders or the proper cirumstances. It just wouldn't be cricket. And all sailors work for the monarch, who would be utterly Not Amused.
    • The sub commanders do have their orders: the letters of last resort written by the Prime Minister, containing orders on what action to take in the event that an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government.
  • France faced the same issues, yet they figured they weren't worth the potential risks of starting World War III. They installed the same kind of locks the US and USSR used. They are also less fond of cricket.
  • Recently declassified data has revealed that the US protections vs. "rogue launch" pretty much only existed from 1961 onwards. In the 50s, there were no physical safety interlocks on US nuclear warheads, at least a half-dozen senior officers had the authority to launch a nuclear strike on their own initiative (said authority intended to be used only if a war situation occurred and the President was out of communication, but as with the Trident submarine example above the only real enforcement was the honor system), and in some cases, bomber units were under orders to attack Russia immediately if they ever stopped receiving periodic "don't attack" messages from HQ — i.e., the same situation as the fictional 'Fail-Safe' example.
  • The US also had nuclear weapons stationed on foreign soil in countries like Italy and Turkey which had experienced military coups. Even with a two key lock system, there was nothing to stop the keys from being seized by force.
• The nuclear button (Eagle Strike): Neither side in the Cold War had nor has a nuclear launch button, even in their "nuclear footballs". The nuclear footballs contain information about nuclear strategy, and equipment for the leader to communicate with, and authenticate himself to, the military personnel in individual silos (etc) who would actually carry out a launch.
  • The Soviet/Russian nuclear briefcase, codenamed "Cheget", after a mountain the the Caucasus, is actually a communication terminal that's always online, and has been ever since the system was activated in 1983. If it ever loses connection with the "Kazbek"^note Another mountain control system of the Strategic Nuclear Forces, it's regarded as a "Launch" command, because it's taken as a sign that its bearer is incapacitated. There are three such briefcases, one for the President ^note CPSU General Secretary in Soviet times, actual Soviet President was a technical position that didn't carry much political power until Leonid Brezhnev, one for the Defence Minister and one for the Chief of General Staff. An actual nuclear strike requires receiving the command from at least two out of three devices.
  • A related error is the idea of "nuclear launch codes" that the President, or a similar official, has memorised. This is often used to establish a Race Against the Clock scenario where the President must be rescued before some villain can extract the codes from him, or simply be why the President must not be allowed to be captured in the first place. In real life, the launch codes are written down (since you don't really want your country blown up without retaliation because someone can't remember a code) and usually kept in the nuclear briefcase, issue orders rather than allowing the direct remote launching of weapons, and would be changed if the President was compromised in some way anyway.
• Presidential power: The US President cannot launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of the Secretary of Defense or any other administrative official that's been appointed/approved by Congress (e.g., CIA director, most of the Presidential Cabinet...). Ordering a retaliatory strike was something a number of people had authority to do. The plane known as "Looking Glass" had authority to do so in the event that the National Command Authority was killed or out of contact. Were DEFCON to reach level 2, both pilot and co-pilot would be required to wear eye-patches in case a nuclear explosion render their exposed eye either momentarily or permanently blind. Nowadays they use goggles that instantaneously turn opaque when exposed to the bright flash of a nuclear detonation and then return to clear to allow the pilots to see clearly. While current policies are classified, it can be assumed that after a major strike on the USA, remaining weapons would be released, with or without higher command. For the Soviets, supposedly, the semi-automatic Perimetr system had three human operators who were able to give the order to launch all remaining warheads in case when on-site seismic detectors detected multiple nuclear explosions on Soviet soil and high command is inaccessible.
  • The Perimetr is only a part of the larger all-encompassing Kazbek control system that also includes aforementioned nuclear briefcases, and it serves as its "fail-deadly" fallback that ensures that the retaliatory strike will be launched even if everyone in the chain of command is incapacitated. It is, however, in a standby mode normally, and is supposed to be activated only when there is imminent threat of an attack.
• Using a missile warhead as a stand-still bomb: Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, virtually all nuclear warheads are designed so that they will only go off after being exposed to certain environmental conditions- as in the large numbers of Gs associated with a missile launch.
  • This can be overstated, however; accelerometers and other arcane safeguards are intended to protect vs. accidents. If you deliberately intend to misuse a warhead in such a manner you would presumably have the knowledge and opportunity to simply remove the detonator mechanism and install a new one, or tamper with the existing one.
  • The US nuclear weapons laboratories apparently think that their nukes could not be made to detonate without the codes, even if the labs themselves tried. To date, this has not been tested.
• Most films behave as if only the USA and USSR had nukes. In reality the UK and France were also nuclear powers before the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Later Communist China, India, Pakistan, and South Africa (probably joint-developed with Israel) produced weapons before the end of the Cold War. The Republic of China/Taiwan also made a bid for acquiring nukes in the 1970s-80s, but was blackmailed out of it by the USA. In an Open Secret, Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons since the 60s or 70s^note Something they still deny to this day, despite overwhelming evidence of the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Generally, everyone says they don't have them, while everyone knows they do. Israel's enemies publicly decry the fact that Israel is the only nuclear-equipped Middle East state, while the rest of the world brushes off such accusations. It's...complicated. Several European countries had American bombs stationed there too. South Africa disarmed in 1990, while it is an Open Secret that Pakistan is still making them. Iran and Syria are suspected by some of having nuclear weapons programmes also. Many European countries still have American nuclear gravity bombs stationed there — the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey among others. Their pilots train to use them; in the event of war, the US bombs would be turned over to local NATO forces.
  • Although the Vela Incident was likely a simple equipment error on what was then an aging satellite, one of the popular theories circulating about it is that it detected a real detonation — perhaps even a joint Israeli/South African nuclear test, as S. Africa was being subjected to multiple embargoes and sanctions due to Apartheid, and Israel was looking for a nation to help them gain nuclear capability because they were being embargoed by some countries in NATO.
  • Note that while North Korea's interest in developing nuclear weapons goes back to the 1950s, the country did not test its first nuclear weapon until 2006. As such, North Korea did not have nukes during the Cold War period.
    • And even so, it's by-and-large suspected that every North Korean nuclear weapon tested to date has been a fizzle (nuclear weapons parlance for a dud).^note It should be noted that a fizzle just means that the nuke didn't reach the expected yield, not that it didn't detonate at all. A fizzle can still yield a blast measured in kilotons, with the largest fizzle, a failure of a fusion secondary during a 1 megaton nuke test, reaching an estimated 250 kilotons. Considering that it still means partial fusion was reached, the test was considered a partial success.
• Disarming a ICBM Post-Launch: Deployed strategic ballistic missiles do not have any mechanisms for the attacker to remotely disarm or destroy the weapons after launch, and use inertial guidance based their maneuvers from a known initial launching position and so cannot be steered off-course either. For all intents and purposes once the missile has been fired it can only be stopped either by mechanical malfunction or interception. Missiles which are used for testing are modified with a self-destruct mechanism in case something goes wrong, but live warheads are not used for testing the missiles.
  • The MX (Peacekeeper) missile was supposed to have post-launch re-targeting ability: its warhead bus (post-boost stage, responsible for individual targeting of warheads) was supposed to be reprogrammable in flight. On practice it means, that it could receive coded command to change one target list for another, as long as warheads were still attached to it. In theory, it was supposed to gave US officials additional time to think; they could launch missiles on warning (thus avoiding the danger of them being caught on ground), observe the enemy attack hits, and then issue the orders to already-launched missiles — exactly which enemy targets to attack. However, it seems that this system was never actually deployed.
  • Gravity bombs on the other hand did have this sort of thing, each was equipped with a scuttle charge in case the bomber had to drop its bombs to make it home. On some models the timer on the scuttle charge was designed to activate even in an aggressive drop, though considerably after the bomb would have detonated if it wasn't a dud (and the chances of a nuke remaining intact after trying to detonate are slim anyway).

See Artistic License – Nuclear Physics for errors involving nuclear technology.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In Future War 198X, the inventor of America's new Missile Defense System is kidnapped by Soviet spies. When the Americans realize that he is being taken back to Russia by submarine, they figure that it would be better to kill their greatest inventor than to let his creations fall into enemy hands. They send out a sea-based nuclear warhead to destroy the boat, thinking that it will be a small enough accident that it can be blamed on an accident aboard. The result is far more enormous than anticipated, setting off the entire horrific war the rest of the movie narrates.
• In Death Note, Mello gets control of the notebook briefly, and threatens that he will write the President's name in the book and force him to launch a nuke and start World War III if the President doesn't comply with Mello's request to fund the search for Kira. It's not known whether the threat was real, or whether Mello was just bluffing.

Comic Books

• The Punisher MAX. "Mother Russia" story has Frank in a firefight in a Russian nuclear missile silo to save a little girl, and later evades capture by launching one of the unarmed missiles away and parachuting out. He only addresses the missile's proximity by saying they won't go off short of another nuke.
• Judge Dredd: American President Robert L. Booth is single-handedly responsible for World War III in the setting by unleashing all the nuclear arsenal of the USA into the world after the ultimatum he gave to the UN (either let America continue the occupation of every key industrial sites in the world or be prepared to get nuked) had expired. The scariest is that Booth seemed to have full support of the entire country if the reaction to his ultimatum was any indication. It would be safe to assume he had been authorized by the proper administrative officials to start an atomic offensive. Not like it would have mattered to him, in any case.

Film — Animated

• The Iron Giant features a mistake regarding USS Nautilus. In the film, the army orders the sub to launch a nuclear missile at the giant. However, Nautilus was an attack submarine, designed to find and sink ballistic missile subs.^note The Nautilus was a nuclear submarine in the sense that it was nuclear-powered, not armed with actual nukes...though the Navy did design nuclear warheads for torpedoes. The first ballistic missile submarine for the US Navy, USS George Washington, would not enter service until 1959, two years after the events of the film.

Film — Live-Action

• Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb may be the epitome of this trope. General Jack D. Ripper issues an order for his bomb wing to attack their targets inside the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had developed a device that would immediately trigger a nuclear holocaust in the event of an attack on Soviet soil. Nobody but Ripper could order his wing to return, and the Soviet device would go off if any attempt was made to disable it. The film opens with a disclaimer from the US Air Force, assuring moviegoers that their safeguards would prevent such events from happening.
• Fail Safe: A bomber group is launched with nuclear weapons and receives the 'go-ahead' signal because of a technical failure. Because they are literally following their instructions, which tell them to ignore stand-down orders, the U.S. has to give the Soviets whatever information they can to tell them how to shoot down their own planes but one bomber escapes the defences and heads for Moscow. When the inevitable becomes clear, the President offers a solution to his Soviet counterpart to avoid a nuclear holocaust. Since their largest city is doomed, he will offer up America's largest city in return as an Heroic Sacrifice to save the world. When the bomb goes off over New York City, the pilot who had to drop it commits suicide because his wife and children were in New York.
• The Bedford Incident. A gung-ho destroyer commander harasses a Soviet sub with the intention of forcing it to the surface. Unfortunately he also rides his crew equally hard, so a keyed-up officer launches an anti-sub missile when he hears the words "Fire One" twice in a row (the captain was actually saying "If he (the sub) fires one, then I'll fire one"). The by-now equally keyed-up Soviet submariners respond with an atomic torpedo before they're destroyed. Downplayed in that tactical nuclear weapons, like atomic torpedoes, tend to lack the technological protections and locks that are used on strategic nuclear weapons, like nuclear missiles.
• Under Siege
  • Subverted in (of all places) a Steven Seagal movie. The U.S.S. Missouri's big guns are about to fire at a submarine carrying stolen nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
  Jordan Tate: If the sub blows, won't the nukes go?
  Casey Ryback: No. They won't detonate. Just sink with the sub.
  • Played straight when Chief Ryback transmits a self-destruct code to a cruise missile in flight and causes it to blow up.
• Superman: The Movie (1978). The United States would never test launch missiles with 500 megaton nuclear warheads (armed or not) over U.S. territory the way they do in the movie: any accident could cause vast destruction and loss of life. Even worse, a newspaper headline before the test mentions that live warheads would be used. So the U.S. military said publicly that they were going to pull this harebrained stunt and no one objected. This of course creates an opportunity by Lex Luthor to murder millions in a way that takes the first Super Hero to stop.
• The Last War averts several tropes by making the sides the Federation and Alliance, and not pointing fingers at any countries in the nuclear attack at the end.
• The villain's plan in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol made and set in 2011, involves seizing control of a single nuclear missile and making it look like a Russian first strike on the U.S. (specifically San Francisco) in order to start a nuclear world war. This might have worked some 30 years earlier in 1981. But in 2011, a single nuclear detonation (on a civilian population center rather than a military target) would likely be assumed an act of terrorism. Even if it appeared to be a genuine Russian attack, a single missile (tracked as it came in) would not provoke immediate all out retaliation because it would be obvious there were no other inbound missiles. The inaccuracy and gross misunderstanding of nuclear politics is made even worse considering the villain is supposed to be an expert on the subject in-universe, albeit one who is insane.
• Spies Like Us. After a Soviet missile is launched at the United States, the American spies who did it realize that they've started World War III. However, one of them remembers that the missile has "source-programmable guidance", so they transmit a signal to it that causes it to fly out into space and explode. Not only do nuclear missiles not have such an option, it would be impossible for the missile to change course that way.

Literature

• 1983: Doomsday is an alternate history where the false alarm in the Serpukhov-15 bunker (see the Real Life section for how things really turned out) was reported to the superiors, resulting in nuclear war.
• Averted in The Hunt for Red October (though not in the movie for reasons of drama). First it's pointed out that Ramius could have launched his missiles virtually from harbour if he wanted to start World War III, and that several officers are needed to launch the missiles, more even than a US submarine. A Politburo discussion about options for preventing the defection of Ramius, specifically pointed out that without the appropriate signal from an accelerometer, the weapon couldn't detonate. Though the film version does have The Mole attempting to sink the October by way of detonating one of the missiles aboard. It's specifically pointed out that the missiles can't be launched, but the fuel and non-nuclear explosives on just one is more than enough to incinerate the ship. Also, the missile the The Mole is attempting to blow in place had been specifically rigged beforehand with a non-standard detonator package, precisely to enable this contingency plan.
• While not quite an Accident, but insanity, in the last book of The Genesis of Shannara trilogy, the last man living in a nuclear launch facility is finally driven to the point where he launches the remaining weapons in his base's arsenal. The two key console had been changed to a single man with a code, and all weapons pre-targeted. Of course this was already After the End, with "The Great Wars" having already destroyed the majority of civilization (in fact it was during these wars that the normal safe guards were removed that allowed one person to launch the entire U.S. ICBM stockpile, that's how bad they got), so instead of starting a war like most of the other examples did/almost did this one just finished up the destruction, basically causing so much cataclysmic damage it set a reset switch, allowing the survivors (who were magically shielded), to start over from scratch.
• "Dormant," a scary, scary SF short story by A.E. van Vogt, describes a robotic nuclear weapon landed on Earth from a long-ago war which is activated by fallout from nuclear bomb tests. On detonation, it almost thrusts the Earth into the Sun, because it doesn't know it's not the same war and would have had no choice even if it had.
• In Animorphs #46: The Deception, the villainous admiral's Batman Gambit involves faking a nuclear attack by the Chinese on a United States aircraft carrier, giving him an excuse to have a submarine under his command "retaliate," which would actually involve the Chinese and kickstart World War III. The goal is to weaken the entire world enough for the Yeerks to switch from infiltration to open invasion of Earth.
• It is claimed that Tom Clancy revealed the details of the "Looking Glass" policy in his novel The Sum of All Fears, but for obvious reasons this has never been officially confirmed (or denied).
• A nuclear detonation kicks off the action of Patrick Robinson's Nimitz-Class. The President and Joint Chiefs believe it was either an accident or sabotage, both scenarios their nuclear weapons specialist categorically refutes.
• Alex Rider: In Skeleton Key, General Sarov plans to detonate a nuclear bomb atop the rusting Russian nuclear submarines in the naval base, which are armed with nuclear missiles. The resulting fallout cloud will contaminate most of Western Europe and allow Russia to return to the glory of its Soviet days, or so Sarov believes.
• In Joe Hill's novella Rain, from Strange Weather, a combination of worldwide mass hysteria and anger over the destruction caused by the strange crystalline rains (not helped at all by the President's deranged warmongering) leads to nuclear exchanges breaking out which devastate entire countries. They also manage to kill the scientists who created the crystalline seed compound, meaning almost everyone who could have come up with a way to stop the rains is dead.

Live-Action TV

• Revolution. Regarding what happened in the episode "The Dark Tower":
  • Nuclear weapons are pre-programmed with their mission profiles, and cannot usually be reprogrammed immediately. It seems unlikely in the extreme that American nuclear missiles were targeted on Philadelphia and Atlanta just prior to the blackout (although the possibility exists that the rump US government could blame the strikes on a third party).
  • Nuclear missiles require constant maintenance; nuclear warheads do degrade over time; and land-based nuclear missile silos tend to flood in rainstorms unless continuously pumped out.
  • Nuclear missiles are subject to dual-key control at the silo (assuming the problems with a loss of contact with squadron command have been resolved). Even if a missile was still functional after 15+ years of abandonment, and targeted on the appropriate city, there would be no way to fire it without manually turning the keys.
• Whoops Apocalypse:
  • In the British comedy series, a series of Pythonesque misadventures leads to an accidental rocket crash being interpreted as a preemptive American strike on Moscow.
  • The film of the same name has the same writers but an almost completely different plot, in which a submarine commander accidentally orders a nuclear strike because a stage hypnotist has implanted the command to say "Fire!" whenever someone snaps their fingers.
• Woops!:
  • This short-lived comedy series begins on the notion that a couple of kids with a radio-controlled airplane accidentally interfered with US missile control systems, causing global thermonuclear holocaust. Of course, the entire show is built in this sort of hyperbolic farce.
  • Not quite as farfetched as you might think, actually.
• In one episode of ALF, the titular alien tries to contact the president to voice his concerns about a nuclear disaster. When Willie asked if that's what destroyed Melmac, ALF replies "No, we all plugged our hairdryers in at the same time".
• In Supergirl (2015), an "ICBM" launched in "Solitude" has an onboard flight computer controlling it and is flying as a self-powered missile straight toward its target. We call that a cruise missile, not an ICBM. A ballistic missile is powered only when launching into sub-orbit; then the rocket cuts out, gravity takes over, and it falls to Earth much like an oversized artillery shell.

Music

• "99 Luftballons" (English: "99 Red Balloons"). Due to bugs in the software, the titular balloons show up as unidentified blips on a radar screen, so one side sends fighter jets to investigate. The other side takes this as an attack and retaliates with the nukes. Fortunately for the world, a hundred ordinary toyshop balloons would not have a large enough return to show up on a radar screen IRL.
• Trope Namer "London Calling" by The Clash is about a post-apocalyptic London after an accidental nuclear disaster.

Video Games

• The Modern Warfare series plays with this trope, as it's, well, about modern warfare.
  • In the first game, the American armed forces are obliterated by a stand-still nuclear warhead as they storm al-Asad's capital city. But given Modern Warfare's propensity for leaving things ambiguous and open to interpretation, they don't really explain how it goes off or who did it, just that NEST and Seal Team Six start to defuse it, followed by a bright flash of light^note Modern Warfare 3 reveals it was set off by Russian terrorist Vladimir Makarov, but given the Infinity Ward fiasco, its canonocity is debatable
  • At the end, Imran Zakhaev takes over a Loyalist nuclear launch facility and launches nukes at the United States in retaliation for the continued US and British presence in Russia, but again the game doesn't really explain how they were able to crack the coded locks, as the US forces had to badger the Russian Loyalists just to get the auto-destruct codes. Of course, this is also in itself an error, as stated above — there are no "auto-destruct" codes.
  • During Modern Warfare 2, Captain Price disappears inside a Russian submarine, followed by an immediate missile launch. Like in the first game, the player doesn't actually see how he does it, although he might've been operating on British nuclear submarine logic and just beaten up the guy with the bicycle lock keys. Fortunately he set the missiles to blow up above Washington DC as an EMP to cripple Russian air superiority, as they were bringing all their materiel and troops in by plane.
  • Modern Warfare 3 revolves around rogue Ultranationalist terrorist Vladimir Makarov kidnapping the Russian president and forcing him to give up the Russian nuclear codes so he can destroy Europe, even though the actual Russian Army who he's secretly in league with (maybe—it's not explained much and contradicts what was established in the last game) are trying to conquer it. And that's not even getting to the fact that the Russians would presumably change the launch codes and/or not accept them from a man who they know has been kidnapped.
• This is one of the main themes of the campaign of Wargame: European Escalation, which visualised World War III happening on four different, unrelated occasions. One of those occasions, the ABLE ARCHER 83 escalation, culminates in a French first strike. Another one, while less grave, deals with a US computer error which fires missiles of various kinds over the Soviet border. While the actual nuclear missiles can be self-destructed before impact, the conventional ones cannot, and World War III erupts nevertheless.
• One of the late Allied missions in Command & Conquer: Red Alert has you race against the clock and fighting through Soviet troops in order to reach certain control panels for disarming nuclear missiles that have been launched minutes ago at several European major cities. The only possible Hand Wave is that Stalin (who in-story was already in the process of purging the ranks of his army and government from "traitors") was too paranoid to trust anyone with a non-disarmable nuke.
• Phantom Doctrine: Valhalla's mission is to prevent one of these from escalating into Mutually Assured Destruction over a statistically inevitable mistake^note The game's title represents the inherent fallacy of using nukes to keep your citizens scared stupid and unable to connect the dots on how military-industrial corporations rule the world by pitting two superpowers against one another; even if every government has secret protocols to eliminate anyone who wants to destroy the world, all it takes is a single accident to spark a nuclear war, one that is inevitable after decades of haphazardly harnessing thousands of nukes. Unfortunately, their own arrogance convinces them that the only way to teach the world how dangerous nuclear errors are is to instigate two themselves, by targeting Washington DC and Moscow with nukes and using their control of the early internet to take over the resulting anarchy.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation story "War Is Child's Play" is about an alternate Earth where Joseph Kennedy became president instead of John, and a nuclear error on the East side was retaliated with a true nuclear barrage from the West, causing the end of the world. Both sides continued to fight during the post-apocalypse, believing the other side struck first.

Western Animation

• The main topic of 1962 animated short "The Hole". Two construction workers debate the danger of an accidental nuclear war. The more skeptical one suggests that science and technology are fallible and could lead to a nuclear holocaust. The animation shows a rat chewing through the power lines at an early warning missile radar station.
• "Hypothese Beta" is an animated short about a silly hole in a computer punch card (the cartoon being from 1967, when computer punch cards were a thing). The hole keeps moving around the punch card unpredictably, bothering the other holes on the punch card, which eventually gang up on the rebellious hole. The Twist Ending / Sudden Downer Ending involves The Reveal that the computer punch card controls some country's nuclear arsenal, and all the chaos on the card accidentally causes a nuclear war.

Real Life

• So far as anyone knows, there has never been an accidental nuclear detonation. But there have been serious errors, usually resulting from midair collisions, where nuclear weapons have been lost temporarily. Others have occurred where the non-nuclear components of the bomb detonated due to accidents, but as they must detonate in a precise sequence with extremely tight time tolerances, the only result was spreading radioactive material around.
  • The closest Spain ever got was probably when a US bomber was destroyed in a refueling accident, releasing all four bombs in its payload (with the non-nuclear explosives aboard two detonating, spreading contamination to a significant area). More details here.
  • In 1961, the US almost nuked North Carolina (a state on the USA's eastern coast) with a 3-4 megaton bomb when a mid-air refueling accident damaged a B-52 nuclear bomber aeroplane and forced its crew to bail out, leaving the bombs onboard. The aircraft broke up in mid-air, causing one of the two bombs it had carried to deploy its parachute and arm itself as per a usual bomb-drop (unlike normal bombs, nuclear bombs were fitted with parachutes to give the bomber time to escape the blast). Thankfully, the bomb couldn't have detonated without a crew activated safety switch, so there was no danger of full detonation. The design of the bomber aircraft and bombs, and the routine nature of such flights and refuelings (a fleet of these bombers was in the air at all times, ready to nuke the USSR at a moment's notice if necessary), meant that a repeat of the incident was almost inevitable until the parachute system was replaced. More details here.
  • There was also a case of the USA losing a nuclear bomb, never to be found again. What happened was that an F-86 fighter plane collided with a B-47 bomber carrying the device. To prevent an explosion and loss of the crew, the bomb was dropped. Several unsuccessful searches later, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island. Read the story here.
• Britain's contribution to nearly starting World War III involved a front-line Vulcan nuclear bomber on patrol in West Germany (awaiting orders to turn right and head for Leningrad) — and a chocolate biscuit. What happened is that the particular sort of chocolate biscuit issued to RAF aircrew (as part of the tea break even nuclear bomber crews get) was prone to exploding in a semi-pressurised cabin at high altitude. Bored crews used to lay one out in a prominent position, on top of the Flight Engineer's console, and lay bets on how long it took to detonate. On this occassion, a Tunnock's Teacake dunked in tea exploded in such a way that fragments of tea-soaked biscuit found their way inside the flight engineer's console. In which 1960's computer circuitry was used to arm and activate the nuke prior to a stand-off launch. A short-circuit was caused and the console lit up indicating the weapon was armed and ready for launch. The crew managed to land in time and the bomb was deactivated. But after that the RAF issued a different sort of biscuit to flight crews. (Come on, you cannot cancel the tea-break for British service personnel...)
• And worse? The world may have been closer to World War III than even during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • In 1983, war tensions were high between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. For a few years, the USSR under Brezhnev and Andropov were terrified that a United States first strike was imminent, and had instituted the RYaN (from the Russian meaning something like "Nuclear Rocket Attack") program to find any hints of warlike intentions. ^note (To make things even worse on this score, the agents tasked with finding this information were berated if they didn't gather positive signs of preparation for a US first strike — anything that suggested the US was NOT about to nuke Moscow was derided as "misinformation" —, and so liberally interpreted every scrap of info in the worst possible sense. In short, the Soviets were talking themselves, quite by accident, into the very nuclear war they feared was coming from the other side.) In the summer of '83, the Able Archer '83 exercises (a NATO communications exercise meant to simulate the first week of World War III, culminating on the last day with a rehearsal of an expected nuclear exchange) were held, this coinciding with the controversial arrival of Pershing nuclear missiles ^note which were capable of hitting Russia within five to six minutes, well under any sort of Soviet early-warning capability. The Soviets were monitoring in real time and were becoming increasingly alarmed at the exercise. The coinciding of the two events sent Soviet suspicions through the roof. And, the Soviet early-warning satellite system was fundamentally flawed. The system registered five ICBMs from three separate launches headed towards Russia.^note In reality, what had happened was that sunlight reflecting off the Earth hit in just the right manner to appear to the satellite's IR sensors to be missile launches. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the officer in charge of the station, realized quickly that the United States would not launch a first strike with just five missiles — had they actually intended to initiate war they'd have launched everything, in an attempt to cut the head off their enemy before it could retaliate significantly. Suspecting an equipment error, especially since he could not corroborate the apparent launches with radar data (which said there were no missiles at all), he shut down the first two alarms, and explained to his superiors that he was ignoring the third, citing the fact that only five missiles had been launched. It is somewhat exaggerated how much of a threat this was given the non-correlation of the radar and satellite data, and this example is often treated as if Petrov had authority to launch missiles himself, but it is possible that if he had treated the alarm as genuine the Soviet Union would have responded with a "counter" launch, leading to a real counterlaunch from the US and MAD. And, to top it all off, Petrov wasn't supposed to be the man on duty that day. He had taken the shift for another operator who was sick. The Soviet Union being what it was, Petrov was promptly relieved of duty pending an official inquiry, primarily because admitting the satellite system was flawed would be a huge embarrassment for the Soviet Union. (For what it's worth, they decided he'd acted properly and he was reinstated.)
  • Even after the Petrov incident, there were still tensions. Two weeks before the Able Archer exercise began, a Marine base in Beirut was hit by a suicide bomber, killing over 200 US Marines. All US bases around the world were put on alert after that, stoking Soviet paranoia. This was followed by considerable encrypted communications traffic between the White House and Downing Street concerning British objections to the U.S. invasion of Grenada (a Commonwealth Realm). Unable to decrypt that traffic, the Soviets assumed it concerned plans for a NATO attack. Then, Able Archer '83 entered its crescendo phase — the simulation of Soviet chemical attacks on Western Europe, and NATO commanders making the decision to launch retaliatory strikes on Eastern Europe. These messages were picked up by Soviet wiretaps, and sent Andropov and the Kremlin into a frothing panic. Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops were sent to their wartime mobilization positions, and nuclear bombers were put in the air as a precaution. It was only tamped down once a East German agent named TOPAZ^note Real name Rainer Rupp, a West German of strong leftist political convictions who became a spy for East German intelligence, who had access to Cosmic Top Secret documents at NATO sent off an urgent message to the East German HVA, who passed it to the KGB, stating baldly that NATO had no concrete intentions of attacking, and that the exercise was as it appeared — just an exercise.
  • Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a civilian 747, strayed off course and flew into Soviet airspace, where it was mistaken for a spy plane. It was then shot down with all onboard lost. Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire" referring to the Soviet Union after this incident, and banned Aeroflot (the Soviet national airline) from landing in the States. Long story short, 1983 was a bad year in international relations.
    • A good deal of that "bad year" thing is because, according to his memoirs, Reagan didn't realize how much the Soviets genuinely feared an American first strike. It was not until the reports of the Soviet reaction to Able Archer 83 made their way back to him six months later that he began to properly understand how they regarded the US and how close it had been.
  • Even the end of the Cold War didn't stop these close calls — a rocket carrying scientific equipment for studying the aurora borealis was launched from Norway in January 1995, but its trajectory took it over Moscow and its flight path was the same as a Minuteman ICBM launched from North Dakota. The scientists had notified Russia (and about thirty others) about the launch, but no one told the personnel at the radar installation that detected it. End result: full alert was issued all the way up to President Boris Yeltsin, and the nuclear briefcase used to authorize nuclear attack was activated (the only time in history thus far this has happened).
• Sometime around the crisis with the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, the US 6th Fleet accidentally issued a valid nuclear release code to some of its ships as part of a readiness exercise. This was not an order for a strike, it simply gave authority to use nuclear weapons to the ship captains. Because it was a scheduled exercise and the message format indicated it was an exercise message, all of the captains or ships involved elected to ignore the validity of the code itself.
• The paranoia came back with a vengeance on January 13th, 2018, when a U.S. nuclear alarm system test was accidentally replaced with a full alert. A few minutes after eight in the morning, the entire state of Hawaii received a smartphone notification (along with interrupted TV and radio) that told them to seek shelter for a nuclear attack, which thanks to the suddenness of the alert, the belligerence of the president at the time, and the stirrings of relatively nearby North Korea led to a panic. Though the alarm system wasn't tied to actual nuclear alarm procedures, meaning any government official or those who'd noticed the lack of sirens or other alerts didn't buy it, the event still resulted in at least one death, a heart attack, and a host of anecdotes about someone here or there doing things they only would've done thinking they were about to die for at least 15 minutes.

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