The Myth of 92 Lost Nuclear Bombs at Sea

If you've heard that 92 nuclear bombs are sitting at the bottom of the ocean, you've encountered one of those viral "facts" that sounds terrifying enough to be true. The reality is both less alarming and somehow more unsettling: we don't know exactly how many nuclear weapons are down there, but it's definitely not 92.

What Are "Broken Arrows"?

The U.S. military uses the term "Broken Arrow" to describe accidents involving nuclear weapons. Since 1950, the Department of Defense has officially acknowledged at least 32 such incidents. The actual number? Probably much higher—hundreds of incidents were detailed by the Defense Atomic Support Agency, though most never made it into public records.

Of these accidents, six U.S. nuclear weapons were lost and never recovered. That's the real number for American nukes permanently AWOL beneath the waves.

The Underwater Arsenal

Here's what's actually down there:

• Tybee Island, Georgia (1958): A nuclear weapon jettisoned into Wassaw Sound after a mid-air collision. Still there.
• Pacific Ocean (1965): An A-4E Skyhawk rolled off the USS Ticonderoga with a B43 nuclear bomb. Pilot, plane, weapon—all vanished at 16,000 feet of water.
• Mediterranean Sea (1966): A B28 thermonuclear bomb with a 1.1 megaton warhead disappeared after a mid-air collision near Spain. Three of four bombs were recovered. One wasn't.

These are just the American losses we know about from declassified records. The U.S. had at least ten nuclear weapons accidentally drop into the ocean across eight different incidents, primarily during the Cold War's white-knuckle years of the 1950s and 60s.

The Soviet Question

When you factor in the Soviet Union, things get murkier. A Soviet submarine carrying 34 nuclear warheads sank in 1986. Nine nuclear submarines in total have gone down over the decades—though not all details about their payloads are public knowledge. Still, even being generous with estimates, we're nowhere near 92.

The myth likely stems from confusion between weapons lost at sea versus weapons deployed at sea, or perhaps from conflating all nuclear accidents (including those on land) with maritime incidents. It's also possible someone mixed up the number of total Broken Arrow incidents with just the underwater ones.

Why This Matters

While 92 is fiction, the real story is hardly comforting. We have confirmed nuclear weapons sitting in international waters, some armed, some in unknown conditions, all essentially irretrievable. The U.S. military considers the risk of accidental detonation to be nearly zero—seawater is apparently a decent safety mechanism—but "nearly zero" and "zero" aren't quite the same thing when we're talking about thermonuclear weapons.

The bigger concern isn't explosion but environmental contamination. These weapons contain plutonium and highly enriched uranium, materials that remain radioactive for thousands of years. Corrosion is inevitable. Leakage is likely.

So no, there aren't 92 nuclear bombs lost at sea. But there are enough down there to make you think twice about that reassuring phrase "lost at sea." When it comes to nuclear weapons, "lost" doesn't mean "gone." It just means we've stopped looking.