Still, at least those incidents can be relatively contained - nobody in their right, non-Russian mind would build a nuclear power plant anywhere near a populated area - which is more than can be said for a bunch of nuclear material being carried on a plane. You know what planes do sometimes? They crash. Sometimes they crash in populated areas. And sometimes they are American military planes carrying atomic weapons who somehow manage to fall from the sky and land somewhere in their own country, which should be all measures lead to a horrifying nuclear incident that could wipe out the most of the country and maybe irradiate the land even further than that. This isn't just one incident, by the way, as most of the others on the list have been so far. This has happened multiple times in American military history. On multiple occasions they have almost ended the world because they can't fly planes properly. Well that's not entirely fair, we suppose; during the Korean War a bomber went down due to engine trouble and crashed at a Californian air base, in the late fifties a mid-air collision caused a hydrogen bomb to wind up being embedded in the Savannah, and there's countless other examples. Most of them didn't detonate, or had a small enough payload to not cause an international incident, but that's a few too many near misses for our liking.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
