Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Life
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The Dropped Wrench

Every day, we go about our lives doing thousands of routine, mundane tasks. And sometimes, we make mistakes. Human error. It happens all the time.

 

It just doesn’t always happen in a nuclear missile silo.

 

This story aired on This American Life and the Radio Diaries Podcast. Here’s a trailer:

And here’s the full episode:

A special thanks on this story to Eric Schlosser who wrote a book on nuclear arms called Command and Control, and whose research was crucial to this documentary. Also, thanks to Eric Molinsky who helped report this story, and to Ben Calhoun, Ira Glass, and all the other folks at This American Life.

Radio Diaries is part of Radiotopia from PRX.

 

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