Thread by @AtomicAnalyst

Tonight in 1975, the guided missile cruiser USS Belknap (CG-26) collided with the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) when the Belknap turned into the Kennedy's path in rough seas during night-flying exercises in the Mediterranean Sea about 70 miles east of Sicily.

The Kennedy's massive flight deck sliced into the Belknap's superstructure, severing a fuel line on the Kennedy and setting off multiple fires on the Belknap, which burned out of control for two-and-a-half hours and came within 40 feet of the Belknap's nuclear weapons magazine.

Inside that magazine were Terrier surface-to-air missiles armed with W45 nuclear warheads (with a yield of 1 or 5 kilotons). The Kennedy was also carrying nuclear weapons at the time of the accident: approximately 100 air-delivered gravity bombs.

Shortly after the collision, Adm. Eugene Carroll, commander of Carrier Striking Forces for the US Sixth Fleet, sent a flash message to his superiors, declaring a probable Broken Arrow aboard the Belknap. An hour later, others on scene determined there was “no radiation hazard.”

The accident killed seven sailors on the Belknap and one on the Kennedy. The fact that nuclear weapons were aboard both vessels—and that initially a Broken Arrow was a serious concern—was not revealed until 1989, when Greenpeace researchers released declassified Navy documents.

In response, the Navy insisted, “It is US government policy neither to confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons .... The 1981 Department of Defense report [on Broken Arrows] is correct in that no nuclear weapons were affected by the 1975 Belknap-Kennedy collision.”