Interesting article and story. I don't rightly recall ever hearing about this particular incident. I was 8; so I wonder if/when details were released to the public. You really wonder -- this would be a hugely dangerous incident and very embarrassing for the general public to find out about it, so you'd expect that the military would keep a lid on it, so to speak, for as long as possible. The cat was out of the bag by 1988, because a film was made about the incident, so it says.

Highly recommend reading Eric Schlosser's fantastic book Command and Control. It goes into great detail about the failings at the Damascus Incident, but also features some truly hair-raising accounts of other near-catastrophic nuclear near-misses.

Seconded.

Add to that the (insane?) early SIOP, a plan for an all-out attack on the USSR with waves of nuke-armed strategic bombers.

As for the Damascus accident, I'd love to watch a high-budget movie about it (preferably on the level of "Deepwater Horizon", with Mark Wahlberg to boot).