On December 5, 1965, no flying was scheduled from aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, which was cruising from the Yankee Station toward Japan. Although Ticonderoga was fighting a real conflict and losing men in conventional warfare, the ship's primary mission was Cold War nuclear combat with the Communist bloc. That day, during the course of a weapons-loading drill and simulated mission, Douglas Webster and his armed A-4 Skyhawk toppled overboard. A young pilot from Ohio, Webster was newly married and with 17 combat missions under his belt. The loss of the bomber, the pilot and the live B43 one-megaton thermonuclear bomb was a major incident, and one that should have been investigated immediately. But instead a cover-up mission began. Though the crew was ordered to stay quiet, rumors circulated of sabotage, a damaged weapon and a troublesome pilot who needed "disposing of." The incident, a "Broken Arrow" in the parlance of the Pentagon, was kept under wraps for a quarter of a century. In the late 1980s, researchers discovered archived documents that disclosed the true location of the carier, hundreds of miles closer to land than admitted. Emerging in 1989, this information caused a diplomatic incident, as the public - and Webster's family - learned that the United States had violated agreements not to bring nuclear weapons into Japan. Broken Arrow tells the story of Ticonderoga's sailors and airmen, the dangers of combat missions and shipboard life, and the accident that threatened to wipe her off the map and blow American-Japanese relations apart.