Since the 1950s Cold War era, when “duck and cover” drills were common in schools, nuclear weaponry has become abstract, if not ignored outright by most Americans. But with belligerent rhetoric – whether Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump or North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un – attention is drifting back to nuclear war.

However, as shown in the new documentary “Command and Control” and the book on which it’s based, nuclear weapons may also pose a grave danger by accident, making the risk a local as well as global fear.

The threat could happen in Peoria as much as Pyongyang.

Six years ago this month, the Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne, Wyo., had a computer failure causing crews to lose communications with 50 Minuteman III missiles, which were offline for more than an hour. If they’d accidentally launched, someplace would have sustained a blast, heat wave, electro-magnetic pulse, radar blackout and radiation for miles around the impact.

Directed by veteran filmmaker Robert Kenner (“Food, Inc.”) and based on the best-seller of the same title by Eric Schlosser, “Command and Control” premiered in New York in April and is now in limited theatrical release, this month showing in nine cities, including Minneapolis and San Diego, and is planned for a PBS telecast on “American Experience” this season.

As recounted in the book and film, a series of mishaps have put areas in jeopardy – thousands, according to Schlosser, including:

* 1961: Two H-bombs fell from a B-52 above North Carolina, where they armed themselves and a firing signal was sent. Luckily, one out of five safety switches worked, preventing detonation.

* 1962: A small nut loosened in a B-47 bomber, creating an electrical pathway and inadvertently arming hydrogen bombs onboard.

* 1968: Seat cushions placed near a heat vent caused a fire that downed a B-52 carrying four H-bombs, and it crashed in Greenland.

* 1980: A technician working on a Titan II missile in a silo outside of Damascus, Ark., dropped a tool several feet, damaging a fuel tank. A huge fireball erupted, destroying the missile and propelling its warhead into the air, landing about 30 yards away. Fortunately, the bomb-firing system held.

* 2007: Unsecured nuclear Cruise missiles were mistakenly flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, where they sat unattended for hours.

* 2008: A shipment of nuclear warhead fuses was accidentally flown to Taiwan.

* 2010: An entire New Mexico munitions squad responsible for a nuclear weapons storage area failed an inspection and was removed from duty.

* 2010: A B-52 carrying 12 nuclear weapons in North Dakota caught fire and threatened to unleash radioactive fallout through the Great Plains

* 2016: A group of 19 Minuteman III launch personnel in North Dakota violated safety rules and was decertified.

In the 1970s, the U.S. military had between 20,000 and 30,000 nuclear warheads; despite some disarmament, about 4,300 remain armed (not including nukes in Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, North Korea and probably Pakistan, India and Israel). Also, the missiles and systems are aging; some complexes are more than 50 years old. Further, about 1 million pounds of plutonium and 3 million pounds of weapons-grade uranium are stored at hundreds of sites in dozens of countries, Kenner noted, who commented, “These accidents were in the news, but because the Air Force maintained there was never great danger, the impact wasn’t felt.

“Every one of those weapons is an accident waiting to happen,” he said, adding, “During the past few years, American missile launch officers have been caught cheating on their exams and using illegal drugs. Airmen responsible for nuclear weapon security have allegedly been caught using cocaine. The Air Force denies that the safety of our weapons was ever at risk, but it’s hard to argue that using illegal drugs while working with nuclear weapons is a good idea.”

However if some sort of nuclear-weapon accident affecting metro Peoria would occur, the result would be catastrophic, killing more than 370,000 people, according to science historian Alex Wellerstein, who used unclassified sources to create NUKEMAP 3D, an online resource showing scenarios of detonations over almost any geographic area.

“I want to make the effects concrete and personal for people,” Wellerstein said, “so that they take them more seriously as actual weapons as opposed to just symbols of ultimate destruction.”

The effects of a detonation of such a device in downtown Peoria would be temperatures like the sun’s vaporizing downtown, releasing intense radiation, almost to Peoria Heights, an air blast damaging concrete structures in East Peoria, and toppling most other buildings as far as Bartonville, with thermal radiation extending to Glasford and Pekin to the south, Dunlap and Chillicothe to the north, and Metamora and Mackinaw to the east.

Speaking to Community Word on the condition of anonymity, a former Peorian who served on a Titan II missile base from 1968-1972 says the film and book offer a valuable perspective. Skilled at electronics since he was a kid, he eventually worked in Peoria repairing electronic equipment.

In the service, “I trained for a year before I got on a crew: four men, two enlisted and two officers,” said the 67-year-old man. “The enlisted guys were like 19 when they started; the officers were college grads. It took both officers to launch – two combo locks on the safe with two keys inside that turned too far apart for one person to do it.

“We called ourselves ‘the pushers of buttons and watchers of lights,’” he continued. “There were checklists for everything, full of warnings and cautions added from years of experience. You felt like part of a well-oiled machine. We pulled only eight alerts a month; staying overnight, about 26 hours per alert. I was the electronics guy: Ballistic Missile Analyst Technician.

“Most of the time it was pretty relaxed while waiting for World War III,” he added. “After about 5 p.m. it was time to play hearts, spades, dominoes or cribbage, and eat pork rinds and drink pop. We even had a TV, and one time we all watched ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ That was bizarre.”

There were institutional safeguards, he said.

“The Air Force was excellent at nailing potential known problems. It’s just the unknown problems,” he said. “They worried about crews not launching. It was pointed at millions of people. If we were told to launch, it meant that we were already in a nuclear war. (This was when it was a ‘retaliatory’ weapon – later in the ’80s it was changed to ‘first-strike capability’.) I knew a guy who DJ’d part-time at a Tucson radio station. On air he said he wouldn’t launch if we got the message. The next day he was reassigned to the motor pool.”

However, “no one can prepare for the unknowable,” he added. “It’s a machine. What is ‘safe’ depends on the consequences when it turns out to be not safe. Nothing is safe from human error or the unknowable. I like Schlosser’s lines: ‘And the problem with luck is it eventually runs out. Nuclear weapons are machines. And every machine ever invented eventually goes wrong.’”

Concerning the consequences of an accidental detonation in Peoria, he agrees that the effects would be disastrous.

“If it was a Titan II and if the warhead somehow armed and blew, it would explode a 8.5-megaton bomb – three times more than all the bombs used in World War II, including the two nukes,” he said. “There would be nothing to play in Peoria.”

Indeed, USAF Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, head of the Global Strike Command, said in 2013, “The greatest risk to my force is an accident … [or someone] doing something stupid.”

The ex-Peorian agreed, adding that people should consider what’s out there.

“Damascus [Arkansas] is just a part of its story,” he said. “Besides the nuclear accidents, the scariest part for me was the command and control ‘structure’ and the EWO [Emergency War Order] plans.”

Schlosser, who also co-produced and co-wrote the 92-minute film, summarized the risk at hand: “The best training, the best engineering, and the best of intentions seemed incapable of preventing accidents,” he said. “Every machine ever invented eventually goes wrong.”