I recently read the non-fiction book Command And Control by Eric Schlosser. It's structured around an incident when a Titan II missile blew up in its silo in Arkansas, throwing the warhead out of the silo and into the air.
Anyway, it uses that incident to go back in history and explain the development of nuclear weapons and how the command and control systems we have today came about. A lot of it was driven to prevent all sorts of near-miss accidents that have happened in the past. We've been really, really lucky.
Highly recommend the book, especially for the HN crowd. It's good prose, but gets deep enough into the tech and system details that you come away with a solid understanding of how it all works.