> a story about a bug in a missile that was on the verge of delaying its deployment due to tests failing.

A Patriot Missile in Saudi Arabia wasn't launched to intercept a SCUD, which then killed 28 soldiers. The reason was poor handling of rounding errors [1]

The maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket resulted in a RUD due to an integer overflow [2]

[1] http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

[2] http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html