In Writing Scientific Software: A Guide to Good Style, several disasters are mentioned including a missle defence system which led to deaths at a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1991.
The error was caused due to catastrophic cancellation in tracking the incoming Scud missile's velocity, in order to fire a missile before it hit the base:
$$\frac{x_{i+1}-x_i}{t_{i+1}-t_i}.$$
It is clear that for large times, and a small difference, this can lead to poor estimates because of catastrophic cancellation. When this was noticed in their C program, it was apparently fixed but how could this be done? Excluding solutions with third party libraries, e.g. GMP.