  We show that in the neighborhood of the tripling bifurcation of a periodic
orbit of a Hamiltonian flow or of a fixed point of an area preserving map,
there is generically a bifurcation that creates a ``twistless'' torus. At this
bifurcation, the twist, which is the derivative of the rotation number with
respect to the action, vanishes. The twistless torus moves outward after it is
created, and eventually collides with the saddle-center bifurcation that
creates the period three orbits. The existence of the twistless bifurcation is
responsible for the breakdown of the nondegeneracy condition required in the
proof of the KAM theorem for flows or the Moser twist theorem for maps. When
the twistless torus has a rational rotation number, there are typically
reconnection bifurcations of periodic orbits with that rotation number.
