Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The Fowler Letter’s only immediate effect was to raise the possibility that Glenn Fowler would lose his job. His urgent safety warning didn’t persuade the Air Force to remove nuclear weapons from its bombers on ground alert. At the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, the anger provoked by the letter was intense. High-ranking officials from both organizations flew from Washington, D.C., to meet with the head of Sandia. In preparation for the meeting, Peurifoy asked Stan Spray to put together an exhibit of weapon components that had been subjected to abnormal environments. Perhaps seeing would be believing: the melted solder on charred circuit boards seemed like irrefutable evidence that nuclear weapons could behave unpredictably during a fire. Spray’s presentation was soon known as the Burned Board briefing. Donald R. Cotter, the assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy, and Major General Ernest Graves, the AEC official to whom Fowler’s letter had been sent, weren’t impressed. They found the evidence unconvincing. And they were outraged that Sandia had put these claims on the record. The American stockpile contained dozens of different types of nuclear weapons, and the Fowler Letter didn’t assert there was a minor safety problem with one of them. It suggested that none were demonstrably safe.

Don Cotter was particularly upset. He knew Peurifoy and Bill Stevens well. Before going to the Pentagon, Cotter had worked at Sandia for years. He’d designed the electrical systems of nuclear weapons, championed early safety devices, and helped Fred Iklé prepare the RAND report on weapon safety. Cotter was offended by the Fowler Letter. His response to it was blunt: “It’s our stockpile. We think it’s safe. Who do you guys think you are?” Peurifoy’s team had challenged not only the conventional wisdom about weapon design but also the readiness of some NATO units and the Strategic Air Command.

Fowler kept his job. But the recommendations in his letter weren’t followed. No air-delivered weapons were taken out of service or retrofitted with new safety mechanisms. Instead, a series of government studies was commissioned to explore the issue of nuclear weapon safety, a classic bureaucratic maneuver to delay taking any action. The Department of Defense argued that “the magnitude of the safety problems is not readily apparent” — and it now had unprecedented influence over the nuclear stockpile. The Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded in 1975. It was replaced by the Energy Research and Development Administration, an agency that lasted only two years, before being subsumed into the Department of Energy. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy — which had served for three decades as a powerful civilian counterweight to the military — was abolished in 1977. The Pentagon wielded largely unchecked power over the management of nuclear weapons, and its Defense Nuclear Agency had a set of priorities that differed from Bob Peurifoy’s. “The safety advantages gained by retrofitting existing stockpile weapons… will be a costly program that in all probability will reduce funds available for future weapons,” the DNA said.

The Air Force deployed most of the weapons that Peurifoy wanted to fix. And it supported the use of new safety devices, so long as they didn’t require:

1. Modification of any current operational aircraft

2. Additional crew actions and

3. Expenditure of Air Force money.

The Air Force also continued to have little interest in permissive action links or other forms of use control. The latest PALs were far more sophisticated and reliable than the ones provided to NATO in the early 1960s. The new Category D PALs had a six-digit code with a million possible combinations, a limited-try feature that permanently locked the weapon if the wrong numbers were entered, and the capability to store multiple codes. The president could now choose to unlock some nuclear weapons, but not others, by selecting a certain code. The system promised centralized, secure command and control. But the Strategic Air Command continued to resist installing PALs inside its warheads and bombs.

After the accident at Thule, the Pentagon had ordered SAC to impose some form of use control. Instead of relying on PALs, during the early 1970s the Air Force put a coded switch in the cockpit of every bomber that carried nuclear weapons. The switch permitted an arming signal to be sent to the bomb bay when the right code was entered. The lock had been placed on the bomber, not inside the bombs — and a stolen weapon could still be detonated with a simple DC signal. SAC was far more worried about its weapons being rendered inoperable during wartime than about someone stealing them or using them without proper authorization. During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.

Peurifoy was undaunted by the many layers of bureaucratic opposition. The issue at stake wasn’t trivial, and he was determined to persuade others in the defense community that the danger was real. The cost of adding weak links and strong links and a unique signal mechanism was about $100,000 per weapon. The Office of Management and Budget estimated that the installation of those safety devices in the two most widely used Air Force bombs, the Mark 28 and the B-61, would cost about $360 million. Peurifoy realized that was a good deal of money — but a nuclear weapon accident could be a hell of a lot more expensive. The amount of money needed for that retrofit was roughly 1 percent of what the Air Force planned to spend driving around MX missiles in the Utah and Nevada desert. The Pentagon’s fixation on obtaining new weapons, instead of properly maintaining older ones, would be hard to overcome. But the fight seemed worthwhile. A friend sent Peurifoy a cartoon that showed a member of the Supreme Court speaking from the bench. It conveyed Peurifoy’s general attitude, when the facts were on his side. “My dissenting opinion will be brief,” the justice said. “You’re all full of crap.”

The role of the weapons laboratories had become mainly advisory. They competed for contracts from the Department of Defense — and felt reluctant to criticize their largest customer. Peurifoy had no authority to demand changes in weapon systems that the armed services already possessed. But he refused to sign the Sandia major assembly release of any new bombs or warheads that didn’t have the new safety devices. And without his approval, those weapons couldn’t enter the stockpile. In 1977, almost four years after gaining some real authority at the lab, Peurifoy signed the release papers on a modification of the B-61 bomb. It was the first nuclear weapon to feature weak link/strong link technology.

As the dispute with the Pentagon dragged on, Peurifoy learned that the armed services were no longer telling him about nuclear weapon accidents. Broken Arrows would be difficult to hide, but the more commonplace mishaps — short circuits, bombs falling off loading carts, weapon carriers overturned — weren’t being reported to him. Peurifoy would often hear about them through other sources. The sense of denial at the upper levels of the Air Force and the Department of Defense had a ripple effect throughout both institutions. The bomber crews, the missile crews, the technicians who routinely handled warheads and bombs, the maintenance teams and firefighters — they were told the weapons were perfectly safe. The misinformation placed them at greater risk. It was also a form of disrespect toward young servicemen and women who were already risking their lives. And it encouraged careless behavior around nuclear weapons. In many ways, denying the safety problems only made them worse.