Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

In 1979 the Department of Defense finally accepted some of the recommendations that Sandia’s safety department had been making for years — but didn’t want to pay for them. The Pentagon agreed to schedule retrofits of weapons like the Mark 28, so long as the cost wouldn’t interfere with the acquisition of new weapons. And until the funds were obtained, the Mark 28 could still be carried by B-52s on ground alert. Although the Air Force balked at devoting a few hundred million dollars to improve the safety of hydrogen bombs, it planned to spend at least $10 billion to equip B-52s with cruise missiles. Instead of trying to penetrate Soviet airspace, the bombers would launch cruise missiles a thousand miles from their targets, turn around, and come home. Until those cruise missiles were available, B-52s were loaded with Short-Range Attack Missiles (SRAMs), carried in a rotary rack. It turned as each missile was fired, like the cylinder of a revolver shooting bullets. The SRAMs were designed to fly a hundred miles or so, destroy Soviet air defenses, and give the B-52 a better chance of reaching its target. The missiles had a destructive force of as much as 200 kilotons, and a single B-52 could carry a dozen of them.

Peurifoy was frustrated by the delays. Even the retrofit of the Mark 28, top on the list, kept getting pushed back. Through a friend in the Air Force, Peurifoy arranged for General Howard W. Leaf to visit Sandia on June 13, 1980. Leaf would be given the Burned Board briefing. The safety problems with the Mark 28 would be outlined in detail, as well as the history of nuclear weapon accidents and the development of weak link/strong link devices. Leaf had an important job, inspector general of the Air Force, with the authority to cut through red tape. The false alarm caused by a faulty computer chip at NORAD, ten days earlier, had brought renewed attention to the importance of command and control, the limits of technology, the risks of human error. After lengthy meetings at Sandia, General Leaf returned to Washington, D.C. — and commissioned another study on the safety of the Mark 28 bomb.

ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1980, Jeffrey A. Zink was pulling an alert at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. Zink was the navigator of a B-52. Once a month he and the rest of his crew would sleep in a building at the end of a runway, with a tunnel leading to their plane. Four or five other B-52 crews would stay there, too, along with the crews of their tankers. In some respects it felt like being confined in a prison. The alert quarters were surrounded by concertina wire, motion detectors, and security police carrying M-16s. Zink and his friends spent most of their time being bored. They would eat, sleep, read books, take naps, watch crap like The Love Boat on TV. But Zink always thought boredom, in this case, was good. Boredom meant that deterrence still worked. So long as these fifty young men were stuck there doing nothing, America’s nuclear strategy was a success. About once a week, however, the Klaxons would sound, and life would suddenly become more interesting.

Zink had never intended to join the Air Force. In the mid-1970s he was a longhaired, true-blue hippie attending the University of Pittsburgh and planning to go to law school. One day he walked into an Air Force recruiter’s office, thinking it would be cool to fly planes. The recruiter told Zink that his eyes weren’t good enough to become a pilot — but he could become a navigator. Zink put aside law school and joined the Air Force in 1977, right after graduation. His hippie girlfriend was stunned, and their relationship soon ended. At first, Zink didn’t fit into the tough, regimented culture of the Strategic Air Command. “What have I gotten myself into?” he wondered. “I don’t think I like these people.” But his feelings gradually changed, and he eventually became a lieutenant colonel.

The navigator of a B-52 sat at a desktop in the “chin” of the plane, a lower level beneath the pilot. Beside the navigator sat the bombardier. They both had ejection seats that fired downward. Their compartment was small, cramped, and windowless, with a ceiling about five feet high. Training flights lasted six to eleven hours, and they could be rough. The eight engines were so loud that the navigator and the bombardier, seated a foot or two from each other, couldn’t shout loud enough to have a conversation. They had to speak on the intercom. And most of the time they’d wear earplugs. The B-52 had originally been designed to attack the Soviet Union at an altitude of about 50,000 feet. But Soviet air defenses now forced the bomber to approach at a low altitude — very low. For three to four hours during a training flight, Zink’s plane would fly 150 to 350 feet off the ground. At that altitude, especially in the summer months, the air turbulence was terrible. The hot sun would send thermals of air swirling upward from the ground. Sitting in his little windowless compartment, getting bounced so hard that things would slide off the desk, Zink often felt airsick. But he also felt too busy to get sick. “I’ll throw up later,” he’d tell himself. “I have too much to do right now.”

The navigator would be in constant communication with the pilot, warning of the terrain that was approaching. The B-52’s navigational tools were rudimentary. Its avionics still relied on vacuum tubes, instead of integrated circuits, and data was entered into the bombing computer with IBM punch cards. At low altitudes, the B-52 was an extraordinary sight, a huge plane with a wingspan about sixty yards wide, hugging the terrain, casting a long shadow, traveling seven or eight miles a minute. Zink’s crew often flew through the Rocky Mountains, and the one time that Zink sat in the cockpit, it was fun to watch the pilot bank around hills and drop into alpine valleys. But sitting down below, without any frame of reference other than his radar screen, the experience could be terrifying. On more than one nighttime flight, Zink thought, “we’re going to die,” as the pilot ignored his warning that a mountain was dead ahead and waited an extra moment to climb.

During low-altitude practice runs, Zink’s crew would radar bomb targets throughout the American West, hitting SAC radar huts in places like Sheridan, Wyoming; Bismarck, North Dakota; and La Junta, Colorado. And before a training mission ended, the pilot would spend an hour or two doing “pattern work,” landing the plane, rolling down the runway, and then taking off again. Zink found these touch-and-go landings even harder to endure than heavy turbulence. At the end of every training flight, he felt like someone had just pummeled him for hours.

The Klaxons sounded about once a week during ground alerts. The drills were supposed to be “no-notice” and come as a total surprise. But by the late 1970s, SAC was taking some precautions. Whenever Zink and his buddies saw three fire trucks and the wing commander’s car park on the alert pad, they’d know a drill was about to begin. They’d stand in the tunnel, waiting, making bets on how many seconds would pass before the Klaxons went off. And then they’d run to their planes. As navigator, Zink would decode the message from SAC headquarters. It usually called for an engine start or a “mover,” an exercise that involved taxiing the bomber to the end of the runway, turning around, and returning to the alert pad. Once the drills were completed, the crew would spend about three hours reconfiguring the plane for the next alert.

A few months earlier, during the first week of June, Zink had been fast asleep at about twelve thirty in the morning when the Klaxons sounded. He jumped out of bed, looked out the window — and didn’t see any fire trucks or the wing commander’s car. He and the bombardier thought, “Oh my God, it’s the real thing.” Drills were never held late at night. Hearts pounding, they ran to the plane. Zink decoded the message and felt profoundly relieved that it didn’t contain an emergency war order. The whole episode felt strange, and it wasn’t until weeks later that they learned NORAD had experienced a false alarm. The gunner on Zink’s crew, a young staff sergeant, was so shaken by the experience that he quit the Air Force. All of a sudden, the meaning of their wartime mission had become clear, and he realized, “I can’t do this.” Zink believed strongly in the value of nuclear deterrence and tried not to dwell on what would happen if deterrence failed. He knew that any attack on the Soviet Union by his crew would be not only murderous but suicidal. And yet he never thought about those things while crawling around the Mark 28s and Short-Range Attack Missiles in the bomb bay, checking their serial numbers before an alert.