Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

“Hey, I need one of them masks,” Anglin said.

“Oh, you don’t need a mask,” one of the officers replied, his voice muffled by the mask.

“Well, give me yours, if you don’t need it.”

Neither of them gave Anglin a gas mask, and he headed toward Damascus without one.

The chaos of the early-morning hours extended to the management of roadblocks. The Air Force had no legal authority to decide who could or couldn’t drive on Arkansas roads. But SAC’s failure to confer with state and local officials left a crucial question unanswered — who was in charge? At a roadblock south of 4–7, Air Force security officers refused to let journalists pass. Correspondents from the major television networks had arrived to cover the story, along with radio and newspaper reporters. Sheriff Anglin overruled the Air Force and allowed the media to park on the shoulder of Highway 65, across from the access road to the missile site. It was public property. Not long afterward a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat was stopped at the same roadblock by Air Force security officers and told that he couldn’t drive any farther. The reporter pointed out that his newspaper’s competitors had just been allowed up the road — and then drove around the roadblock without permission and headed toward 4–7, ignoring the soldiers with M-16s. An Air Force security truck pursued him at high speed but gave up the chase. And the correspondent for the Democrat joined the crowd of journalists near the access road, who were shouting questions at every Air Force vehicle that entered or left the site.

AFTER LOADING THE WOUNDED onto helicopters, Richard English and Colonel William Jones returned to 4–7. A convoy from Little Rock Air Force Base soon met them there. It brought specialized equipment and personnel that the Disaster Response Force lacked: portable vapor detectors, radiation detectors, bunny suits, fire trucks, firefighters, and an EOD unit.

A two-man radiation team traveled by helicopter to Launch Complex 374-6 and got a ride from a security police officer to 4–7, about ten miles away. Wearing protective gear, they walked down the access road in the dark, carrying alpha, beta, and gamma ray detectors. They went as far as the low hill overlooking the complex, found no evidence of radioactivity — a good sign — and walked back to the access control point near Highway 65.

English put on a bunny suit and prepared to search for the warhead. The suit was a lot lighter than the RFHCO he’d worn to find Livingston. English thought that he’d seen the warhead during one of his trips onto the complex. His second in command at Disaster Preparedness, Sergeant Franklin Moses, and the members of the EOD unit suited up, too. The half dozen members of the initial reconnaissance team, led by English, waited for permission from SAC headquarters to look for the weapon. The word came from Omaha: they could enter the complex at first light.

RODNEY HOLDER WAS STILL WEARING the T-shirt and old pants he’d put on to take a nap, just before the Klaxons sounded at 4–7. Almost twelve hours had passed since then, and it felt like a long night. Now Holder and Ron Fuller were sitting on the access road to Launch Complex 4–6, outside the town of Republican. They’d hitched a ride from a security police officer at the grocery store in Damascus, hoping to get back to the base in Little Rock. But the officer had gone to 4–6 to pick up a two-man radiation team. And the helicopter had taken off from 4–6 without waiting for Holder and Fuller. The chopper’s departure left them with a couple of options. They could return to the scene of the accident with the radiation team — or stay on the access road at 4–6. The security officer lent Holder his coat and drove off. It was still dark, and the two men sat in the road, exhausted, waiting for someone to give them a ride.

AT THE BAPTIST MEDICAL CENTER in Little Rock, doctors tried to save the lives of Jeff Kennedy and David Livingston. The two were put into the intensive care unit, placed on ventilators, and given high doses of corticosteroids. Oxidizer released by the blast had induced a dangerous form of respiratory distress. Both of the men were now suffering from pulmonary edema, as fluid filled their lungs. Kennedy’s wife left their children with a friend and rushed to the hospital. A young woman came to see Livingston as well, telling one doctor that she was his wife, another that she was his sister. Colonel Michael J. Robertson — the chief of aerospace medicine at the base who’d treated the injured airmen aboard the helicopter — didn’t care who she was. He was just glad that Livingston had someone there. The worst effects of the oxidizer would usually appear about five hours after exposure. Like the phosgene gas used as a chemical weapon during the First World War, the oxidizer could kill you in an extremely unpleasant way. It was known as “dry land drowning.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD HAD BEEN fast asleep when the phone rang at about half past three in the morning. The caller told him to report to the base: his EOD unit was heading into the field. The call came at a bad time. Arnold and his wife had just moved into a new apartment in Shreveport, and they’d stayed up late moving boxes. He’d gotten only a few hours of sleep. The place was full of boxes that still needed to be unpacked, and he didn’t feel like going to work at three in the morning. When Arnold arrived at Barksdale, his squadron commander said that they were going to Arkansas — and nothing more. As the unit loaded its gear into a couple of pickup trucks and prepared to leave, Arnold felt guilty about leaving his wife to deal with the mess at home. He wouldn’t be able to call her, tell her where he was going, or let her know how long he’d be gone.

The EOD team at Barksdale was part of the Strategic Air Command, and it responded to every accident involving SAC nuclear weapons in the eastern half of the United States. During Arnold’s two and a half years as an EOD technician, the unit had spent most of its time on mundane assignments. When unexploded ordnance was found in the marshes surrounding the air base, his EOD squad would defuse it. Every so often, when a plane crashed, they’d render safe the bombs, starter cartridges, flare packages, rounds of ammunition, and ejection-seat rocket motors found in the wreckage. And when nothing else was happening, they’d practice taking apart and reassembling dummy weapons. But on a few occasions, Arnold responded to accidents that involved the real thing.

Twice at Barksdale, a load cart collapsed while transporting a rotary launcher full of Short-Range Attack Missiles. Each launcher held eight SRAMs, and the load carts had telescoping arms to lift the missiles into the bomb bay of a B-52. During both accidents, the telescoping arms broke, dropping the rotary launcher and the SRAMs about five feet to the ground. At least two warheads and half a dozen missiles were damaged. A manufacturing defect or corrosion seemed the most likely explanation for the collapse of the telescoping arms. But an Air Force investigation later found a different cause: maintenance crews had been goofing around with the load carts, out of sheer boredom, and using them to lift B-52 bombers off the ground.

In April 1979, Arnold’s unit responded to a nuclear weapon accident a few miles north of Fort Worth, Texas. The accident was considered serious enough to require their presence urgently, in the middle of the night, and so they flew there in the only aircraft that was available: the base commander’s KC-135. The big jet was a lot plusher than the planes that usually carried Arnold’s team. At Carswell Air Force Base, someone on a loading crew had ignored a tech order and pulled a handle too hard in the cockpit of a B-52. Instead of opening the bomb bay doors, he’d inadvertently released a B-61 hydrogen bomb. It fell about seven feet and hit the runway. When members of the loading crew approached the weapon, they saw that its parachute pack had broken off — and that a red flag had appeared in a little window on the casing. The bomb was armed. Arnold’s team arrived at the base, removed a small panel from the casing, and rotated a switch with a wrench. A green flag replaced the red one in the little window; the bomb was safed. The whole procedure took about an hour, and Arnold’s unit flew back to Barksdale on their usual means of air transportation, a cargo plane.