Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

We’re ready to rock-and-roll, Arnold told his EOD commander. This is what we train for, day after day. These eggheads should just get out of the way and let us go to work. Let’s get the weapon out of here and go home.

Arnold wasn’t allowed anywhere near the warhead. Instead, he was sent onto the launch complex to look for the remnants of retrorockets and other explosives carried by the Titan II. He’d lost his cool, and he knew it. Someone else should do the render safe, Arnold agreed — his mind was too preoccupied with the recent move, the unpacked boxes, the mess waiting for him at home. He wasn’t on top of his game. And much as Arnold hated to admit it, the guy from Los Alamos was probably right.

IN THE PARKING LOT of the hospital at Little Rock Air Force Base, Al Childers was told to take off his clothes. He was contaminated with radiation, according to the alpha detector being used to screen everyone who’d been at 4–7. One of the detectors at the hospital didn’t work at all, and the other kept finding traces of alpha particles. A line of naked men stood in front of Childers, preparing for a rudimentary form of decontamination. They were sprayed with cold water from a garden hose before being allowed into the emergency room. Childers got angry. He’d just come from the hospital in Conway, after making sure that the injured airmen would receive treatment there. He’d pulled a muscle in his back helping to carry Devlin from the field. He didn’t think these alpha readings were accurate. And he couldn’t believe that the hospital was forcing people to strip in the parking lot, while reporters and photographers stood nearby. Childers told the hospital staff to set up a screen or something for a little privacy. This was a harsh welcome home for men who’d had a rough night.

The water from the garden hose felt incredibly cold.

The doctors gave Childers a muscle relaxant for his back and admitted him to the hospital. He was planning to go home later that day, hug his wife, and get some sleep. Instead he was told to get dressed and return to the launch complex. The emergency war order checklists and other classified material had to be retrieved from the safe in the control center. Childers couldn’t understand why his missile crew commander, Mazzaro, hadn’t been asked to do it. But as deputy commander, Childers was responsible for the material, as well. Feeling a bit groggy and wearing the dirty uniform that had just been deemed radioactive, he was driven back to 4–7.

In the early-morning light Childers saw the scale of the destruction for the first time — and realized his life had been spared by sheer luck. The explosion had blown most of the debris toward the west, some of it landing almost half a mile from 4–7. Enormous pieces of steel and concrete lay in the fields of nearby farms. The silo door had been thrown more than two hundred yards, shearing off the tops of trees before crashing into the woods northwest of the complex. The door weighed about 150,000 pounds. Had the debris been blown to the east, toward Highway 65, it would have killed a lot of people.

Driving down the access road, Childers was amused when he saw where the warhead had landed. The object that he’d thought to be the warhead was actually a hydrogen accumulator — a large steel tank, tossed into the road, that looked like the weapon. While yelling for Silas Spann to get away from the tank, afraid that it was the warhead, Childers had been standing right next to the warhead.

Near the entrance to the complex, the road was blocked by debris. Childers and his escorts entered on foot. Smoke still drifted from the silo. The blast had obliterated its upper levels and widened the hole in the ground. What had once been a deep, concrete cylinder now looked like a huge funnel, with a rough edge of rocks and dirt. Security police officers seemed to be everywhere, guarding the site and searching through the wreckage. Childers entered through the access portal, walking down the stairs as Kennedy and Livingston had done earlier that morning. It was dark, and some of the walls and floors were charred. But Childers was impressed that you could still walk through the blast doors and blast locks, that the place was there at all.

The control center felt eerie, like a dark, abandoned basement. Everything was exactly as they’d left it. The Coke that Childers had been drinking was still in its cup. The tech orders and tech manuals were still in their plastic binders, propped open on the floor — none of them had been knocked over by the explosion. The door of the safe was still slightly open, and the classified documents inside it hadn’t moved so much as an inch. Childers and Holder had been right. They’d been right. They could have stayed in the control center. They could have monitored the tank pressures, remained in touch with the command post, turned equipment on or off. And they would have been just fine.

IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY INFORMATION from the Air Force, officials from the Arkansas Department of Health and the Pollution Control and Ecology Department performed their own tests, looking for signs of radiation and oxidizer. About a dozen people in Guy, Arkansas, claimed to have been sickened by toxic fumes. Guy was about six miles from the missile complex. The small town hadn’t been evacuated, and its mayor, Benny Mercer, was among those feeling ill. Everyone seemed to be angry about the federal government’s response. “The Air Force wouldn’t tell us a damn thing when it happened,” a member of the Office of Emergency Services told the Democrat, “and they still won’t.” Gary Gray, the sheriff of nearby Pulaski County, said that he learned more from the radio than from the Air Force. Sam Tatom, the state’s director of public safety, tried to enter the missile site and speak with the commanding officer there, but security police stopped Tatom on the access road, not far from Highway 65.

Governor Bill Clinton found himself in a difficult spot. He had to pacify his own officials, reassure the public, and limit his criticism of the Carter administration, six weeks before the presidential election. After taking a call from Sheriff Gus Anglin, who let him know how poorly everything had been handled, Clinton urged the Air Force to release more details about the accident — and praised its leadership for doing “the best they could.” Vice President Mondale spoke to journalists at the Democratic convention in Hot Springs, accompanied by Governor Clinton, Senator Pryor, and Congressman Bill Alexander. Mondale would neither confirm nor deny the presence of a nuclear warhead. But Alexander was willing to state the obvious. “I assume they’re armed,” he said about the Titan IIs in Arkansas. “That’s why they’re here.”

AT FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON, the secretary of the Air Force, Hans Mark, held a press conference at the Pentagon. Mark was a physicist, a nuclear engineer, and an expert in aerospace technology who’d previously led a research institute at NASA. Mark was the ideal person to explain the inner workings not only of the Titan II but also of the W-53 warhead. He’d been a rocket scientist and a weapon designer. As secretary of the Air Force, Mark provided the Carter administration’s view of the accident.

“I believe that the Titan missile system is a perfectly safe system to operate, just as I believe that the 747 aircraft is a perfectly safe aircraft to operate,” Mark told the press. “Accidents happen.”

When reporters suggested that the Titan II was dangerous, obsolete, and poorly maintained, Mark said that the problem in Damascus hadn’t been caused by equipment failure or a maintenance lapse — it was just an accident, and human error was solely to blame. He refused to answer any questions about the warhead, not even to correct an erroneous claim that plutonium might have been spread by the blast. The explosion was “pretty much the worst case” of what could happen at a Titan II site, he argued. Nobody was killed, no radioactive contamination had occurred, and the only people who got hurt were members of “the emergency teams whose job it is to take these risks.” Unless a more detailed investigation proved otherwise, Mark thought that “the emergency procedures worked properly.”