Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

“Roger, General”: Quoted in ibid.

“Little Rock, this is Martin-Denver”: Carnahan’s recommendation that nothing be done is the only quote in the entire three-volume accident report that comes from a tape recording of discussions on the Missile Potential Hazard Net. The quote is long, it’s verbatim — and it absolves Martin Marietta of responsibility for what later went wrong. The recording was made at Martin-Denver. See “Report, Major Missile Accident, Titan II Complex 374-7,” Testimony of Charles E. Carnahan, Tab U-11, pp. 1–2.

“It’s hot as hell”: Quoted in “Report, Major Missile Accident, Titan II Complex 374-7,” Kennedy statement, Tab U–46, p. 10.

a B-52 bomber took off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base: My account of the accident is based on interviews with Bob Peurifoy and Bill Stevens, as well as on documents that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act. See “Summary of Nuclear Weapon Incidents (AF Form 1058) and Related Problems — January 1961,” Airmunitions Letter, No. 136-11-56G, Headquarters, Ogden Air Material Area, April 18, 1961 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), pp. 1–27; and “Official Observer’s Report, Air Accident, Goldsboro, North Carolina,” Ross B. Speer, AEC/ALO, February 16, 1961 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA /declassified). A good explanation of why the accident was so dangerous can be found in a memo written by Parker F. Jones, the supervisor of Sandia’s Nuclear Weapon Safety Department: “Goldsboro Revisited, or How I Learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb, or To Set the Record Straight,” Parker F. Jones, SFRD Memo, SNL 1651, October 22, 1969 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). Joel Dobson offers the best description of the accident itself and the fate of the crew in The Goldsboro Broken Arrow: The Story of the 1961 B-52 Crash, the Men, the Bombs, the Aftermath (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2011). But Dobson’s book is less reliable about the inner workings of the weapons.

Mattocks managed to jump through the escape hatch: Mattocks should have been killed immediately by the tail of the plane. But the plane was breaking apart as he left it, and the tail was already gone. The B-52 exploded right after his parachute deployed, briefly collapsing it. He landed on a farm in the middle of the night, assured its frightened owners that he wasn’t a Martian, got a ride to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base — and got arrested by the guards at the front gate. They had not been informed of the accident, and he couldn’t produce any military identification. One of the other crew members who safely escaped from the plane, Captain Richard Rardin, found a ride to the base and arrived at the gate not long afterward. When the guards threatened to arrest Rardin, too, Mattocks managed to convince them that the two men were indeed Air Force officers and that a B-52 had just fallen from the sky. See Dobson, Goldsboro Broken Arrow , pp. 55–60.

The Air Force assured the public: See Noel Yancey, “In North Carolina: Nuclear Bomber Crashes; 3 Dead,” Fort Pierce News Tribune (Florida), January 24, 1961.

The T-249 control box and ready/safe switch… had already raised concerns at Sandia: Interviews with Peurifoy and Stevens. Some of the limitations of the T-249, known as the Aircraft Monitor and Control Box, had been addressed two years earlier in “A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems,” pp. 19–23.

all of the weapons were armed: Stevens interview. See also Stevens, “Origins and Evolution of S2C at Sandia,” p. 60.

A seven-month investigation by Sandia: See ibid.

“It would have been bad news — in spades”: “Goldsboro Revisited,” p. 1.

“One simple, dynamo-technology, low-voltage switch”: Ibid., p. 2.

the groundburst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro: The amount of fallout would not have been as great as that produced by the far more powerful Bravo test. But the Goldsboro bomb could have spread deadly radioactive material across a large area of the northeastern United States.

“pay any price, bear any burden”: “Text of Kennedy’s Inaugural Outlining Policies on World Peace and Freedom,” New York Times , January 21, 1961.

The story scared the hell out of him: Interview with Robert S. McNamara.

A B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb had caught fire: Peurifoy and Stevens interviews. See also Airmunitions Letter , June 23, 1960, p. 37, and Maggelet and Oskins, Broken Arrow , pp. 113–18.

A B-47: …caught fire on the runway at Chennault Air Force base: See Airmunitions Letter , June 23, 1960, p. 53.

In the skies above Hardinsburg, Kentucky: See Airmunitions Letter, Headquarters, Ogden Air Material Area, No. 136-11–56B, June 29, 1960 (SECTET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified, pp. 13–46, Maggelet and Oskins, Broken Arrow , pp. 129–32.

a “crunching sound”: Quoted Maggelet and Oskins, Broken Arrow , p. 132.

At an air defense site in Jackson Township: For details of the BOMARC accident, see “Report of Special Weapons Incident… Bomarc Site, McGuire AFB, New Jersey,” 2702nd Explosive Ornance Disposal Squad, United States Air Force, Griffiss Air Force Base, New York, June 13, 1960 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA declassified); Airmunitions Letter, No. 136-11-56C, Headquarters, Ogden Air Material Area, September 8, 1960 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified; and George Barrett, “Jersey Atom Missile Fire Stirs Brief Radiation Fear,” New York Times , June 8, 1960.

An Air Force security officer called the state police: See “Jersey Atom Missile Fire.”

Fallout from the BOMARC’s 10-kiloton warhead: See “Civil Defense Alerted in City,” New York Times , June 8, 1960.

The accidents in North Carolina and Texas worried Robert McNamara the most: McNamara interview. See also “Memorandum of Conversation (Uncleared), Subject: State-Defense Meeting on Group I, II, and IV Papers,” January 26, 1963 (TOP SECRET/declassified), NSA, p. 12.

“bankruptcy in both strategic policy and in the force structure”: “Robert S. McNamara Oral History Interview—4/4/1964,” John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection , John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, p. 5.

“The Communists will have a dangerous lead”: Quoted in Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 18. Although Ball’s work was written before the declassification of many important national security documents from the Kennedy era, the book’s central arguments are still convincing. I also learned a great deal about the Kennedy administration’s aims from How Much Is Enough? 1961–1969: Shaping Defense Program (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1971), by Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith. Enthoven was one of McNamara’s most brilliant advisers. For Kennedy’s attacks on the strategic thinking of the Eisenhower administration, see Christopher A. Preble, “‘Who Ever Believed in the “Missile Gap”?’: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,” Presidential Studies Quarterly , vol. 33, no. 4 (December 2003), pp. 801–26.

“We have been driving ourselves into a corner”: Quoted in William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 40.

General Maxwell D. Taylor’s book, The Uncertain Trumpet: Taylor argued that the United States needed “a capability to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge, for coping with anything from general atomic war to infiltrations and aggressions.” He was later a major architect of the Vietnam War. See Maxell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 6.