Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

While Fuller was setting up the portable vapor detector near the blast door, he overheard one of the PTS crew say something about a dropped socket. Fuller asked what had happened in the silo. After hearing the story, Fuller said they needed to tell the commander. Powell stepped forward, admitted to dropping the socket, and began to cry. He described how it fell and hit the thrust mount, how fuel sprayed from the missile like water from a hose. When he was done, the room fell silent.

“Holy shit,” thought Holder.

Captain Mazzaro told Powell to come over to the phone and tell the command post exactly what had happened. Powell got on the line and repeated the story. The details were incredible — but plausible.

Things fell all the time in the silo: nuts, bolts, screwdrivers, flashlights, all sorts of tools. They always fell harmlessly into the at the bottom of the silo, and then someone had to climb down and get them. You could drop a socket a thousand times from a platform at level 2 without its ever bouncing off the thrust mount and hitting the missile. And even if it did hit the missile, it would probably cause a dent, and nothing more, and nobody would ever know.

Half an hour after the accident, everyone realized what they were dealing with — a major fuel leak, maybe a fire. The Dash-1 didn’t have a checklist for this scenario. Now it was time to improvise, to figure out what could be done to save the missile and the warhead and the ten men in the underground control center.

SID KING WAS HAVING DINNER at a friend’s house when he got a call from the board operator at KGFL, the AM radio station in Clinton, Arkansas. It sounds like there’s something going on at the Titan II silo in Damascus, the operator said, a leak or something. King was the manager and part-owner of KGFL, as well as its roving reporter. His friend Tom Phillips was the station’s sales rep. Clinton was about seventeen miles north of Damascus, along Highway 65 — and Choctaw, where Phillips lived, was even closer to the missile site.

Let’s run down there and check it out, King suggested. Phillips thought that sounded like a good idea. They said good-bye to their wives and got into KGFL’s mobile unit, a Dodge Omni that King had fitted with a VHF transmitter and a big antenna. The nickname of the subcompact, the “Live Ear,” was painted on both sides, along with the station’s call letters.

King was twenty-seven years old. He’d been raised in Providence, a town with a population of approximately one hundred, about an hour east of Damascus. His father was a jack-of-all-trades — a math teacher who also sold real estate, cut hair, and managed a movie theater to support the family and their small farm. King had an idyllic, small-town childhood but also dreamed of some day leaving rural Arkansas for Hollywood. At Arkansas State University, he studied radio and television, encouraged by a great uncle who’d been one of the first TV weathermen in Arkansas. During the summers, King was the drummer of the house band at Dogpatch USA, an amusement park in the Ozarks featuring Li’l Abner and other characters created by the cartoonist Al Capp. The house band played for hours every night, mainly Dixieland jazz, soft rock like “Joy to the World,” and show tunes like “Sunrise, Sunset,” from Fiddler on the Roof .

Working at Dogpatch was a lot of fun, and King got a full-time job there after college. He fell for Judi Clark, a tap dancer at the park, and the two soon got married. Backed by a brother-in-law, King started looking for a good place in Arkansas to open a new radio station. Clinton, they decided, was the place. It was the county seat of Van Buren County, in the foothills of the Ozarks, with a population of about 1,600 and a downtown that attracted shoppers from throughout the area. In 1977, KGFL went on the air as a 250-watt “sunset” station, licensed to broadcast only during daylight hours. King wanted the station to assume the role that a small-town newspaper would have played a generation earlier. KGFL started each day with the national anthem. It played gospel music for about half an hour, then switched to country and western. During the morning, it broadcast phone-in shows like “Trading Post,” a radio flea market that allowed local callers to buy and sell things. In the afternoon, when kids got out of school, the station began to play rock-and-roll, and that’s what it played until going off the air at dusk. King’s wife opened a dance studio near the station, teaching jazz, tap, and ballet to children. Her studio was on the second floor of the only two-story building in downtown Clinton.

Sid King and Tom Phillips were about the same age. They’d met at Dogpatch, where Phillips had played Li’l Abner. And they were already familiar with the Titan II site in Damascus. KGFL had covered an accident there a couple of years earlier. At about three in the morning on January 27, 1978, an oxidizer trailer parked on the hardstand had started to leak. The trailer was heated to ensure that the oxidizer remained above 42 degrees during the winter. But the thermostat was broken. Instead of keeping the oxidizer at about 60 degrees, the heater pushed it to more than 100 degrees, far beyond its boiling point. A brown plume of oxidizer floated from the trailer, eventually becoming a cloud half a mile long and a hundred yards wide.

The crew in the underground control center had no idea that the trailer topside was leaking oxidizer. The leak was discovered about five hours later by the missile crew arriving at the site to pull an alert that morning. The crew spotted the cloud of oxidizer from the road, turned around, drove back to Damascus, and called the command post from a pay phone. A PTS team with RFHCO suits was flown by helicopter to Launch Complex 374-7. They fixed the leak and lowered the temperature of the oxidizer by spraying the trailer with cold water for hours. The missile site’s neighbors were not pleased by the incident. A cloud of oxidizer had drifted across nearby farms, killing more than a dozen cattle, sickening a farmer who’d gotten up early to milk his cows, and forcing the evacuation of a local elementary school. The farmer later filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Air Force and the companies that made the trailer.

Gus Anglin, the sheriff of Van Buren County, was standing with a state trooper on the shoulder of Highway 65, near the access road to the silo, when King and Phillips rolled up in the Live Ear . Anglin was in his early forties, thin and wiry, the sort of rural sheriff who knew the names of all the teenagers in town, knew their parents, and knew the right threat to make kids slow down, go home, or stop doing what they were just doing. Van Buren County didn’t have much crime, aside from petty theft, some pot growing, and the occasional domestic dispute — and yet Anglin still found himself constantly answering the phone in the middle of the night and leaving his house to deal with all kinds of unexpected things. He wore a badge and drove a squad car but didn’t carry a gun, unless the situation seemed to demand one. He and a couple of deputies had to cover thousands of square miles in the county, which took him away from his wife and two children for long stretches of time. Anglin felt obligated to answer every call personally, from the minor ones to the most urgent. That was what the Van Buren County sheriff was supposed to do, a lesson learned from his father-in-law, who’d previously held the job and hired him to serve as a deputy.

During the early-morning leak in 1978, Anglin had evacuated Damascus residents who lived in the path of the oxidizer. The experience had left him frustrated with the Air Force. At first the Air Force didn’t know what was happening — and then it didn’t want to tell him. Again and again, he was assured that the reddish brown cloud posed no serious threat. He and one of his deputies inhaled a fair amount of oxidizer while escorting people out of their homes. It made both of them sick. After Anglin got the dry heaves and vomited in the road, the two were airlifted by helicopter to the hospital at Little Rock Air Force Base. They were given a clean bill of health and released within a few hours. But Anglin got headaches and didn’t feel right for weeks. Now a column of what looked like white smoke rose into the sky from the same missile complex. Once again, nobody from the Air Force had bothered to give him a call.