Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

JEFF KENNEDY WANTED a closer look at the white cloud drifting about two hundred feet away, on the other side of the perimeter fence.

“Captain Mazzaro, we have to get that propane tank off the complex,” Kennedy said. A fire in the silo could ignite it. The tank was sitting on the hardstand, near the exhaust vents, attached to a pickup truck. Kennedy suggested that they enter the complex and drive the tank out of there.

Mazzaro thought that sounded like a good idea. But he and Childers had no desire to do it. They hadn’t brought their gas masks, and the idea of running through clouds of fuel vapor without the masks didn’t sound appealing. Kennedy and Powell seemed eager to move the tank; Mazzaro told them to go ahead. He and Childers would wait by the fence.

The gate was still locked, and so Kennedy and Powell had to leave the access road, circle the complex, and enter through the breakaway section of the fence. Kennedy wore combat boots and fatigues. Powell was still in long johns and the black vinyl boots from his RFHCO. They walked along the chain-link fence, looking for the gap.

Kennedy had no intention of moving the propane tank. He planned to enter the underground control center and get the latest pressure readings from the stage 1 tanks. That was crucial information. In order to save the missile, they had to know what was going on inside it. Mazzaro wouldn’t have liked the plan, and that’s why Kennedy didn’t tell him about it. The point was to avert a disaster. “If Mazzaro hadn’t abandoned the control center,” Kennedy thought, “I wouldn’t need to be doing this.”

Fuel vapors swirled above the access portal, but the escape hatch looked clear. Kennedy ran for it, with Powell a few steps behind. During all the visits that Kennedy had made to Titan II complexes over the years, to fix one thing or another, he’d never been inside the escape hatch. The metal grate had been removed topside, and the two men climbed inside the air shaft, Kennedy going first.

“Stay here,” Kennedy said.

“Hell no,” Powell replied.

It’ll be safer if I go down there alone, Kennedy said. I can get out of there quicker.

“I’ll give you three minutes — and then I’m coming down.”

Kennedy climbed down the ladder wearing his gas mask, then crawled through the narrow steel tunnel. He felt confident that the blast doors were sealed tight and that the control center hadn’t been contaminated. But he didn’t want to stay down there too long. The air in level 3 seemed clear, and the lights were still on. He got out of the escape hatch and ran up the stairs. Everything looked good; there was no sign that blast door 8 had been breached. Kennedy sat at the launch commander’s console and pushed the buttons on the PTPMU. As the tank pressures flashed, he recorded them on a piece of paper.

“We’re in some serious shit,” Kennedy thought.

The pressure in the stage 1 oxidizer tank had risen to 29.6 psi. It was never supposed to exceed 17 psi. And the burst disk atop the tank was designed to pop at 50 psi. If the tank hadn’t already ruptured by then, the burst disk would act like a safety valve and release oxidizer into the silo, relieving some of the pressure. Normally, that would be a good thing, but at the moment there were thousands of gallons of fuel in the silo.

The pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank had dropped to –2 psi. Kennedy had been told that the tank would probably rupture once it reached between –2 and –3. He was surprised that the pressure had fallen so much in the past hour.

I’m not even wearing a watch, Powell realized, moments after Kennedy disappeared down the hatch. After counting the seconds for a while, Powell figured that three minutes had passed. He climbed down the ladder to find Kennedy, made it about halfway, and then heard Kennedy yell, “There’s not enough room for two people!” Kennedy was quickly climbing back up.

“Oh, God,” Powell said, after hearing the latest tank pressures. They got out of the escape hatch, left the complex through the breakaway fence, and made their way back to the gate.

Kennedy told Mazzaro that they couldn’t move the propane tank — and nothing more. The four of them walked down the access road to Highway 65. Colonel Morris was sitting in a pickup truck beside the road. Kennedy called him over and took him aside.

“Sir, this is what the tank readings are,” Kennedy said.

Morris asked, “Where in hell did you get those?”

Kennedy told him about entering the control center. The situation was urgent. They needed to do something about the missile, immediately.

Morris was glad to have the new readings but upset about what Kennedy had just done.

Something has to be done, and right away, Kennedy said. Earlier in the evening, he’d thought that the tank pressures would stabilize, but they hadn’t. He explained to Morris how precarious things had become. There was a major fuel leak, not a fire — and the stage 1 fuel tank wouldn’t hold much longer. If something wasn’t done soon, it would collapse like an accordion.

Colonel Morris asked Mazzaro if he knew what Kennedy had just done. After hearing about it, Mazzaro became furious.

Morris called the command post on the radio and provided the latest tank pressure readings, without revealing how he’d obtained them. Then Mazzaro got on the radio and told Little Rock that Kennedy had disobeyed orders and violated the two-man rule.

Kennedy didn’t care about any of this bullshit. He wanted to save the missile. And he had a plan, a good plan that would work.

Morris agreed to hear it.

We need to open the silo door, Kennedy said. That would release a lot of the fuel vapor, lower the heat in the silo, and relieve the pressure on the stage 1 oxidizer tank. Then we need to drop the work platforms — all nine levels of them — to support the missile and keep it upright. The platforms could prevent the missile from collapsing or falling against the silo wall. And then we need to send a PTS team down there to stabilize the stage 1 fuel tank, to fill it with nitrogen and restore the positive pressure.

For Kennedy’s plan to work, somebody would have to reenter the control center so that the platforms could be lowered and the silo door opened. Al Childers and Rodney Holder said they were willing to do it, if there was any chance of saving the missile.

Colonel Morris listened carefully and then spoke to the command post.

About fifteen minutes later, Morris told Kennedy the command post’s response: nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be done without approval from SAC headquarters in Omaha. Lieutenant General Lloyd R. Leavitt, Jr., the vice commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, was now in charge of the launch complex in Damascus. The problem with the missile and ideas about how to resolve it were being discussed. It was 9:30 P.M., almost three hours since the socket had been dropped. Until new orders came from Omaha, Morris said, everyone would have to sit tight.

Fred Charles Iklé began his research on bomb destruction as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Born and raised in an alpine village near Saint Moritz, he’d spent the Second World War amid the safety of neutral Switzerland. In 1949, Iklé left his studies in Chicago and traveled through bombed-out Germany. The war hadn’t touched his family directly, and he wanted to know how people coped with devastation on such a massive scale. One of the cities he visited, Hamburg, had suffered roughly the same number of casualties as Nagasaki — and had lost an even greater proportion of housing. A series of Allied bombing raids had killed about 3.3 percent of Hamburg’s population and destroyed about half of its homes. Nevertheless, Iklé found, the people of Hamburg were resilient. They had not fled the city in panic. They’d tried to preserve the familiar routines of daily life and now seemed determined to rebuild houses, businesses, and stores at their original locations. “A city re-adjusts to destruction somewhat as a living organism responds to injury,” Iklé later noted.