Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

According to the AEC’s rules, if the Strategic Air Command wanted to obtain the nuclear cores of atomic bombs, the president of the United States would have to sign a directive. Local field offices of the AEC and the Department of Defense would have to be notified about that directive. Representatives of those field offices would have to contact the AEC storage sites. Once the proper code words were exchanged, keys would have to be retrieved, storerooms unlocked, nuclear cores carried outside in their metal containers. At best, SAC would get the cores in about twelve minutes. But the process could take a lot longer. Local officials might have to be tracked down on vacation or awakened in the middle of the night. They might have to be persuaded that this was the real thing, not a test.

In June 1953, President Eisenhower approved the shipment of nuclear cores to American naval vessels and overseas bases where the other components of atomic bombs were already stored — and where foreign governments had no authority to dictate how the bombs might be used. Cores were removed from the AEC stockpile, placed under military control, and shipped to sites that met those criteria: American naval vessels and the island of Guam. The following year the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked for permission to store bomb components and nuclear cores at SAC bases. Dispersing the weapons to multiple locations, the Pentagon argued, would make the stockpile much less vulnerable to attack. The AEC didn’t object to handing over more nuclear cores. The chairman of the commission, Lewis Strauss, agreed with most of LeMay’s strategic views. And the new general manager of the AEC, General Kenneth Nichols, had not only argued for years that the military should control America’s atomic bombs, he’d pushed hard for dropping them on Chinese troops during the Korean War.

President Eisenhower allowed the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to start moving nuclear cores to their own storage sites, both in the United States and overseas. But his faith in military custody had its limits. Eisenhower insisted that the AEC retain control of the cores for all of the nation’s hydrogen bombs, even during an emergency. “No active capsule will be inserted in any high yield weapon,” the new rules stated, “except with the expressed approval of the AEC custodian and in the custodian’s presence.” Civilian employees of the Atomic Energy Commission were posted on aircraft carriers, ammunition ships, and air bases where H-bombs were stored. These AEC custodians were supposed to keep the cores securely locked away and hold on to the keys, until the president ordered them to do otherwise. But the Joint Chiefs considered this arrangement inconvenient, largely symbolic, and an insult to the military. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson agreed, and in 1956 the AEC custodians were withdrawn from ships and air bases. Instead, President Eisenhower allowed the captains of those Navy ships and the commanders of those Air Force bases to serve as “Designated Atomic Energy Commission Military Representatives.” And they were given the keys to the nuclear storerooms.

Legally, the hydrogen bombs were still in civilian custody. But in reality, after nearly a decade of unrelenting effort, the military had gained control of America’s nuclear weapons. The Navy carried them on ships in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Mediterranean. The Strategic Air Command stored them at air bases in the ZI and overseas — at Homestead in Florida and Ellsworth in South Dakota, at Carswell in Texas and Biggs in South Carolina, at Plattsburgh in New York and Castle in California; at Whiteman in Missouri, Schilling in Kansas, and Pease in New Hampshire; at Fairford, Lakenheath, Greenham Common, Brize Norton, and Mildenhall in Great Britain; at Nouasseur, Ben Guerir and Sidi Slimane in French Morocco; at Torrejón and Morón and Zaragoza in Spain; at Kadena in Okinawa; and at least nineteen other locations. Atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs had been liberated from civilian oversight and scattered throughout the world, ready to be assembled by military personnel.

For safety reasons, the nuclear cores and the bomb components were stored separately. On naval vessels they were kept in different rooms. At SAC bases they were kept in different bunkers, shielded by earthen berms and walls ten feet thick. The storage bunkers, known as “igloos,” were located near runways, by order of the Joint Chiefs, “to provide rapid availability for use” and reduce “the possibility of capture.”

In addition to gaining custody of nuclear weapons, the military also assumed a much larger role in their design. The AEC’s authority had been diminished by a revision of the Atomic Energy Act in 1954 and by an agreement signed the previous year with the Department of Defense. A civilian agency that had once enjoyed complete control over the stockpile became, in effect, a supplier of nuclear weapons for the military. The Army, Navy, and Air Force were now customers whose demands had to be met. The AEC labs at Livermore and Los Alamos aggressively competed for weapon contracts, giving the armed services even greater influence over the design process. The rivalry between the two labs became so intense that at times their dislike for each other seemed to exceed their animosity toward the Soviet Union. When Livermore’s first three designs for hydrogen bombs proved to be duds, it was an expensive setback to America’s weapons program, but a source of much amusement at Los Alamos.

AS THE NUMBER OF storage sites multiplied, so did the need for weapons that were easy to assemble and maintain. Ordinary enlisted men would now be handling hydrogen bombs. The weapons in the stockpile during the mid-1950s were much simpler than the first generation of atomic bombs, and yet they still required a good deal of maintenance. Their batteries were large and bulky and could hold a charge for only about a month. When a battery died, the bomb had to be taken apart. After the battery was recharged, the bomb had to be reassembled, and its electrical system had to be checked. One of the final steps was a test to make sure that all the detonators had been properly connected. If the detonators didn’t work, the bomb would be a dud — but if they were somehow triggered by the maintenance procedure, the bomb could go off. On at least three different occasions during the 1950s, the bridgewire detonators of nuclear weapons were set off by mistake during tests of their electrical systems. These accidents occurred during training exercises, and none resulted in the loss of life. But they revealed a worrisome design flaw. An error during routine maintenance or hurried preparations for war could detonate an atomic bomb.

Bob Peurifoy led a team at Sandia that was trying to create a “wooden bomb” — a nuclear weapon that wouldn’t require frequent maintenance or testing, that could sit on a shelf for years, completely inert, like a plank of wood, and then be pulled from storage, ready to go. Peurifoy had heard about a new kind of battery that didn’t need to be recharged. “Thermal batteries” had been invented by a Nazi rocket scientist, Georg Otto Erb, for use in the V-2 missiles that terrorized Great Britain during the Second World War. Erb revealed how the batteries worked during an interrogation by American intelligence officers after the war. Instead of employing liquid electrolytes, a thermal battery contained solid ones that didn’t generate any electricity until they reached a high internal temperature and melted. Peurifoy thought that thermal batteries would be an ideal power source for a nuclear weapon. They were small, rugged, and lightweight. They had a shelf life of at least twenty-five years, if not longer. And they could produce large amounts of current quickly, after being ignited by an electric pulse. The main drawback of a thermal battery, for most civilian applications, was that it couldn’t be reused or recharged. But Peurifoy didn’t consider that to be much of a problem, since the batteries in a nuclear weapon needed to work only once.