Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

In December 1957, President Eisenhower traveled to a NATO summit in Paris, only weeks after his stroke, and announced that the United States would provide its European allies with access to nuclear weapons. He offered to create a separate nuclear stockpile for NATO and build intermediate-range missile sites in NATO countries. The offer stopped short of actually handing over missiles and bombs. The Atomic Energy Act prohibited the transfer of nuclear weapons to a foreign power; custody of the NATO stockpile would have to remain with the United States. The Eisenhower administration tried to strike a balance between physical control and legal custody, between sharing the weapons with allies in a meaningful way and obeying the will of Congress. As plans emerged to put intermediate-range missiles in Great Britain, Italy and Turkey, to store atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and atomic artillery shells at NATO bases throughout Europe, the tricky issue of command and control was resolved with a technical solution. The launch controls of the missiles and the locks on the weapon igloos would require at least two keys — and an American officer would keep one of them.

THE MARK 36 was a second-generation hydrogen bomb. It weighed about half as much as the early thermonuclears — but ten times more than the new, sealed-pit bombs that would soon be mass-produced for SAC. It was a transitional weapon, mixing old technologies with new, featuring thermal batteries, a removable core, and a contact fuze for use against underground targets. The nose of the bomb contained piezoelectric crystals, and when the nose hit the ground, the crystals deformed, sending a signal to the X-unit, firing the detonators, and digging a very deep hole. The bomb had a yield of about 10 megatons. It was one of America’s most powerful weapons.

A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about twenty miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for ten minutes — long past the time factor of the Mark 36 — then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster.

The fire lasted for two and a half hours. The high explosives in the Mark 36 burned but didn’t detonate. According to an accident report, the hydrogen bomb and parts of the B-47 bomber melted into “a slab of slag material weighing approximately eight thousand pounds, approximately six to eight feet wide and twelve to fifteen feet in length with a thickness of ten to twelve inches.” A jackhammer was used to break the slag into smaller pieces. The “particularly ‘hot’ pieces” were sealed in cans, and the rest of the radioactive slag was buried next to the runway. Sidi Slimane lacked the proper equipment to measure levels of contamination, and a number of airmen got plutonium dust on their shoes, spreading it not just to their car but also to another air base.

The Air Force planned to issue a press release about the accident, stressing that the aircraft fire hadn’t led to “explosion of the weapon, radiation, or other unexpected results.” The State Department thought that was a bad idea; details about the accident hadn’t reached Europe or the United States. “The less said about the Moroccan incident the better,” one State Department official argued at a meeting on how much information to disclose. A public statement might be distorted by Soviet propaganda and create needless anxiety in Europe. The Department of Defense agreed to keep the accident secret, although the king of Morocco was informed. When an American diplomat based in Paris asked for information about what had happened at Sidi Slimane, the State Department told him that the base commander had decided to stage a “practice evacuation.”

Two weeks after an accident that could have detonated a hydrogen bomb in Morocco, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission issued a joint statement on weapon safety. “In reply to inquiries about hazards which may be involved in the movement of nuclear weapons,” they said, “it can be stated with assurance that the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion… is so remote as to be negligible.”

Less than a month later, Walter Gregg and his son, Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs. Gregg was inside the house, sewing, and her daughters, Helen and Frances, aged six and nine, were playing outdoors with a nine-year-old cousin. The Mark 6 had a variable yield of anywhere from 8 to 160 kilotons, depending on the type of nuclear core that was used. The bomb that landed in the yard didn’t contain a core. But the high explosives went off when the weapon hit the ground, digging a crater about fifty feet wide and thirty-five feet deep. The blast wave and flying debris knocked the doors off the Gregg house, blew out the windows, collapsed the roof, riddled the walls with holes, destroyed the new Chevrolet parked in the driveway, killed half a dozen chickens, and sent the family to the hospital with minor injuries.

The atom bomb had been dropped by a B-47 en route from Hunter Air Force Base near Savannah, Georgia, to Bruntingthorpe Air Base in Leicestershire, England. The locking pin had been removed from the bomb before takeoff, a standard operating procedure at SAC. Nuclear weapons were always unlocked from their bomb racks during takeoff and landing — in case the weapons had to be jettisoned during an emergency. But for the rest of the flight they were locked to the racks. Bombs were locked and unlocked remotely on the B-47, using a small lever in the cockpit. The lever was attached by a lanyard to the locking pin on the bomb. As the B-47 above South Carolina climbed to an altitude of about fifteen thousand feet, a light on the instrument panel said that the pin hadn’t reengaged. The lever didn’t seem to be working. The pilot told the navigator, Captain Bruce Kulka, to enter the bomb bay and insert the locking pin by hand.

Kulka couldn’t have been thrilled with the idea. The bomb bay wasn’t pressurized, the door leading to it was too small for him to enter wearing a parachute, and he didn’t know where the locking pin was located, let alone how to reinsert it. Kulka spent about ten minutes in the bomb bay, looking for the pin, without success. It must be somewhere above the bomb, he thought. The Mark 6 was a large weapon, about eleven feet long and five feet in diameter, and as Kulka tried to peek above it, he inadvertently grabbed the manual bomb release for support. The Mark 6 suddenly dropped onto the bomb bay doors, and Kulka fell on top of it. A moment later, the eight-thousand-pound bomb broke through the doors. Kulka slid off it, got hold of something in the open bomb bay, and held on tight. Amid the gust and roar of the wind, about three miles above the small farms and cotton fields of Mars Bluff, he managed to pull himself back into the plane. Neither the pilot nor the copilot realized the bomb was gone until it hit the ground and exploded.

The accident at Mars Bluff was impossible to hide from the press. Although Walter Gregg and his family had no idea what destroyed their home, the pilot of the B-47, unable to communicate with Hunter Air Force Base, told controllers at a nearby civilian airport that the plane had just lost a “device.” News of the explosion quickly spread. The state police formed checkpoints to keep people away from the Gregg property, and an Air Force decontamination team arrived to search for remnants of the Mark 6. Unlike the accident at Sidi Slimane, this one couldn’t have produced a nuclear yield — and yet it gained worldwide attention and inspired a good deal of fear. “Are We Safe from Our Own Atomic Bombs?” the New York Times asked. “Is Carolina on Your Mind?” echoed London’s Daily Mail . The Soviet Union claimed that a nuclear detonation had been prevented by “sheer luck” and that South Carolina had been contaminated by radioactive fallout.