Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Leavitt was in his early fifties, short, compact, and self-confident. He’d been a member of the first class to enter West Point after the Second World War. While the heroism of that war was celebrated in popular books and films, his classmates were soon risking their lives in a conflict that was largely ignored by the public. Leavitt became a fighter pilot and flew one hundred combat missions during the Korean War. He routinely encountered enemy planes and antiaircraft fire. During one mission, his F-84 was hit by flak and suffered an electrical failure; Leavitt had to fly 250 miles without flight instruments or a radio, before landing safely at an American base. During another, his plane spun out of control amid a snowstorm; Leavitt had to bail out at eight thousand feet and felt lucky to be found by South Korean troops, not Communist guerrillas. He later flew 152 combat missions in Vietnam. The two conflicts, as well as training flights, took the lives of many good friends. Of the 119 West Pointers who graduated from flight school with Leavitt, 7 were killed in Korea, 2 in Vietnam, and 13 in airplane accidents. The odds of being killed on the job, for his classmates, was about one in six.

Some of Leavitt’s most dangerous missions occurred during peacetime. From 1957 to 1960, he flew U-2 spy planes. The U-2 was designed to fly long distances and take photographs at an altitude of seventy thousand feet, without being detected or shot down. In order to do so, the plane had to be kept as light as possible. And the small size of the pilot’s survival kit imposed certain restrictions. Before leaving on a mission to photograph Soviet airfields and radar sites in Siberia, Leavitt was given a choice: bring a life raft or a warm parka. He wasn’t allowed to bring both. Leavitt chose the parka, figuring that if he had to bail out over the Bering Sea, he’d freeze to death — with or without the raft. U-2 pilots flew alone, in a tiny cockpit, wearing cumbersome pressure suits and maintaining complete radio silence, for as long as nine hours. The plane was difficult to fly. It was fragile and stalled easily. Strong g-forces could break it apart midair. To save weight, it had only two sets of landing gear, one in the front and the other in the back. “Landing the U-2,” Leavitt wrote in his memoir, “was like landing a bicycle at 100 mph.” Of the thirty-eight U-2 pilots with whom he trained, eight died flying the plane.

The Missile Potential Hazard Net was rarely activated, and the commander of SAC usually led it. But General Richard H. Ellis was out of town — and so Leavitt, the second in command, took his place. Leavitt got on the net from the balcony of SAC’s underground command post, overlooking the world map. Although he’d flown B-52s for a year, worked at the Pentagon, commanded an Air Force training center, and served on the staff of a NATO general, Leavitt still had the manner of an old-fashioned fighter pilot: cocky, decisive, self-reliant. He did not, however, have firsthand experience working with Titan II missiles. Nor did Colonel Russell Kennedy, the director of missile maintenance at SAC headquarters, who joined Leavitt on the balcony. They would have to rely on the advice and the expertise of others.

THE PRESENCE OF A WHITE hazy cloud on the other side of blast door 8 was ominous. Regardless of whether it was fuel vapor or smoke, it shouldn’t have been there when Gregory Lester opened the door, hoping to grab the RFHCOs. That meant blast door 9, leading to the cableway and the silo, had somehow been breached. That meant blast door 8 was all that stood between the men in the launch control center and a cloud of toxic, perhaps explosive fumes. The plan to reenter the silo was scrapped. Captain Mazzaro had already asked for permission to evacuate. Now he asked for it again, and Heineman, speaking on behalf of his PTS crew, wholeheartedly backed the request.

At the Little Rock command post, the hazard team debated what to do next. For the moment, their options were limited. The PTS team topside was still missing. Colonel Morris and Jeff Kennedy were en route in the helicopter but hadn’t brought along air packs and RFHCOs. Rodney Holder, the missile systems analyst technician at 4–7, was getting ready to power down the missile, so that a stray electrical spark wouldn’t ignite fuel vapor in the silo. Once the main circuit breakers were shut off, the men in the control center could do little more than stare at the changing tank pressures on the PTPMU.

The K crew worried about the safety of their counterparts at 4–7. Captain Jackie Wells, a member of the K crew, thought that if the missile collapsed, the fuel vapor that had leaked into the blast lock might ignite and rupture blast door 8. Even if the door held, debris from a large explosion might trap everyone in the control center. The blast doors and the escape hatch were supposed to ensure the crew’s survival, even after a nuclear detonation. But a Titan II complex had not yet faced that sort of test, and Wells thought the risks of leaving people in the control center outweighed any potential benefit.

The K crew advised Colonel Moser to order an evacuation. Sergeant Michael Hanson — the chief of PTS Team B, who was in the command post, preparing to lead a convoy to the site — agreed. He didn’t think the control center would survive a blast. And he wanted his buddies to get out of there, right away.

Captain Charles E. Clark, the wing’s chief technical engineer, said that the crew should stay right where they were. He had faith in the blast doors. And he warned Colonel Moser that if the crew left, the command post would have no way of knowing the tank pressures inside the missile and no means of operating the equipment within the complex. Clark argued that the crew should remain in the control center, monitor the status of the missile — and open the massive silo door above it. Opening the door would dilute the fuel vapor with air, making the vapor less flammable. The temperature in the silo would drop, and as the oxidizer tanks cooled, they’d become less likely to burst. Opening the door wouldn’t pose much of a threat to Damascus. Unlike the oxidizer, the fuel would dissipate rapidly in the atmosphere. It wouldn’t travel for miles, sickening people and killing cattle. First Lieutenant Michael J. Rusden, the bioenvironmental engineer, had calculated that with the winds prevailing at the moment, a toxic corridor would extend only four hundred to six hundred feet beyond the silo.

After consulting with SAC headquarters, Colonel Moser ordered everyone to evacuate the control center. And he asked SAC if the crew should open the silo door before they left.

That door was not to be opened under any circumstances, General Leavitt said. The idea wasn’t even worth discussing. Leavitt wanted the fuel vapors fully contained in the silo. He did not want a cloud of Aerozine-50 floating over nearby houses and farms. More important, he didn’t want to risk losing control of a thermonuclear weapon. Leavitt felt absolutely certain that if the missile blew up, the warhead wouldn’t detonate. He’d been around nuclear weapons for almost thirty years. In 1952 he’d been secretly trained to deliver atomic bombs from a fighter plane, in case they were needed during the Korean War. He had complete faith in the safety mechanisms of the W-53 warhead atop the Titan II. But nobody could predict how far the warhead would travel, if the missile exploded with the silo door open. Leavitt didn’t want a thermonuclear weapon landing in a backyard somewhere between Little Rock and St. Louis. Maintaining control of the warhead was far more important, he thought, than any other consideration.

The K crew waited tensely to hear if the men had made it out of the control center. Before abandoning the complex, the launch crew had left the phone off the hook — and when the intruder alarm suddenly went off at 4–7, the sound could be heard over the phone in the command post. That meant someone topside had opened the door to the escape hatch. More time passed without any word, and then Sergeant Brocksmith was on the radio, saying that he had everyone in his pickup truck.