Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The portable vapor detector has pegged out, Livingston said.

Hanson told Morris, who informed the command post. The news was shared with everyone on the net.

Colonel Scallorn thought the mission was over — the detector had pegged out.

Sergeant Hanson told Livingston to put his hand over the vent and try to get a sense of the vapor temperature. Hanson had meant to bring a thermometer from the base but had forgotten it.

Scallorn kept expecting someone on the net to call it off and bring this boy back to the truck. He didn’t understand why they were sending anyone into the complex at two in the morning. They’d already waited more than seven hours to do something. It seemed too late now.

Livingston put his hand over the metal grate. He could feel the heat through his glove.

Colonel Morris told the command post that he was bringing Livingston back.

Livingston returned from the complex, took off his helmet, and leaned against the bed of the pickup.

“It’s hot as hell over there,” he said.

At the command post, members of the K crew assumed that the mission was over. The fuel vapor hadn’t dissipated — like Martin Marietta had suggested it would — and the portable vapor detector couldn’t reveal how high the level really was. It was at least 250 ppm, the cutoff mark that everyone had agreed upon. SAC headquarters ordered Devlin and Hukle to enter the launch complex.

The men put on their helmets and air packs and grabbed their equipment. They had a lot more gear than Livingston. Between the two of them, Devlin and Hukle carried a portable vapor detector, flashlights, the hydraulic hand pump, and a tool bag holding screwdrivers, Crescent wrenches, and pliers. They also brought a couple of crowbars.

The outer steel door and the door at the bottom of the entrapment area were locked — and could no longer be jimmied open with a credit card. Devlin and Hukle would have to break into the launch complex with crowbars. Nobody knew how difficult that would be since nobody there had ever done it.

The two young airmen in RFHCO suits, holding their flashlights and crowbars and tools, went through the hole in the fence.

On January 23, 1961, a B-52 bomber took off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for an airborne alert. The flight plan was a long, circular route along the East Coast. At the end of the first loop, the B-52 met its tanker a couple of minutes early and refueled. At the end of the second loop, after more than ten hours in the air, the bomber refueled again. It was almost midnight. Amid the darkness, the boom operator of the tanker noticed fuel leaking from the B-52’s right wing. Spray from the leak soon formed a wide plume, and within two minutes about forty thousand gallons of jet fuel had poured from the wing. The command post at Seymour Johnson told the pilot, Major Walter S. Tulloch, to dump the rest of the fuel in the ocean and prepare for an emergency landing. But fuel wouldn’t drain from the tank inside the left wing, creating a weight imbalance. At half past midnight, with the flaps down and the landing gear extended, the B-52 went into an uncontrolled spin.

Major Tulloch heard a loud explosion and ordered his crew to bail out, as the plane started to break apart at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Four of the men ejected safely, including Tulloch. First Lieutenant Adam C. Mattocks managed to jump through the escape hatch, while the bomber was upside down, and survived. Major Eugene Shelton ejected but suffered a fatal head injury. The radar navigator, Major Eugene H. Richards, and Technical Sergeant Francis R. Barnish died in the crash.

The B-52 was carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, each with a yield of 4 megatons. As the aircraft spun downward, centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit. The lanyard was attached to the bomb release mechanism. When the lanyard was pulled, the locking pins were removed from one of the bombs. The Mark 39 fell from the plane. The arming wires were yanked out, and the bomb responded as though it had been deliberately released by the crew above a target. The pulse generator activated the low-voltage thermal batteries. The drogue parachute opened, and then the main chute. The barometric switches closed. The timer ran out, activating the high-voltage thermal batteries. The bomb hit the ground, and the piezoelectric crystals inside the nose crushed. They sent a firing signal. But the weapon didn’t detonate.

Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit. The switch was in the SAFE position when the bomb dropped. Had the switch been set to GROUND or AIR, the X-unit would’ve charged, the detonators would’ve triggered, and a thermonuclear weapon would have exploded in a field near Faro, North Carolina. When Air Force personnel found the Mark 39 later that morning, the bomb was harmlessly stuck in the ground, nose first, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree.

The other Mark 39 plummeted straight down and landed in a meadow just off Big Daddy’s Road, near the Nahunta Swamp. Its parachutes had failed to open. The high explosives did not detonate, and the primary was largely undamaged. But the dense uranium secondary of the bomb penetrated more than seventy feet into the soggy ground. A recovery team never found it, despite weeks of digging.

The Air Force assured the public that the two weapons had been unarmed and that there was never any risk of a nuclear explosion. Those statements were misleading. The T-249 control box and ready/safe switch, installed in every one of SAC’s bombers, had already raised concerns at Sandia. The switch required a low-voltage signal of brief duration to operate — and that kind of signal could easily be provided by a stray wire or a short circuit, as a B-52 full of electronic equipment disintegrated midair.

A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/safe switch in the cockpit was intact, and the knob hadn’t been turned to GROUND or AIR. The bombs had not been armed by the crew. A seven-month investigation by Sandia found that a tiny metal nut had come off a screw inside the plane and lodged against an unused radar-heating circuit. The nut had created a new electrical pathway, allowing current to reach an arming line — and bypass the ready/safe switch. A similar glitch on the B-52 that crashed near Goldsboro would have caused a 4-megaton thermonuclear explosion. “It would have been bad news — in spades,” Parker F. Jones, a safety engineer at Sandia, wrote in a memo about the accident. “One simple, dynamo-technology, low-voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe!”

With strong northerly winds, the groundburst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro would have deposited lethal fallout over Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. And the timing would have been unfortunate: the new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, had delivered his inaugural address only three days earlier, promising renewal and change, vowing to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The spirit of youthful optimism sweeping the United States would have been dimmed by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in North Carolina and an evacuation of the nation’s capital.

The Goldsboro accident, far from being an isolated or improbable event, was a portent of the nuclear threats that the Kennedy administration would have to confront. Robert S. McNamara, the new secretary of defense, learned about the accident during his third day on the job. The story scared the hell out of him. McNamara knew remarkably little about nuclear weapons. The previous month, when Kennedy had asked him to head the Department of Defense, McNamara was the president of the Ford Motor Company. He was a young, supremely self-confident businessman devoted to systems analysis and efficiency. At the Harvard Business School, he’d taught accounting. Aside from a three-year stint in the Army Air Forces — where he’d served in the Office of Statistical Control and helped General LeMay calculate optimal fuel use for the bombing of Japan — McNamara had no military experience. And he’d spent little time thinking about military strategy or procurement. Determined to shake things up at the Pentagon, McNamara found himself, instead, feeling profoundly shaken during his first week on the job.