Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The briefing did not go well. The other vice presidents at Sandia were indifferent, unconvinced, or actively hostile to Peurifoy’s recommendations. The strongest opponents of a retrofit argued that it would harm the lab’s reputation — it would imply that Sandia had been wrong about nuclear weapon safety for years. They said new weapons with improved safety features could eventually replace the old ones. And they made clear that the lab’s research-and-development money would not be spent on bombs already in the stockpile. Sandia couldn’t force the armed services to alter their weapons, and the Department of Defense had the ultimate responsibility for nuclear weapon safety. The lab’s upper management said, essentially, that this was someone else’s problem.

In April 1974, Peurifoy and Fowler went to Washington and met with Major General Ernest Graves, Jr., a top official at the Atomic Energy Commission, whose responsibilities included weapon safety. Sandia reported to the AEC, and Peurifoy was aiming higher on the bureaucratic ladder. Graves listened to the presentation and then did nothing about it. Five months later, unwilling to let the issue drop and ready to escalate the battle, Peurifoy and Fowler put their concerns on the record. A letter to General Graves was drafted — and Glenn Fowler placed his career at risk by signing and sending it. The “Fowler Letter,” as it was soon called, caused a top secret uproar in the nuclear weapon community. It ensured that high-level officials at the weapons labs, the AEC, and the Pentagon couldn’t hide behind claims of plausible deniability, if a serious accident happened. The letter was proof that they had been warned.

“Most of the aircraft delivered weapons now in stockpile were designed to requirements which envisioned… operations consisting mostly of long periods of igloo storage and some brief exposure to transportation environments,” the Fowler letter began. But these weapons were now being used in ways that could subject them to abnormal environments. And none of the weapons had adequate safety mechanisms. Fowler described the “possibility of these safing devices being electrically bypassed through charred organic plastics or melted solder” and warned of their “premature operation from stray voltages and currents.” He listed the weapons that should immediately be retrofitted or retired, including the Genie, the Hound Dog, the 9-megaton Mark 53 bomb — and the weapons that needed to be replaced, notably the Mark 28, SAC’s most widely deployed bomb. He said that the secretary of defense should be told about the risks of using these weapons during ground alerts. And Fowler recommended, due to “the urgency associated with the safety question,” that nuclear weapons should be loaded onto aircraft only for missions “absolutely required for national security reasons.”

The scope of the Fowler Letter had deliberately been limited to the weapons whose safety devices were Sandia’s responsibility — mainly bombs carried by airplanes. The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force were responsible for the arming and fuzing mechanisms of the nuclear warheads carried by their missiles. And the safety of those warheads in an abnormal environment was even more questionable than the safety of the bombs. The batteries, accelerometers, barometric switches, and safety devices weren’t located inside the warhead of a ballistic missile. They were in an adaptation kit a few feet beneath it — which meant the arming wires traveled a good distance to the detonators. That distance made it easier for stray voltage to enter the wires. And the missile was constantly linked to sources of electrical power inside the silo. In 1974 the oldest nuclear warhead deployed on a ballistic missile was also the most powerful, the W-53 atop the Titan II, designed in the late 1950s. Tucked away inside a silo, the W-53 was less likely to encounter abnormal environments than a bomb. But how the warhead would respond to them was less clearly understood.

During the summer of 1979, James L. “Skip” Rutherford III was working in the Little Rock office of Senator David H. Pryor. Rutherford was twenty-nine years old. He’d grown up in Batesville, Arkansas, a small town in the northern part of the state, attended the University of Arkansas, and edited the student newspaper there. After graduation he did public relations work for a bank in Fayetteville. The job introduced him to Pryor, who was running for a seat in the United States Senate, after two terms as the governor of Arkansas. Pryor was a new breed of southern Democrat, an opponent of racism and segregation, a supporter of women’s rights, a progressive who greatly enjoyed meeting with voters, rich or poor, in every corner of the state. Rutherford worked as a volunteer for the campaign and joined Pryor’s staff after the election, representing the senator at events throughout Arkansas. And then one day Rutherford took a call from someone at Little Rock Air Force Base, a young airman who wanted to meet with Pryor confidentially. The airman sounded nervous. When Rutherford asked what this was about, the airman said: “It’s about the Titan missiles.”

Skip Rutherford didn’t consider himself an expert on intercontinental ballistic missiles. But he’d served in the Arkansas Air National Guard for six years, spending one weekend a month at Little Rock Air Force Base. He knew a lot of people at the base and felt comfortable there. The airman agreed to meet with Rutherford at the federal building in Little Rock, after hours, to avoid being seen — and brought a couple of other guys who worked with the Titan II. They were about Rutherford’s age. They didn’t want their names used as the source of any information. They were scared about getting into trouble. And most of all they were scared about what was happening at the Titan II silos in Arkansas.

The missiles were old, the airmen said, and most of them leaked. The portable vapor detectors and the vapor detectors in the silos often didn’t work. Spare parts were hard to find. The Propellant Transfer System crews were overworked, sometimes spending fifteen or sixteen hours on the job. And many of the young PTS technicians weren’t adequately trained for the tasks they were being ordered to perform. After that first meeting, Rutherford secretly met with other airmen from the base and took their calls from pay phones late at night. He spoke to roughly a dozen members of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, promising not to reveal their identities to the Air Force. And they all said basically the same thing: the Titan II was a disaster waiting to happen.

Rutherford told Senator Pryor about the meetings. Pryor was disturbed by the information and decided that something had to be done. He wrote to Dr. Hans S. Mark, the secretary of the Air Force, asking for details about the staff shortages and training deficiencies at Little Rock Air Force Base. And Pryor learned that other members of Congress were concerned about the Titan II. Representative Dan Glickman, a Democrat, and Senator Bob Dole, a Republican, had already asked the Air Force to launch a formal investigation of safety problems with the Titan II. Glickman and Dole were both from Kansas, where some of the missile’s flaws had been revealed during an accident the previous summer.

AT LAUNCH COMPLEX 533-7, about an hour southeast of Wichita, Kansas, the final stages of a missile recycle were being completed. A Titan II had been removed from 3–7 and returned to McConnell Air Force Base, where it would undergo routine maintenance checks. A replacement missile had been lowered into the silo. On the morning of August 24, 1978, a PTS crew arrived at the complex to pump oxidizer into the tanks. The fuel would be added the following day, and then the warhead would be placed atop the Titan II, finishing the recycle. On the main floor of the control center, the head of the PTS crew, Staff Sergeant Robert J. Thomas, briefed the missile combat crew commander, First Lieutenant Keith E. Matthews, about the work that would be done that day. A trainee, Airman Mirl Linthicum, would be acting as PTS team chief, supervising the procedure from the control trailer topside.