Command and Control (26 page)

SAC's arguments on behalf of an airborne alert were strengthened by the apparent shortcomings in the American missile program. A week
before the launch of
Sputnik 1
, an Atlas long-range missile had failed spectacularly in the sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the second Atlas failure of the year. Near the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union had fiercely competed to recruit Nazi rocket scientists. Although the three leading figures in Germany's V-2 program—Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and Walter Dornberger—were secretly brought to the United States and protected from war crimes trials, for almost a decade after the war the Air Force showed little enthusiasm for long-range missiles. The V-2 had proven to be wildly inaccurate, more effective at inspiring terror in London than hitting specific targets. An intercontinental ballistic missile with the same accuracy as the V-2, fired at the Soviet Union from an American launchpad, was
likely to miss its target by about one hundred miles. Curtis LeMay thought bombers were more reliable than missiles, more versatile and precise.
He wanted SAC to develop nuclear-powered bombers, capable of remaining airborne for weeks. But as thermonuclear weapons became small enough and light enough to be mounted atop a missile, accuracy became less of an issue. An H-bomb could miss a target by a wide margin and still destroy it. Even LeMay admitted that an accurate intercontinental ballistic missile would be “
the ultimate weapon.”

During the fall of 1957, the United States had six different strategic missiles in development, with rival bureaucracies fighting not only for money but also for a prominent role in the emergency war plan. On behalf of the Army, Wernher von Braun's team was developing an intermediate-range missile, the Jupiter, that could travel 1,500 miles and hit Soviet targets from bases in Europe. The Air Force was working on an almost identical intermediate-range missile, the Thor, as well as three long-range missiles—Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman. The Navy was pursuing its own intermediate-range missile, the Polaris, having decided not to deploy the Army's Jupiter in submarines.
The interservice rivalry over missiles was exacerbated by the competition among the defense contractors hoping to build them. The General Dynamics Corporation lobbied aggressively for Atlas; the Martin Company, for Titan; Boeing, for Minuteman; Douglas Aircraft, for Thor; Chrysler, for Jupiter; and Lockheed, for Polaris. President Eisenhower
planned to fund two or three of these missile programs and cancel the rest, based on their merits and the nation's strategic needs. Amid Democratic accusations of a missile gap, Eisenhower agreed to fund all six.

The
Sputnik
launches also complicated America's relationship with its NATO allies. The Soviet Union appeared to have gained a technological advantage, and the United States no longer seemed invincible. NATO ministers began to wonder if an American president really would defend Berlin or Paris, when that could mean warheads landing in New York City within an hour. Khrushchev's boasts about long-range missiles were accompanied by
a Soviet “peace campaign” that called for nuclear disarmament and an end to nuclear weapon tests. For years, the World Peace Council, backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, had been promoting efforts to “Ban the Bomb.” The slogan had a strong resonance in Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, countries that felt trapped in the middle of an arms race between the superpowers, that had already endured two world wars and now rebelled against preparations for a third. While public opinion in Western Europe increasingly turned against nuclear weapons, the leadership of NATO sought an even greater reliance on them. The French, in particular, had long argued that the United States should cede control of its nuclear weapons based in Europe. Giving the weapons to NATO would allow the alliance to use them quickly in an emergency—and prevent an American president from withholding them, regardless of any last-minute doubts. It would demonstrate that the fate of Europe and the United States were inextricably linked.

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.

•   •   •

T
HE
M
ARK
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.

The Strategic Air Command tried to counter the Soviet propaganda with the truth: there'd never been a risk of nuclear detonation, nor of harmful radioactivity. But SAC also misled reporters. During a segment entitled “‘Dead' A-Bomb Hits U.S. Town,” Ed Herlihy, the narrator of a popular American newsreel, repeated the official line, telling nervous movie audiences that this was “
the first accident of its kind in history.” In fact,
a hydrogen bomb had been mistakenly released over Albuquerque the previous year. Knocked off balance by air turbulence while standing in the bomb bay of a B-36, the plane's navigator had steadied himself by grabbing the nearest handle—the manual bomb release. The weapon broke through the bomb doors, and the navigator held onto the handle for dear life. The H-bomb landed in an unpopulated area, about one third of a mile from Sandia. The high explosives detonated but did not produce a nuclear yield. The weapon lacked a core.

The Air Force grounded all its bombers after the accident at Mars Bluff and announced a new policy: the locking pins wouldn't be removed from nuclear weapons during peacetime flights. But the announcement failed to dampen a growing antinuclear movement in Great Britain. General Power had inflamed public opinion by telling a British journalist, who'd asked whether American aircraft routinely flew with nuclear weapons above
England, “
Well, we did not build these bombers to carry crushed rose petals.” Members of the opposition Labour Party criticized Prime Minister Harold Macmillan for allowing such flights and demanded an end to them.
Macmillan was in a difficult position. For security reasons, SAC wouldn't allow him to reveal that the bombs lacked cores—and wouldn't even let him know when American planes were carrying nuclear weapons in British airspace.