Command and Control (43 page)

The elaborate nuclear strategies promoted by RAND and embraced by McNamara now seemed largely irrelevant. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, a “no cities” policy lost its appeal. Newspapers had criticized it, NATO allies had repudiated it, and the dispersal of SAC bombers to commercial airports had blurred the distinction between civilian and military targets. And as the Soviet Union built more long-range missiles, a counterforce strategy would require the United States to deploy more missiles to destroy them. The arms race would become never ending. The hope of eliminating the Soviet threat with a first strike and defending America from attack now seemed illusory. Thousands of new missiles, the construction of more bomb shelters, or even an antiballistic missile system couldn't change what appeared to be an unavoidable fact for both superpowers: launching any nuclear attack would be suicidal.

Within weeks of President Kennedy's assassination, McNamara formally endorsed
a strategy of “Assured Destruction.” The idealism and optimism that had accompanied Kennedy's inauguration were long gone. The new strategy was grounded in a sense of futility. It planned to deter a Soviet attack by threatening to wipe out at least “
30% of their population, 50% of their industrial capacity, and 150 of their cities.” McNamara's staff had calculated that
the equivalent of 400 megatons, detonated above the Soviet Union, would be enough for the task. Anything more would be overkill. Informed by a reporter that the Soviets were hardening their silos to protect the missiles from an American attack,
McNamara said, “Thank God.”
The move would improve “crisis stability.” Once the Soviets felt confident that they could retaliate after being attacked, they'd feel much less pressure to strike first. Leaving the cities of the United States and the Soviet Union vulnerable to annihilation, McNamara now thought, would keep them safe. The strategy was soon known as MAD: “mutually assured destruction.”

The strategic thinking at the White House and the Department of Defense, however, didn't correspond to the targeting policies at SAC headquarters in Omaha. The gulf between theory and practice remained vast. Although the SIOP had been revised during the Kennedy administration, General Power had blocked significant changes in weapon allocation.
The new SIOP divided the “optimum mix” into three separate target groups: Soviet nuclear forces, conventional military forces, and urban-industrial areas. The president could decide to attack only the first group, the first two groups, or all three. Moscow, China, and cities in the Eastern bloc could selectively be spared from destruction. The SIOP could be launched as a first strike or as retaliation. But all the attack options still required that the Soviet Union be hit by thousands of nuclear weapons, far more than were necessary for “assured destruction.” The three target categories of the SIOP—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie—were the same as those in the attack plan proposed by SAC in 1950. And the new SIOP was almost as destructive, inflexible, and mechanistic as the previous one. A war plan that seemed too horrible to contemplate when Kennedy and McNamara first learned of its existence had become institutionalized.

By the time Robert McNamara retired from the Pentagon in February 1968, the command-and-control system of the United States had been improved. The new Missile Defense Alarm System—satellites with infrared sensors that could detect heat from the launch of missiles—promised to give as much as half an hour of warning, if the Soviets attacked. SAC's Looking Glass command post, airborne twenty-four hours a day, increased the likelihood that a Go code could be sent after the United States was hit. New computer and communications systems were being added to the World Wide Military Command and Control System. But many of the underlying problems hadn't been solved.

The number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal had increased by more than 50 percent since the Eisenhower administration. The United States now had about thirty thousand of them, and each one could potentially be lost, stolen, sabotaged, or involved in an accident. Tactical weapons hadn't been removed from Europe. On the contrary,
the number of tactical weapons had more than doubled, and they were no longer safely tucked away in igloos. Putting locks in NATO's weapons allowed them to be widely dispersed to units in the field—where they could be more easily stolen. And the question of how to keep the president alive and in command still didn't have a satisfactory answer. The plans for a Deep
Underground Command Center were scrapped after Kennedy's death. The bunker had a good chance of surviving multiple hits from Soviet warheads. But its survival would prove meaningless. After an attack the president and his aides would most likely find themselves trapped two thirds of a mile beneath the rubble of the Pentagon, unable to communicate with the rest of the world or even get out of their bunker. The facility would serve primarily as a multimillion-dollar tomb.

Although McNamara's efforts to avoid a nuclear war were tireless and sincere, he left office as one of the most despised men in the United States. Half a million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam, the war seemed unwinnable, and most Americans blamed the number-crunching secretary of defense and his Ivy League advisers for the fiasco.
A centralized command-and-control system—so essential for managing a nuclear war—had proven disastrous when applied to a civil war in Southeast Asia. Distrusting the Joint Chiefs of Staff and convinced that victories on the battlefield could be gained through cost-benefit analysis, the secretary of defense micromanaged the Vietnam War. McNamara personally chose targets to be bombed and supervised air strikes from his office at the Pentagon. “
I don't object to its being called McNamara's war,” he said in 1964. “In fact I'm proud to be identified with it.”

Four years later hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians had been killed, tens of thousands of American servicemen had been killed or wounded, antiwar protests were spreading throughout the United States, and the Pentagon had become a symbol of bureaucratic malevolence and pointless slaughter. Known for his cool, detached manner, McNamara was now prone to bouts of sobbing in his office. While receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the day before his retirement, he apologized for being unable to speak. President Lyndon Johnson put a hand on McNamara's shoulder, ended the ceremony, and guided him from the room.

Curtis LeMay withdrew from public life the same year, having left the Air Force in 1965. Once the darling of Hollywood and the media, he was now widely mocked and ridiculed. His well-publicized disputes with the Kennedy administration had given him a reputation for being a right-wing
Neanderthal. When a fictionalized version of General LeMay appeared in film, the character was no longer a heroic defender of freedom. He was a buffoon, like General Buck Turgidson in
Dr. Strangelove
, willing to sacrifice twenty million American lives for the sake of defeating the Soviet Union. Or he was a crypto-fascist, like General James Mattoon Scott in
Seven Days in May,
preferring a coup d'état in the United States to a disarmament treaty with the Soviets.

LeMay seemed to confirm those stereotypes in October 1968, when he agreed to serve as the vice presidential candidate for the American Independent Party. George C. Wallace, an outspoken racist and segregationist, was the presidential candidate. LeMay had played a leading role in integrating the Air Force, and his
support for equal rights, labor unions, birth control, and abortion seemed out of place in the Wallace campaign. But LeMay's anger at how the Vietnam War was being fought—and his belief that both the Democratic and Republican candidates, Hubert H. Humphrey and Richard M. Nixon, were willing to appease the Communists—persuaded him to run. It was perhaps the worst decision of his life.

Tough and disciplined as a commander, LeMay was a supremely incompetent politician. At the press conference announcing his candidacy, he refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The same implied threat that Eisenhower had made to end the Korean War sounded heartless and barbaric sixteen years later, as images of Vietnamese women and children burned by napalm appeared on the nightly news. LeMay had strongly opposed sending ground troops to Vietnam and disagreed with McNamara's strategy for fighting a limited war there. “
War is
never ‘
cost-effective,'” LeMay argued. “People are killed. To them the war is total.” At the press conference he stressed that the United States should always try to avoid armed conflict, “
but when you get in it, get in it with both feet and get it over with as soon as you can.” The logic of his argument received less attention than the tone-deaf remark that preceded it: “
We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons.”

On the campaign trail, the general who'd risked his life countless times fighting the Nazis was
jeered by protesters yelling, “
Sieg Heil
.” He told
reporters that
the antiwar movement was “Communist-inspired,” lost his job as an aerospace executive for running with Wallace, and largely faded into obscurity after their defeat. LeMay and McNamara, polar opposites who'd battled over a wide range of national security issues, each convinced that the other was dangerously wrong, now found themselves in much the same place. They ended 1968 in humiliation and disgrace, their views repudiated by the American people.

O
n March 13, 1961, at about half past eleven in the morning,
a B-52 took off from Mather Air Force Base in California, not far from Sacramento. The plane was on a Chrome Dome mission, carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. Twenty minutes after takeoff, the pilot, Major Raymond Clay, felt too much hot air coming from the vents in the cockpit. He and one of the copilots, First Lieutenant Robert Bigham, tried to turn off the heat. The vents wouldn't close, and it became uncomfortably warm in the cockpit. Almost seven hours into the flight, the control tower at Mather instructed Clay to “
continue mission as long as you can . . . if it gets intolerable, of course, bring it home.” Before the second refueling, Clay guided the plane to a low altitude and depressurized the cabin to cool it. But it heated up again, as the bomber climbed to thirty thousand feet. Fourteen hours into the flight, the temperature in the cockpit had reached 160 degrees Fahrenheit—so hot that one of the pilot's windows shattered.

Clay descended to twelve thousand feet again and requested permission to end the mission. In addition to the broken window, a couple of the crew members were feeling sick. The cockpit had become so hot that Clay and his two copilots took turns flying the plane, going back and forth to the cabin below, where the temperature was a little cooler. Passing through overcast skies, the bomber flew off course, fell behind schedule by about
half an hour, and lost another seven or eight minutes avoiding bad weather. Twenty-two hours into the flight, First Lieutenant Bigham realized that a gauge for one of the main fuel tanks was broken. The reading hadn't changed for at least ninety minutes—but nobody had noticed, amid the heat and the hassle of coming and going from the cockpit. Bigham asked the control tower to send a tanker; they were running low on fuel. Forty minutes later, while approaching the tanker, the B-52 ran out of gas. All eight engines flamed out at once.

At an altitude of seven thousand feet, the crew started to bail out. Major Clay stayed in the cockpit and banked the plane away from Yuba City, California, just forty miles short of their base. Confident that the bomber wouldn't hit the town, Clay ejected at an altitude of four thousand feet. The B-52 made a full 360-degree turn and then crashed nose first into a barley field. The high explosives of both hydrogen bombs shattered on impact and didn't burn or detonate. The weapons harmlessly broke into pieces. All eight members of the crew survived the crash. But an Air Force fireman, rushing to the scene, was killed when his truck overturned.

Fred Iklé had predicted that as the number of nuclear weapons and airborne alerts increased, so would the number of accidents. He was correct, and the aircraft involved in those accidents had few safeguards to protect weapons during a crash. The Air Force considered the performance of a bomber or a fighter—its speed, maneuverability, capacity, and range—more important than its structural integrity. The B-52 had been designed in the late 1940s, and its designers never anticipated that the bomber would be used for airborne or ground alerts. It wasn't built to carry fully assembled nuclear weapons during peacetime. When the weapons were attached to the underside of a plane, they were fully exposed to the effects of a crash. And when they were carried inside the bomb bay of a B-52, a Sandia report noted, they were located in “
a weak point in the aircraft's structure, a point at which the aircraft is apt to break open, spewing weapons beyond the protection afforded by the fuselage.”

On Johnston Island in the central Pacific, tests designed to measure the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions served as a reminder that missiles and warheads didn't always behave in predictable ways. On June 3, 1962, a
Thor intermediate-range missile with a 400-kiloton warhead lifted off smoothly. But a radar tracking station failed, endangering ships in the area if the missile flew off course. The range safety officer decided to abort the flight. The command destruct mechanism blew up the missile, destroying its warhead. Two and a half weeks later, another Thor was launched, this time with a 1.4-megaton warhead. The missile's engine shut down after fifty-nine seconds, and the range safety officer decided, once again, to use the command destruct mechanism. The Thor exploded at an altitude of about thirty thousand feet. Pieces of the missile and the warhead, including plutonium from its core, fell on Johnston Island and the surrounding lagoon.

About a month later, another Thor missile with a 1.4-megaton warhead misfired on the launchpad. It never got off the ground. The range safety officer gave the command destruct order, and a massive explosion destroyed much of the launch complex, showering it with debris, burning fuel, and plutonium. The next two months were spent rebuilding the complex and decontaminating the island. On October 15, during the first use of the new launchpad, a Thor missile went off course about ninety seconds after liftoff. The command destruct order was given, the missile exploded, and more plutonium fell onto Johnston Island.
Two thirds of the Thor missiles used in the tests—modified versions of the Thors deployed in Great Britain—had to be destroyed by remote control.

The mishaps on Johnston Island occurred during test launches carefully planned for months. But mundane, everyday tasks also caused nuclear weapon accidents. On November 13, 1963,
three workers at an Atomic Energy Commission base in Medina, Texas, were moving partially assembled Mark 7 bombs into a storage igloo. The weapons were being decommissioned. Their high explosives would eventually be burned, their uranium recovered. Two explosive spheres most likely rubbed together while being unloaded, and one of them ignited. The three workers—Marvin J. Ehlinger, Hilary F. Huser, and Floyd T. Lutz—noticed the flames, ran out of the igloo, and jumped into a ditch across the road. The sphere burned for about forty-five seconds and then detonated, setting off approximately 123,000 pounds of high explosives in the building. The
explosion did not produce a nuclear yield, although the mushroom cloud rising from the blast contained uranium dust. Shop windows were blown out in San Antonio, fourteen miles away. All that remained, where the igloo had once stood, was a crater twenty feet deep. The other igloos at the base were undamaged, the three workers unharmed. They were given the rest of the day off.

A few weeks later
a B-52 encountered severe air turbulence while crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It was transporting two Mark 53 hydrogen bombs—an air-delivered version of the weapon carried by the Titan II missile, with a yield of 9 megatons. The pilot, Major Thomas McCormick, took the plane down to about twenty-nine thousand feet, looking for a smoother ride. But the turbulence got worse, and McCormick received permission to climb another few thousand feet. The crew heard a loud thud. The fifty-foot-high tail fin had snapped off the bomber. McCormick told everyone to bail out, as the plane rolled over and flew upside down for a moment before spiraling downward. Four crew members got out safely; the radar navigator, Major Robert Townley, didn't. The plane crashed into the side of Savage Mountain, about twenty miles from Cumberland, Maryland, during a heavy snowstorm. It was one thirty in the morning, and the temperature outdoors was about 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

Technical Sergeant Melvin Wooten, the gunner, landed in a field about half a mile from Salisbury, Pennsylvania. The lights of the town were visible in the distance, but Wooten died before reaching it. He'd suffered severe head, chest, and leg injuries. Major Robert Payne, the navigator, walked for hours in the darkness, through snowdrifts two to three feet deep. He fell into a stream and froze to death. Major McCormick and a copilot, Captain Parker Peedin, landed near trees, about three miles apart. They waited until daylight to seek help. McCormick found refuge in a farmhouse, after walking for two miles. Peedin was spotted by a search plane, and both men were hospitalized with minor injuries. The hydrogen bombs were found amid the wreckage of the B-52, partially buried in snow. Their high explosives had neither detonated nor burned.

Another accident with a Mark 53 bomb took place on December 8, 1964. During a training exercise at Bunker Hill Air Force Base, about a
dozen miles north of Kokomo, Indiana, a B-58 bomber turned onto an icy runway. The plane carried five hydrogen bombs—four Mark 43s and the Mark 53—with a combined yield of perhaps 13 megatons. As the B-58 turned, the plane ahead revved its engines. The strong, sudden gust of exhaust hit the B-58. The bomber slid off the runway, and the landing gear beneath the right wing collapsed. The pilot, Captain Leary Johnson, saw a bright flash; fuel had leaked and ignited. Johnson gave the order to bail out, jettisoned his canopy, climbed over the nose of the plane, leaped through flames, and caught on fire. He rolled through snow and puddles of water to put out the flames, suffering only minor burns. The defensive systems operator, Roger Hall, jettisoned his canopy, noticed the left wing was on fire, climbed onto the right one, jumped off the engine, and briefly caught on fire, too. His burns were superficial. Instead of climbing out, the navigator, Manuel Cervantes, Jr., triggered his escape capsule, and a rocket blasted it into the air. The capsule landed about 150 yards from the burning plane, but Cervantes was killed by the impact. He had two young sons.

The five hydrogen bombs incurred varying degrees of damage: two were intact; one was scorched; another was mostly consumed by the fire; and the fifth completely melted into the tarmac. None of the high explosives detonated. Fire crews aggressively fought the blaze, long past the time factors of the bombs. The fire threatened not only a SAC base crowded with bombers and nuclear weapons but also the fifty thousand inhabitants of Kokomo. At one point firefighters dragged a burning hydrogen bomb fifty yards from the plane, dumped it into a trench, covered it with sand, and extinguished the flames.

During the same week as the Bunker Hill accident, a couple of young airmen, Leonard D. Johnson and Glenn A. Dodson, Jr., drove out to
a Minuteman missile site at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. A crew in the launch control center, about twenty miles away, had reported a problem with the security system around the silo. Johnson and Dodson were told to find out what was wrong. They entered the silo, opened the security alarm control box, and checked the fuses. Dodson had forgotten to bring a fuse puller, so he used a screwdriver instead. After removing each fuse, he'd put it back into place. You could hear the difference between a
good fuse and one that had burned out. When a good fuse was inserted, it made a clicking sound. One of the fuses didn't make that “click.” Dodson pulled it out again with the screwdriver, put it back, and heard a different kind of sound—a loud explosion.

The two airmen ran out of the launch duct and called the control center. Half an hour later, a Missile Potential Hazard Team ordered them to reenter the silo. They found it full of thick, gray smoke. One of the retrorockets atop the Minuteman had fired. The reentry vehicle, containing a W-56 thermonuclear weapon, had lifted a few inches into the air, flipped over, fallen nose first from the missile, bounced off the wall, hit the second-stage engine, and landed at the bottom of the silo. The warhead wasn't damaged, although its arming and fuzing package was torn off during the seventy-five-foot drop. An investigation later found that the retrorocket had been set off by a fault in an electrical connector—and by Dodson's screwdriver.

The weapon accidents often felt sudden and surreal. On December 5, 1965,
a group of sailors were pushing an A-4E Skyhawk fighter plane onto an elevator aboard the USS
Ticonderoga
, an aircraft carrier about seventy miles off the coast of Japan. The plane's canopy was open; Lieutenant Douglas M. Webster, its pilot, strapped into his seat. The deck rose as the ship passed over a wave, and one of the sailors blew a whistle, signaling that Webster should apply his brakes. Webster didn't hear the whistle. The plane started to roll backward. The sailor kept blowing the whistle; other sailors yelled, “
Brakes, brakes,” and held onto the plane. They let go as it rolled off the elevator into the sea. In an instant, it was gone. The pilot, his plane, and a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb vanished. No trace of them was ever found; the ocean there was about three miles deep. The canopy may have closed after the plane fell, trapping Webster in his seat. He had
recently graduated from Ohio State University, gotten married, and completed his first tour of duty over Vietnam.

•   •   •

B
Y
THE
MID
-1960
S
, sealed-pit nuclear weapons had burned, melted, sunk, blown apart, smashed into the ground. But none had detonated
accidentally. The B-52 crash in Goldsboro, North Carolina, had been an awfully close call, gaining the attention of engineers at Sandia. Nobody wanted that sort of thing to happen again—and yet during the Goldsboro crash, the weapons had failed safe. Now that nuclear testing had resumed, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia were busy designing new warheads and bombs for every branch of the armed services. The need for new safety devices was not apparent. Again and again, the existing ones worked.

President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara had taken a personal interest in nuclear weapon safety. A few months after Goldsboro, Kennedy gave the Department of Defense “
responsibility for identifying and resolving health and safety problems connected with the custody and storage of nuclear weapons.” The Atomic Energy Commission was to play an important, though subsidiary, role. Kennedy's decision empowered McNamara to do whatever seemed necessary. But it also reinforced military, not civilian, control of the system. At Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia, the reliability of nuclear weapons continued to receive far greater attention than their safety. And a dangerous way of thinking, a form of complacency later known as
the Titanic Effect took hold among weapon designers: the more impossible an accidental detonation seemed to be, the more likely it became.